Product Hunt Daily - A daily digest of the best of Product Hunt w/ your friends 💌

@rrhoover @rstankov I like this idea. I always go to my notifications tab to see whose upvoting what. I'm glad there's a place for this ☺️

@rrhoover @rstankov my fingers will miss all the manual product entry. 🖖

@rrhoover @rstankov very interesting! excited to explore further

@rrhoover @rstankov This is great & exactly how I want to learn about new products, personally! @rrhover @rstankov: I'm curious why you decided to add a second, opt-in-required email rather than just opt everyone already getting the daily emails into this email and keep a section with the 'top voted' items?

@rrhoover @rstankov really great step Ryan and team! Thank you 👍🏼

@hfauq 😁😁😁

@hfauq unrelated but would someday love to hear a podcast or Medium write up of the tools, resources or general activities Ryan does to maintain sanity and stay organized (what PH tools are your Go To or how do you use PH). Tack it onto your 10k To Do (or NOT To Do list) 😉

@william_fitz we've discussed sourcing social signals from Facebook and Twitter friends similar to Nuzzel, and it's not off the table, but for now we want to focus on surfacing explicit sentiment from those interacting on PH. For example, sharing an article on Twitter is very different than clicking an upvote button. In the latter, there's a clear signal of interest/favor, where as in the former, it could be the exact opposite (e.g. "This product is the worst: foobar.com").

@eric3000 great question! Categories (tech, books, podcasts, and games) were a first step toward segmenting things into different "media types" on PH but we knew they would still be too broad for a wide audience. For example, "Books" isn't really a specific interest. That's like opening the door for someone at Barnes and Nobel -- there's too much to choose from and finding something relevant takes effort. Now if a B&N employee guides the shopper to the "Startup Books" aisle, they're getting closer to something they might like (assuming that's what they're into). Collections and Topics are more akin to the "Startup Books" aisle at B&N, enabling the community to curate lists of things individually and together. We now have collections and topics on thousands of interests. The transition we're making now is to (1) surface things more relevant to you based on this data and (2) continuing to expand to more specific (and possibly niche) interests. Re: the social component, we also know that people gravitate toward opinions of their friends and people they respect. This sentiment inspires action (e.g. "15 of my friends upvoted Bonk. Must be interesting. *click*"). There's a ton of social content buried within Product Hunt, in the form of upvotes, comments, and other contributions. Product Hunt Daily will help surface more of this activity and soon you'll see similar dynamics on the site. Curious to hear your thoughts/ideas, Eric!

@rrhoover From my perspective, it seemed as if the vertical approach wasn't working. I know your main KPI is how much traffic you send to other sites (or at least it used to be). It was rare to see a product in games, books, or podcasts to get enough upvotes to be in the top 3 for the daily leaderboard. This likely meant that these products weren't sending as much traffic out as tech products did. There were likely other indicators of this as well - how often these categories were selected in the nav, traffic to each category leaderboard, and subscribers to the individual newsletter. I think that your hypothesis is 100% valid. "Books" isn't an interest. "Product Management" is. And that spans software, podcasts, books (probably not games). My guess is that you'll measure how well this change works by continuing to focus on that KPI - are you now sending more traffic to other sites? Are more products getting upvotes? The nice thing about topics and collections is that the community can help define what should be a topic. When Pokemon Go blew up and tons of products were submitted related to it, Pokemon deserved its own category. Or maybe there's a very popular collection organized around a theme. Perhaps that should be a topic. So that flexibility and community buy-in should also be a benefit and create more passion from my perspective.

@eric3000 we actually do have a topic for Pokemon Which was created and populated by the community. Admittedly we could do a better job of surfacing these things.

@rrhoover I was saying you have a topic for Pokemon. That you all responded well to the popularity you saw based on products being submitted. The flexibility to create a topic like that easily is a benefit for users and administrators.

@eric3000 ahh, sorry, I was reading/replying on mobile while traveling.

@taykcrane This is instead of the current daily. We're transitioning everyone to the new version in the next couple weeks. This gets you in earlier. Taking it slow to figure out all the scaling issues/get feedback/etc.

@naxn what do you mean by categories?

@rrhoover thanks for quick reply. I can see you are moving beyond the initial categories (tech, books, podcasts, and games) to lots of sub categories - which will continually be updated and refined I assume. If these micro categories and niche categories become available as a kind of flipboard style 'choose your interests' process that would allow the user to not only get stuff delivered on the basis of their data but also let a user choose a new interest to follow (for example I'm personally suddenly interested in kids learning apps since my daughter just turned 3 but my friends or previous behaviour would not suggest I might like or value these). There are lots of collections, but no easy way to aggregate what I would call 'interests'. Hope that makes sense!