We built Ship to help makers and startups announce new products, collect emails, and get feedback from users, which we've been doing for years with various tools.

The initial audience for Product Hunt was built through years of writing and engaging with the tech community, which helped when launching the platform.

In hindsight, we shouldn't have launched with a free service in the first place; we ended up becoming a truly premium model based on ticket prices. We won't monetize a free product, which allows us to undercut our competitors and led to thousands of free events being published on our platform.

Press coverage and engaging with makers on Twitter were key tactics for growing Product Hunt's user base in the early days.

We decided to offer our product as a fully functional free beta for 30 days, with a commercial price of $299 for companies and $99 for hobbyists, trusting users to pay based on their usage.

We started with a freemium model, but realized it distracted us; we shifted to a paid model and consistently increased prices over time, which helped us focus on serious customers.

Many founders think they need to offer their product for free to gain users, but it's often better to charge a price to gauge real interest.

Podcasts didn't fit into Product Hunt's content ecosystem, so we decided to focus on product discovery instead, even though there's potential in podcast discovery.

I remember when we implemented Algolia for Product Hunt, which helped us build a strong relationship with the founder, Ryan. This connection allowed for candid conversations and better product development.