Product Hunt has launched a service called Ask Product Hunt that lets users proactively inquire whether apps exist to solve their particular problems. Bearing similarities to Jelly and Facebook’s Recommendations, the goal is improve product discovery early on — the company hopes it can provide answers to the “Does anyone know of any app that does XYZ?” question.
There are more than 90,000 products and a dedicate group of developers, designers, product managers, and founders that use Product Hunt. The service has traditionally been centered around letting creators showcase their work and also provided tools to help market them afterwards, such as its Reddit-like Ask Me Anything service. But until today, Product Hunt specifically touted tools developers were highlighting, not necessarily leveraging the wisdom of the crowd.
Before, there were answers to the question “have you seen this new app?”, but never about whether an app existed to solve a specific problem. This is what Ask Product Hunt could shed some light on. To use this, you ask a question in the same manner as you would a friend, Product Hunt will distribute it to users to ask for recommendations. When someone has an answer, you’ll receive an update with not only the product, but an opinion about why it’s being recommended.
Products don’t need to be previously listed on Product Hunt to qualify, as apps and services listed on Amazon, Etsy, the App Store, and the rest of the web can be recommended.
Questions don’t have a shelf life, meaning that anyone can reference them in the future. Soon, these answers will be included in search results and Product Hunt will also highlight the more popular questions on its homepage to improve discoverability.
This is a new phase for the company, four months after being acquired by AngelList. While it has launched features dedicated towards curating ideas and products, it appears the next step is to improve discovery in a way that’ll also boost its library of products. Even though users may link to existing items from the Product Hunt catalog in recommendations, there’s a good chance outside products could be shared and that, in turn, would be a boon to the company.
If you looked on Product Hunt, normally you’d find a lot of apps, books, and podcasts that span a variety of industries and markets. It can be information overload. Somebody could create a collection of products around specific themes, but it doesn’t really answer specific discovery questions. Where on Product Hunt, or on the internet, could I get an answer to “What’s the best system for live-streaming on the web, iOS, and Android?” Ask Product Hunt offers a more personalized service without you needing to wait for someone to predict what you want to know about.
As mentioned earlier, there are some striking similarities between Ask Product Hunt and Jelly, the Q&A service started by Twitter cofounder Biz Stone that was recently acquired by Pinterest. Ryan Hoover, Product Hunt chief executive, told VentureBeat that the similarities are that the answers are delivered from your friends or a community of people, but that’s where it stops. Unlike Jelly, Product Hunt has a more specialized approach, around products.
Ask Product Hunt is available on the web and mobile web, but not on the iOS app yet. “We will spend the next quarter taking feedback from the community and improving the web experience before we consider bringing it to the native app,” Hoover said.
April 03, 2017 at 07:25PM
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from Ken Yeung
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