Why YourStack failed

‍Occasionally I’m asked why YourStack failed. So, I figured I’d finally write about it.

But first for those unfamiliar with the project, here’s context.‍

The story of YourStack‍

In 2019 we carved out a small portion of the Product Hunt team to work on a new project called YourStack.

It was a new brand with its own domain, completely separate from producthunt.com. We opted to start from scratch, using everything we’ve learned building Product Hunt the prior five years to build a new product discovery experience.

Product Hunt is primarily about what’s new, a firehose of the latest tech launches. YourStack was all about the products you use and love, regardless of their age. Our goal was to expand beyond tech, to help people discover and buy products recommended by people they know and trust. Instead of a Product Hunt-style leaderboard of daily launches, we designed YourStack with a follower model to personalize the experience and widen the scope of products surfaced.

The underlying thesis: People will try and buy products from people they trust. Longer term, we were building a new product graph, a unique data set of the products people actually use and endorse.

We launched YourStack in early 2020. It was well-received and amassed 15K signups within the first week. Not crazy, but a great start.

But it failed. Here’s why.‍

Why it didn’t work

Product discovery isn’t a daily or even weekly activity.‍

How often do you seek new products to buy? Probably not often.

Most consumer social products require frequent engagement and without that, a habit is never formed. There are many ways to bring a person back through external triggers (e.g. push notifications) but if the underlying internal trigger (e.g. a desire to discover and/or buy products) is infrequent, you will constantly fight against the natural state of what people want when attempting to design for DAU adoption.[1]

In comparison, Product Hunt is designed for the DAU. The internal trigger: To stay up to date with what’s new in tech, follow trends, and get inspired by what people have built. It has a clear flywheel[2] to drive adoption and re-engagement.

‍It was too broad.‍

We intentionally aimed to broaden YourStack beyond tech. We didn’t want it to be limited to tech gadgets, SaaS software, and apps.

But sometimes niching down is the best way to start.

The more narrow the focus, the easier it is to build the ideal experience for that use case or interest. It also clarifies your target audience, simplifying the messaging and GTM strategy to reach those people.

‍We should have built mobile-first.‍

Product Hunt started on the web, designed for the desktop. This made sense considering the audience, skillset of the team, and era the company started (2013). We carried forward with this web focus for YourStack. That was a mistake.

If you’re building for a wide audience of consumers, especially one which demands frequent engagement, mobile should probably be the priority.

We started building a mobile app post-launch, but at that point we were somewhat confined to the limitations of what we designed for the web. Furthermore, it fractured our focus making it more difficult to iterate on the core model across both web and mobile.

‍We overbuilt.‍

We should have launched YourStack, or a version of it, much sooner to test the core interaction model and assumptions. Instead, we got too cute and fell into the midwit trap.

Before launch, we built a product Q&A experience, scraper to ingest product recommendations from Twitter, user-created tips on how to use specific products, and more. This extended our launch date, bifurcated engagement, and introduced more real estate for us to maintain.

‍I burned out.‍

This mistake is more personal and deserving of its own blog post.

By the time we launched YourStack, I was approaching 7 years as CEO of Product Hunt. I was losing motivation. In hindsight it’s clear to me what I should have changed to avoid burnout but once I caught the bug, it was difficult to maintain the stamina required to iterate toward product-market fit.

Some founders underestimate the number of iterations required to build something people want, especially in consumer social where the smallest changes can make a massive difference. The first version is never it. I knew this, especially after launching YourStack and knowing what we had wouldn’t work. I knew the commitment required to get to PMF.‍

On a lighter note…‍

I share this not to entirely dissuade people from building in this space. 

I still firmly believe in YourStack’s underlying thesis: The best way to drive product adoption is through an authentic recommendation from a trusted person.

This is perhaps obvious, even more so today than when we started building YourStack in 2019, with the rise of influencer marketing and creator-led brands. Our goal was to create a system for everyday consumers to “influence” their micro networks, to elongate the tail of product discovery and elevate the products people actually use and love.

The key is that it’s authentic and relevant to the recommender’s background.

Additionally, socially-powered recommendations might be the best route toward serendipitous product discovery.

When you know what you want, most consumers turn to Amazon, Google, or YouTube to find a product to try or buy. You know what to search for. But if you don’t know the product exists that could solve your problem or improve your life, social recommendations have the potential to pull you toward those discoveries.‍

The opportunity‍

As the cost to bring new products to market decreases, we’re going to see even more options emerging leading to a greater need for curation.

Those that solve this may not tackle product discovery head-on. They might look very different and enter the space through a backdoor. TikTok, and Musically before it, illustrates this. The platform isn’t designed for music discovery, but it has had a larger influence in breaking artists and shaping culture than any music discovery platform in the last decade.

Respect to founders building in this space. :)

‍

‍[1] It’s possible to create a DAU experience by driving engagement toward tangential use cases, but this changes the underlying goal of the product. For example, you might design an experience that surfaces product recommendations but the core loop is centered on financial management (maybe a bad example, but you get the idea).‍

‍[2] H/T Julie, former Head of Design at Product Hunt, for the flywheel visual.