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For Subscribers

How Product Hunt Rose to the Top The website attracts hundreds of thousands of readers monthly. Find out why.

By Michael Frank

This story appears in the May 2015 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »

Eva Kolenko
Seek and he shall find: Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt.

Imagine a place where you can find the next cutting-edge soft-ware tool or business app that will streamline your operations, enable you to enter a new market or give your business a competitive edge. That place already exists. It's a year-old website called Product Hunt, and according to its 28-year-old founder, Ryan Hoover, its purpose is to serve as a launch pad for new, mostly untested ideas.

In 2013 Hoover was working as a product manager at Playhaven, a mobile gaming company, when he launched Product Hunt as an informal e-newsletter for friends to find and share shortcuts to tech-development issues.

"Whenever I faced a problem, I always thought, There must be something out there that already does what I need to do," he recalls. And for the most part there was—he just needed to find it.