Conan, What Is Best In Life?
The key question to all that matters.
Having just fed my animals, I settled into what has become my morning routine. A bit of meditation, some work with Muse to help me learn to control calmness, time with Luminosity and Elevate to kick my brain into gear, and Duolingo to stretch my brain.
As a mental cool-down, I read Facebook, Twitter and now, Product Hunt.
Product Hunt is an interesting company in that it has “virtualized” what happens every single day in Silicon Valley, namely the conversation and critique around products.
When I lived in Boulder, we had the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup (which is now New Tech Colorado and has BLOWN UP!). Every month, a bunch of companies would present their products to a room full of fellow entrepreneurs, product people, designers, etc.
I truly enjoyed presenting at New Tech (apparently so did some other folks), especially the Q&A portion.
The questions were repeated from presentation to presentation (“How are you going to make money?”) so often that they almost became a joke.
Over time, what those common questions became were a framework for how you should present your company/product. The presentations improved in their density and value, and the entire event elevated.
Since then, I have watched multiple events use a similar structure. Probably the most famous is Inside the Actors Studio, where the host, James Lipton, ends every show with a variation of the Proust Questionnaire which explores personal themes and exposes the internal thinking and beliefs of the guest.
In the Walking Dead TV show, three questions are used to understand the potential positive—and negatives—a person could bring the group.
[embed]http://youtu.be/Eey68NKR0nA[/embed]
Questions are how we learn. Questions can help form what we need to learn or drive innovation. If you know what matters, you can build for it.
Which brings us back to Product Hunt. As the site has grown and evolved, so has my use. While it is clear that there are five types of community members:
Discoverers: The Christopher Columbus’ of the tech world. Value: initiate conversation.
Critics: The Robert Eberts. They either are wildly positive or wildly negative. Often asking questions that really don’t add much value “Can you tell us why you are different than product X?”
Sharers: The tech bloggers. One of the realities of ProductHunt is they surface interesting products. One of the jobs of a tech blogger is to write about interesting products. You can do pretty well writing posts about the top 5 products on Product Hunt every day.
Makers: They either have created the product in question, or actually build or design products. It’s easy to see them, they often have a little M icon, or explore feature choices or design elements with the intent of improving the product.
Users: They actually use the product. Funny how in our zeal to showcase our experience/intelligence/whatever, we forget the folks that matter.
And given there are distinct types of community members, helping to shape the conversation could add real additional value. How can we shape it?
Through (semi-)standard questions.
Imagine if there were a set of community driven questions that have been developed through repeation and improvement that cover the primary topics that are important to each community member? They don’t have to be formal, they can just be put in each comment thread.
Here are some ideas:
Do you see this as a company or a side project?
What was the greatest challenge you faced in building this?
What was the problem this is trying to solve?
Why is your solution the best?
Why would I stop using product X and start using your product?
What is the tech stack you built on? Why?
If you could describe your perfect user, what would she look like?
What makes you happiest about what you built?
What makes you cringe?
Why did you get excited about this product?
What’s your favorite feature?
Why would you use this daily?
How many developers have you killed? (wait, thats for something else…)
It would be pretty amazing if the Product Hunt community came up with the 3 or 5 questions that were always asked that framed the discussion in a way that truly got to the core of the product and to the heart of the maker.
After all, isn’t that what makes Product Hunt fun?