Get ready for our next guest Emily Snowdon who is the Head of Operations at Product Hunt, which was acquired by AngelList! Emily’s story is interesting, she started off as a consultant but was brought onto the community team full time to ultimately be promoted to Head of Operations. We will talk about her rise to Head of Operations, how they keep a massive community growing and so much more.
Get ready for our next guest Emily Snowdon who is the Head of Operations at Product Hunt, which was acquired by AngelList! Emily’s story is interesting, she started off as a consultant but was brought onto the community team full time to ultimately be promoted to Head of Operations. We will talk about her rise to Head of Operations, how they keep a massive community growing and so much more.
Too Long; Didn’t Listen
Derek Andersen:
Welcome to the C2C podcast. I am your host Derek Andersen. After holding my first event in 2010 I went on to create Startup Grind, a 400 chapter community based in over a hundred countries. Along the way, I discovered the greatest marketing tool of all time; your customers. Yet I couldn't find anyone sharing how to build a community where people could experience your brand in person or at scale. On this show, we talk with the brightest minds in companies on the planet about how to build customer to customer marketing strategies and create in-person experiences for your brand and customers before your competitor does.
Derek Andersen:
I'm thrilled about our next guest, Emily Snowden, who's the Head Of Operations at Product Hunt, which was acquired by AngelList. Emily's story is super interesting. She started off as a consultant, but was brought onto the community team full time, and ultimately promoted to the Head Of Operations. We'll talk about her rise to Head Of Operations and how they keep a massive community growing and so much more. Take a listen.
Derek Andersen:
Emily, can you describe what Product Hunt and AngelList are and what you do in your role?
Emily Snowden:
Yes, absolutely. Thanks for having me. So Product Hunt itself is an online community for tech creators and tech enthusiasts. Every day members of our community will hunt or launch new products that they love or have built themselves for the wider community to then upvote, comment on, review and more generally to discover what's new and trending in tech every day.
Emily Snowden:
So we were acquired by AngelList back in December, 2016 as you mentioned. And AngelList is essentially a network for startups, helping them to find the tools that they need to grow. Across our family of companies, we have AngelList Venture, which is our platform for capital and fund, infrastructure. Essentially what this does is reduce some of the hassle for VCs and Angels so that they can spend the majority of their time helping founders.
Emily Snowden:
Then we also have AngelList Talent, which is our employer side. We help startups and founders to recruit the best people into their teams. We at Product Hunt actually use AngelList Talent to recruit ourselves. Very meta, but it does just work. And then now of course we have Product Hunt filling that sort of third piece of the puzzle to help the startups.
Emily Snowden:
As for myself, I look after our community marketing and revenue teams. I also more broadly how keep the teams on track. We're a fully remote distributed team. So I will keep one, I found on the metrics, I love data in spreadsheets and just help us all keep aligned to our different KPIs.
Derek Andersen:
And my connection actually to AngelList goes back a long ways too because Naval Ravikant, who is the co-founder of AngelList was one of the very first speakers I ever had at Startup Grind.
Emily Snowden:
Oh, awesome.
Derek Andersen:
And so he drove down from San Francisco one night in 2011 and spoke, and it was as the largest event we'd ever had. And he spoke many times after that. But very inspiring person. And Ryan Hoover as well is super inspiring person. So great companies, which we've used as well over the years. Product Hunt has a really incredible in-person community. Can you tell us about it and why has it grown so fast?
Emily Snowden:
Yeah, I think the initial growth really has to go back to Ryan Hoover. You mentioned our founder, his passion for products and all things tech in the early days, Product Hunt started as a side project, a passion project for Ryan. It was an act together over Thanksgiving weekend and then turned into an email list, which then spilled out into a site and he would actually individually email people he knew what kind of product they might be interested in what he was building.
Emily Snowden:
So in those early days, a lot of doing things that don't scale to code that program [inaudible 00:04:01], but physically, manually, personally emailing these hundreds of people, getting that input, feedback and then referrals. So growing the community in those early days a lot by word of mouth, which was very impactful. And obviously we don't quite do things at the same level today. Things that don't scale, but we do still foster a very personal community.
Emily Snowden:
The team is global for a couple of reasons and one of those is to make sure someone from community is always available to be either on support or within the community and always ready to interact, keep on top of things. I mean another side of our growth can really be attributed to the tech industry just in general. We see people launching new products every single day. There's never a dull day on the site. It's amazing to see just what people can build with no code or with low code or with all the code. It's never been more accessible to actually build or start something new and we're very privileged to be a part of that journey. And so our growth really is in a large part due to that community as a whole having just spiraled and continued to grow over the past few years and hopefully as we continue to the future.
Derek Andersen:
What kinds of differences do you see in community members that are sort of primarily participating online versus the sort of C2C offline community or people that do both? Do you see unique things with one or the other or levels of engagement with one or the other?
Emily Snowden:
Yeah, that's an interesting question. I mean, we're predominantly known for our online community, but we also encourage our community members around the world, we are a global community to host in-person meetups in their cities, in their different locations. And we support them through sending swipe packs and sharing on social and sending guidance out as ways to host these meetups. And it's amazing to see people that maybe have met online through the community. And then we will often ask them to, for instance, take over our Instagram stories and then we get to see people meeting in real life in Boston or in Bangalore or in London. And it's really cool to see people making those in-person connections that maybe they met online originally. So in terms of your original question, it's hard to say the differences with their interaction with us as a community online, but it is very cool to see that spill out offline in a very real world sense. And we absolutely encourage that.
Derek Andersen:
You started off in community and then you got promoted to Head Of Operations. What advice would you give to a junior community professional that aspires to a more senior role?
Emily Snowden:
So my career path hasn't exactly been linear. I've kind of jumped around a little bit, so there's not an easy tact step-by-step blow that I can describe or impart the wisdom. But one thing I would say is in community, and in startups in particular, we have this great opportunity to often have a lot more autonomy and responsibility and decision making ability than you would say in a more traditional environment or a more traditional role. And I would say really take hold of that and go after experiments. Hopefully you know what your team or your company's north star is or what you're chasing in terms of objectives.
Emily Snowden:
And then don't wait to be told if you see something that your company should be doing or you think should be doing or we're not doing or could do better, don't wait for your manager to go, 'Okay, go and fix that. Go do this and here's how you do it.' It's always really impressive in a one to one or a team standup when someone's like, 'Hey, I did this because I thought it would do that and this is what actually happened and this is what we learned.' And they're like, 'Wow, cool. That's awesome. Thank you so much. You've really impressed me with that scenario.' So I would say don't wait to be told and always report back, own your successes, but also your failures. Not all experiments will pan out, but we can always learn from them. So don't be shy about that.
Derek Andersen:
As you transition, you hired for a community support role. I wonder what advice you have to the community people out there who now have to hire someone for their team. Like what did you look for? What do you think's critical for that kind of role? What things are nice to haves or must haves?
Emily Snowden:
Yeah, it's a good question because as we know, community manager, our community support can mean really different things in different companies. It's not a very one-size-fits-all, but in terms of things that I personally look for when making hires, one of our core values actually as a company is empathy. And for me, for junior high you can definitely train, you can train people on your guidelines, on your principles, on the technical side of the role and what to do day to day. But especially in an online community, what I find that it's really hard to teach is being able to put yourself in someone else's shoes and go, okay, maybe I can't fix this problem in the exact way someone's asking me to, but by understanding how they feel about this particular scenario, I'm better able to help them through it through understanding and encouragement. And generally for me, that's something that, like I said, it can't be taught and it really is hugely important for community building.
Derek Andersen:
We've talked to a few people about the trend of brands acquiring communities and I wonder from your experience at Product Hunt, why do you think it was so valuable for AngelList to bring that community and acquire it?
Emily Snowden:
For AngelList and Product Hunt, I really think that there was just a natural fit. So at AngelList we really believe startups are future and we want to do everything in our power to make startups a success. So what AngelList was already doing and doing really well is the venture size, connecting founders with getting funding, talent, getting their first hires in place, and with Product Hunt, our mission really is to connect founders and tech creators with their first audiences and be a supportive community. Launching products, it's hard and it can be really scary. So providing that supportive community and that first audience is a piece of that puzzle that just kind of closes the pie, if you will. So for us, the AngelList acquisition, it really made sense to align those values.
Derek Andersen:
Now that Product Hunt is so large and so well established, what do you think is the key to continue growing it?
Emily Snowden:
That's a great question. We never take for granted our community. We live or die by the people that come every day and launch products, hunt products, upvote products, and really be a part of that community with us. So we're very cognizant of that and any changes we make to the platform, to our maker community, we aim to build in public or at least semipublic. So we get feedback from folks via email, via Twitter, via groups to get feedback on what we're doing, check our submissions. Are we building the tools that people find useful? A good example of that is we're building something new. It's very exciting. I can't share too much just yet, but if you follow us on the Twitter handle @yourstacks, you can get a sneak peek of a new little something we've been cooking up. It's a private group at the moment, but if you follow it, you get dumped in there and you'll see a cool little video from Ryan updating you on the progress of that. And hopefully with the feedback of those initial beta users, hopefully will be something called that our community will love.
Derek Andersen:
What metrics are critical for you and your team that you track on a daily, weekly, monthly basis?
Emily Snowden:
So we track a couple of different metrics. I am a big data person, I love spreadsheets, but there's a couple of different ways we think is important to measure health. So there's the overall growth. So visitors coming to the site, people joining the community, is that growing? What does that look like? And so we keep an eye on that very closely.
Emily Snowden:
But on the other side of that, and what for us is super important, and I think every community is equally as important, is those interactions, those community contributions. And by that I mean people upvoting, hunting products, commenting, chatting in our discussions, setting goals in our maker group, this to us demonstrates that the community, okay maybe it's growing, but is it also healthy? Do people love the tools that we're giving them to use and do we still provide value for them? Which is ultimately what we want to be doing. So those two pieces for us are what we monitor to judge the health of our community.
Derek Andersen:
This is the C2C podcasts, Customer-to-Customer marketing. And so I must ask, what do you think you're getting out of the community meeting in real life that you don't get online? I'm sure there's lots of things going the other way, but like what magical or special or different do you get out of the in-person interactions that you haven't seen come online?
Emily Snowden:
Yeah, it's a good question. And going back to the meetups I mentioned earlier, people all around the world meeting up through first hearing of one another on Product Hunt online, and that's really something special. You know you've had an impact on these two, maybe strangers getting in a room together, talking. They're often demoing projects in a real life setting, so pitching demo in a startup. There are products that we've helped facilitate in some small way and as a community that wants to help makers, wants to reduce some of that friction for actually launching a product, finding that community, having people get together in real life. There's something really magical about that online removes the barriers of locale, you might get to meet people that you never would be in a room with otherwise because of travel or their different seniority or different industries, but once you can get people into a room after they've had that online connection, I think there's something really magical about that and the fact that we can say we've played a part in that is something pretty cool.
Derek Andersen:
Thank you so much for listening. If you liked the show, please leave a review wherever you listen to this. If you'd like to see more about how to create your own event community, go to bevylabs.com/pod. Again, that's B-E-V-Y-L-A-B-S.com/pod.