With this post, I will try and give you a description of the set of events that happened that got us featured on Product Hunt.
First- what is Highlyreco?
Highlyreco in its current form
At Highlyreco, we are making it possible for you to find the most relevant book to read that will teach you something. We do this by aggregating book recommendations from awesome people in Tech and Entrepreneurship. The reason for doing that — Firstly we think, books are the best ways to learn something. Peter Thiel is not going to sit with you explaining his understanding of startup dynamics. Your best bet is to read Zero to One. Books are the easiest way for someone willing to teach, to scale his learning to a lot of people. Also there are times when you read a book and you just don’t get it. Later with some life experience when you read the same book, you might be like — “Holy ****, this is intense”. That’s what I felt when I was reading Ben Horowitz’s Hard things about hard things when I was closing down my previous startup.
Thats why we think there is a right time to read a book. What we figured is that, you can figure out what is the most relevant book for you by looking at the book recommendation of the people that you really really think is awesome today.
The other revelation that we had was that, all the people that we thought were ridiculously awesome, are extremely well read. That can’t be a coincidence. Highlyreco was build by us to solve our own problem – How do I find the most relevant book to read today with which I can learn something?
A quick showcase:
Warning: Highlyreco is not ready for mobile yet. If you like to try it out, you need to try it out on a browser. It’s pretty messed up on the phone. You have been warned.
The product is fairly straight forward. Once you are at https://www.highlyreco.com, here is what you will see…
You will go straight to the filter page. You will find books in the left column, its corresponding reviews in the middle column and the filter by people on the right. If you login, it will filter by influencers in our list that you follow on twitter. This way you can focus on a set of people relevant to you. Additionally you can also filter by topic.
Back to the main story:
We started by creating a list of people that we wanted to learn from — it turned out to Marc Andreessen, Sam Altman, and 13 others etc..
Dug up on the internet and found the top book recommendations from each of these people. We thought that was valuable. But, what we found to be more valuable was to get all the book recommendations from the person that you most wanted to learn from. Basically dig deeper. So we picked Marc Andreessen and pulled up all the books that he had recommended on twitter. That turned out to be 80+ recommendations. Personally for us that turned out to be super valuable. We also figured we had something that no one else had- We had 80 books recommended by Marc Andreessen. You can find them here — https://www.highlyreco.com/usr/pmarca
We were like, okay, this is cool. Wonder how many people will find this valuable. So I tweeted tagging pmarca on it. This is that tweet
Exhaustive book recommendations from @pmarca in the last 2 years (compiled from @pmarca‘s twitter feed)- https://t.co/q9vkvIgdB0
— Alex J V (@alexjv89) May 27, 2016
pmarca retweeted. And hence that tweet got a ton of visibility. Ben Tossell community lead at Product Hunt noticed us, and we got featured on product hunt.
On the same day I also posted the same on hackernews. Here is a link to that.
As you would notice, nothing happened there.
Important lesson learned — who introduces your product to a platform makes a ton of difference. Thanks Ben.
We were the top product in tech on product hunt for a whole day.
From being featured on product hunt, we realized that there is something of value here. It’s worth people’s attention. For us highlyreco is something worth exploring further.
Probably we will do a post on consequences of being featured on Product Hunt and how useful it is soon.
Can you tell us something?
It would be amazing if you can tell us 2 things:
- What is the most irritating thing on the website right now?
- Who is that one awesome person not on the platform that you really want recommendations from?