Product Hunt, one of my 11 faves from this week's Y Combinator Demo Day, is having quite a day.
CEO Ryan Hoover announced the San Francisco gadget review startup has already raised $1 million in funding and launched an app for Apple's iPhone and iPad.
The seed investors include Ashton Kutcher's A-Grade Investments, Aileen Lee's Cowboy Ventures, CrunchFund, Google Ventures, Greylock Discovery Fund, Naval Ravikant of AngelList, SV Angel and, of course, Y Combinator itself.
Product Hunt launched last fall as an email list between Hoover and friends about gadgets that interested them. It grew into a public site that by Demo Day had 51,000 active email subscribers, 250,000 monthly unique visitors and generated 1.7 million clicks to products.
Hoover wrote about the history of Product Hunt and its funding in a blog posted on Medium that hints the site may displace some of the tech gadget sites and bloggers already on the scene.
'Product Hunt is a more efficient platform for launching, often surfacing new products before traditional press,' he wrote, adding that his self-described 'product hunters' have an advantage.
'They aren't beholden to press embargoes and lengthy write-ups,' he wrote. 'All it takes is a name, tagline, and link to the product to distill product launches into their simplest form. We're then able to provide consumers with a curated feed of what's new and interesting.'
Product Hunt users vote the apps and gadgets reviewed up or down, giving the most highly regarded the top spot on the site.
The fact that the site's new iOS app is at the top of the site today is either home field bias or testimony to how popular it is.
Cromwell Schubarth is the Senior Technology Reporter at the Business Journal.
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