Product Hunt enters KC market, offers onboard for entrepreneurs

A popular international product discovery platform is hoping to engage more tech entrepreneurs in the Kansas City area.

Product Hunt — a website that features new products such as apps, hardware and other tech creations — recently launched a series of meetings in Kansas City in hopes of garnering more products from the area for its global-reaching platform.

Investors, journalists and many tech heavyweights frequent the site to keep up on the latest in new technology, products, startups and tools, said Bob Specht, host of the Kansas City Product Hunt meetup. Specht added that the platform offers local tech entrepreneurs opportunities to receive critical feedback and gain more exposure, with the end game being growth.

“Product Hunt has created a community within the startup community (composed of) people who make and desire to be on the forefront of emerging technology,” he said. “Bringing those builders together, with how many ideas they tend to have, is just a logical way to stoke the interesting conversations happening in our startup community.”

Product Hunt launched in 2013 as an email newsletter cataloguing applications and websites that  28 year-old founder Ryan Hoover found intriguing. It’s since rapidly grown and in 2014 closed a Series A of $6.1 million led by Andreesen Horowitz and complimented by Google Ventures, betaworks and Crunch Fund.

Members of the community submit new products using the title, URL and tagline. Once the product has been vetted and placed on the site, users can support it with an “upvote” and comment to provide feedback or support.

Specht hopes that the local Product Hunt meetings — hosted at Think Big Partners — will offer attendees a chance to share experiences and best practices on the site. The Product Hunt-sanctioned meetings are offered in other tech hubs such as Los Angeles, Boulder, Austin and Seattle. The group has yet to schedule its next summer meeting.

This article was written by freelancer Brandon Painter. Brandon is what some would call a “startup junkie,” but his Clark Kent day job is an advertising and marketing communications professional in Kansas City.