“Product Hunt Changed My Life”: Meet Product Hunt’s New CEO Rajiv Ayyangar
Rajiv Ayyangar, the co-founder and CEO of Tandem, has been announced as the new CEO of Product Hunt.
Product Hunt is an online community platform founded by Ryan Hoover in 2023 for makers to launch their products and consumers to find the latest and greatest in tech.
The platform attracts product-loving enthusiasts who come together to share the latest apps, websites, hardware projects, and tech creations.
“Product Hunt changed my life,” Ayyangar announced on Twitter. “Now I’m stepping in as CEO.”
Launching on Product Hunt
Founders use Product Hunt to launch their new products and other mainstream products, then get hunted down by fellow community members.
One such founder was Rajiv Ayyangar, the co-founder and former CEO of Tandem.
The Indian Filipino founder credits his co-founder, Bernat Fortet Unanue, for introducing him to the platform while sitting on a Yahoo shuttle in 2015.
A few years later, they launched Cryptagon – a portfolio tracker – on Product Hunt, but it reached a dead end after a year.
Meanwhile, the pair had been working remotely due to family commitments but felt disconnected. So, they decided to build Tandem as a virtual office for remote teams.
“Our Product Hunt launch changed everything,” wrote Ayyangar on Twitter.
“We hit #1 for the day, and there was a rush of signups, and excitement spilt over to Twitter.”
After being noticed by many, they got a $7.5M Seed closed, and it was the beginning of Tandem.
Tandem
Tandem provides a virtual office for remote teams with video-chatting and messaging capabilities and integrations with top enterprise tools.
In 2019, Tandem was one of the most well-known companies coming out of Y Combinator. Ayyangar told TechCrunch that his company grew 30-fold in only a few weeks.
Tandem’s desktop program costs $10 a month for each user and shows what teammates are working on so colleagues can know if they are available for a video call or meeting within the app.
The list of user statuses automatically updates to let people know if their co-workers are on a call, writing in Google Docs or doing some other task.
On reflection about Product Hunt, Ayyangar wrote, “Product Hunt changed my life. It’s an amazingly powerful company and community.”
“Product Hunt is THE place for tech enthusiasts to find the next big thing before they go mainstream.”
From Product Hunt Maker to CEO
Ayyangar wrote in his blog post that, on July 24 2023, he received a direct message from Product Hunt’s founder, Ryan Hoover, asking him if he was interested in taking over as CEO.
“My first reaction was one of immense gratitude toward the community and the support they provided for all of the projects I’ve worked on over the last 8 years,” he wrote.
According to Ayyangar, there’s never been a greater need for a home, a community, a place for innovation, optimism, early feedback and judgment-free experimentation, and that’s what Product Hunt is.
“Of course, Product Hunt is a launch platform at its core,” Ayyangar stated. “That won’t change.”
Ayyangar plans to continue to support makers well beyond their initial launch while leveraging a new wave of technology, nodding to the rise in AI tools.
Product Hunt aims to invest heavily in moderation tooling and potential new leaderboards to get even better at spotlighting what’s new and promising in tech.
“I’m thrilled to be able to shape the next chapter of Product Hunt – a company that’s changed my life and countless others,” Ayyangar wrote in a blog post.
