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Analysis of Product Hunt products from 2014 to 2021

An analysis of Product Hunt, 2014 - 2021

In fact, Product Hunt itself, which offers a subscription program for aspiring founders "to kickstart your startup," fits squarely within the researchers' characterization of the "Entrepreneurship Industry," a market of goods and services that caters to the Veblenian Entrepreneur and ultimately contributes to "an economy that outwardly appears dynamic and entrepreneurial, but is rife with inefficiencies and lacks substantive innovative capacity." From the perspective of VCs, the ultimate objective is not productivity as dictated by conventional market logic (i.e., the minimization of costs and the maximization of profits on goods and services), but the shuffling of money between investors, facilitated through the aggregation of various narrative components — branding, headcount increases, a mythos of disruption — until the investment position has grown enough to be worth cashing out through acquisition or IPO. Microsoft's acquisition of Rare, which in the 1990s created groundbreaking titles like Donkey Kong Country and Banjo Kazooie, ended with the studio "reduced to making shovelware Kinect games," a reference to the Xbox's motion-capture peripheral whose canyon-sized disparity between marketing and reality made it a case study in consumer tech hype.

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