Ryan Hoover

Ryan Hoover is an American entrepreneur and venture investor based in Miami / San Francisco / New York. He is best known as the founder of Product Hunt, the daily leaderboard for new technology products, and as the general partner of Weekend Fund, an early-stage pre-seed fund. He is active on X as @rrhoover with 331,000+ followers.^[1]

Career

Hoover holds a BS in Entrepreneurship from the University of Oregon (Lundquist College of Business, 2009). He began his career in product and marketing roles at InstantAction and PlayHaven before becoming an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Tradecraft (San Francisco, 2013–2014).^[2]

He founded Product Hunt in November 2013 as a side project — a simple email digest of the day's best new products. It grew into the leading platform for product launches and was acquired by AngelList in 2016. Hoover stepped down as CEO in October 2020, handing the reins to Josh Buckley.^[1]

In parallel he launched Weekend Fund in 2017, a $10M pre-seed fund investing $100k–$250k per company across B2C and B2B, with particular interest in no/low-code tools, audio tech, and creator tools. The fund is backed by prominent angels and institutional investors.^[3]

He also writes at ryanhoover.me and has contributed to the book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal.^[4]

Connection to Jan

In April 2025, Jan reached out to Ryan after seeing a tweet about the Weekend Fund, pitching uithub as a pre-seed investment opportunity. Ryan responded positively, asking for more detail on traction and long-term vision. Jan replied with a detailed breakdown: three separate viral spikes each generating 100k+ pageviews, steady 500–2,000 DAU between spikes, and a vision for a VSCode-style marketplace with pay-as-you-go context generation for private repos. Jan mentioned a planned Product Hunt launch for uithub v2.^[5]

See Also

• Jan Wilmake
• uithub
• Ben Tossell