Ryan Hoover was dancing with some friends at DNA Lounge in San Francisco last month when a stranger suddenly turned to him and asked, "Are you Ryan from Product Hunt?" A few weeks later, another person recognized him while he was working out at the gym.

"It's been happening more than I would expect lately," Hoover says. "It makes me feel slightly more self-conscious and aware of what I'm doing."

Hoover may not be a household name for the general public, but he is a rising star in the tech community. His company Product Hunt is quickly changing the way new apps and tech products get discovered. VCs have used the site to pick their next investments, tech reporters turn to it for signals on apps to cover and founders flock to the service for feedback on products. All of that and Product Hunt hasn't even celebrated its first anniversary yet.

Product Hunt launched last November with the mission of helping people find new mobile and web applications every day. The only guidelines: make sure the submission is for something new and not super obvious. "I’m always on the hunt to find new compelling products, not just for fun but to learn," Hoover wrote in a blog post on his personal website announcing Product Hunt. "The earlier you discover and use these products, the better."

Some have described the service as being like a Reddit for products. Users can submit items and upvote entries just as they would on Reddit. On any given day, there is a leaderboard of the most upvoted products on the platform. Many of the comment threads for the submissions also resemble Reddit's Ask Me Anything sessions, but specifically for founders and developers rather than celebrities and politicians.

When Foursquare launched a major app update two months ago that effectively killed the check-in experience, CEO Dennis Crowley responded to feedback on Product Hunt from founders and employees at Oracle, Aviary and The Associated Press. When Clinkle finally teased its first release after raising $30 million in funding, engineers at the normally secretive startup took to Product Hunt to explain their thinking.

You'll find Hoover in each of these comment threads and many others. Though he submits fewer products than he used to — three to five per week, down from one or two each day in the beginning — Hoover is all over the discussions on the site, asking questions, offering positive feedback and driving the conversation. Product Hunt's team is growing and the number of unique monthly visitors is in the hundreds of thousands, but it remains Hoover's service through and through.

"Product Hunt is Ryan," says Nir Eyal, who met Hoover nearly two years ago and is an early investor in the company. "It's a good example of the product becoming a manifestation of the founder. He is a community hub. As long as I've known Ryan, he's always been that."

It's Hoover who brings the Product Hunt conversation to Twitter with a dizzying number of tweets from his personal account each day. And it's Hoover who reaches out to founders and members of the tech industry to participate in the Product Hunt comments. Sometimes he even tips interesting products to reporters and investors. In the process, Hoover has asserted himself as a tech tastemaker, or at the very least a loud cheerleader for whatever the next new thing is — even if that new thing is an app called Yo.

Investors and early adopters found out about Yo on Product Hunt several weeks before it gained mainstream media attention.

An influencer, for better and for worse

He wakes up at 5:30 each morning during the week and quickly scans his website with a mix of excitement and anxiety.

"You don't know what's going to be posted on Product Hunt overnight," Hoover says. It's not nearly as freewheeling as Reddit and there are other employees who can keep track of submissions and comments, but there are still gaps in the day when it goes unchecked. Once he catches up on the site and takes a shower, he heads to his "office" at Philz Coffee where he hammers out the morning newsletter.

Then the hunt begins again.

For investors, the hunt is for the next big thing. "Several friends of mine who are angels see things on Product Hunt and try to reach out to the founders. It's sort of how Kickstarter was perceived a year ago," says Josh Elman, a partner at Greylock who met Hoover before he started Product Hunt and who has since invested in the startup. For Hoover, the hunt is for something new worth sharing.

During our first interview, Hoover is particularly excited about a new app bubbling up on Product Hunt called Ethan, which was developed by someone named Ethan and is described as "a messaging app for messaging Ethan." It is funny and frivolous and the perfect example of what's good and bad about Product Hunt: it's a place where seemingly superficial but entertaining apps can gain attention. After all, this is the same site where many in the tech community discovered Yo, the app for saying "yo" to your contacts, weeks before it gained mainstream media attention.

Hoover admits that apps like Ethan are "going to get a lot of hate," but that doesn't stop him from talking about it on Twitter and pitching it to a writer at Business Insider, which becomes the first of several media outlets to cover the messaging app.

"It's a good example of an app that's novel and different," Hoover says. "I won't use it next week. Some dude built it just for fun based on a small need he had and people are finding it interesting and funny." Indeed, he is a staunch defender of the so-called "dumb" apps. "I think those things are good, they are encouraging new ideas. Who knows what they can turn into?"

This attitude about the Ethan app is emblematic of his attitude to new releases in general: be positive. "He loves everything new, even if it's crap," Eyal says. "He gives everything a chance. I’ve never heard him poo poo a product."

That is a big part of what makes Product Hunt such an exciting atmosphere for the tech community. It is largely insulated from what some investors and founders characterized as more critical or even cynical coverage in the traditional tech press. Product Hunt, in their telling, is more a place for sharing and discovery and constructive feedback.

Yet, if the service becomes too flooded with silly, single-function applications that are only worth using for a few days, it may eventually turn off investors and early adopters looking for more lasting businesses and trends. Ethan and Yo are fun apps, but do they have the same potential as Kickstarter successes like the Oculus Rift? What happens if the dumb apps really just are dumb?

Hoover doesn't seem to be losing much sleep over this — then again, he doesn't sleep that much to begin with. "Investors are using it now to find stuff to invest in and that will continue I’m sure, but it doesn’t change Product Hunt's success whether no one ever invests in something you find on Product Hunt in the future," Hoover says. "We’re not building a platform for investors, that's just a small business."

The "bigger opportunity," he says, is "building something for consumers." That's what he's hunting for now.

Ethan, "a messaging app for messaging Ethan," which gained attention this week on Product Hunt.

The Silicon Valley outsider

Hoover, now 27, grew up in Eugene, Oregon, a college town about an eight-hour drive away from the startup scene in San Francisco. He did have some inspiration closer to home though: His father launched several companies over the years — not at all like the tech companies you see on Product Hunt — including a barter exchange business, a video game store and most recently a waste management service.

"My dad was always encouraging entrepreneurial things," Hoover says. He worked at his dad's video game store when he was 13, running the gum ball machine. In his spare time, he built his own computer and, at the age of 14, he briefly tried to build a "business" of his own. It was a website called Operation Laugh that collected comics and jokes. Part of the goal was to learn front-end development skills; part of the goal was to make some money.

"I had a friend in high school who did something similar and he said he made $100,000 in advertising. I thought, if he can do this maybe I can do something similar and make some revenue there," Hoover recalls. "Apparently he executed better."

Hoover gave up on the website after a few months, but didn't lose his fascination with the tech industry. "I was always following it from afar," he says, noting that he subscribed to tech and video game publications. But he didn't have many people to talk tech with in Eugene. "A lot of my closest friends there, my interest and passion for products and startups was their interest in sports. I never really was a part of that."

Perhaps that explains why he wasn't fully committed to a career in tech when he first got to college. Hoover attended the University of Oregon and pursued a degree in business — which he describes as "one of those degrees you get when you don't know what to do" — while minoring in computer information. In his senior year, he tiptoed further into tech with an internship at Instant Action, a video game site, and followed that up with a job at PlayHaven, which brought him to San Francisco. After more than three years there, he got tired of working for others and put in notice to quit. He just didn't know what he would be working on next.

Throughout the second half of 2013, Hoover juggled projects and wrote constantly about startups and products on his Twitter account, on his personal blog, on tech sites like PandoDaily and on various online communities and comment boards. In mid-2013, he launched Startup Edition, an e-mail newsletter collecting insights from founders who he reached out to. It was an experiment and one that paved the way for Product Hunt.

Bret Taylor, CEO of Quip and former Facebook CTO, talks about the latest update to his product in a Product Hunt thread. Image: Product Hunt

The hunter becomes the hunted

If Hoover missed out on talking tech with friends when he was a teenager, he more than made up for it after college. He talked about new products constantly with people online and offline. He dedicated himself to scouring the web for new products and eventually had the revelation that there's no single destination that reliably curates all the new things in tech.

That idea, simple as it might sound, was the basis for Product Hunt. What turned it into a force was Hoover himself.

"He has this kind of infectious enthusiasm. He reaches out to people, but he never reaches out and says, 'Hey I'd like to meet.' He reaches out with something he can offer or very specific questions," says Elman, the partner at Greylock. That approach helped Hoover build out his network and also helped with Product Hunt. "He’d reach out to founders and say, 'I'd love you to come and tell your story [on Product Hunt].'... Then pretty quickly the tables turned and everybody started coming to him."

Almost every person we spoke with who has worked closely with Hoover over the years met him the same way: online. Elman got to know him through a chat group. Eyal, the early investor, introduced himself through e-mail after Hoover included him on a brazen list published on his blog called "13 People I Want to Meet in 2013." Nathan Bashaw, the product designer who helped Hoover launch Product Hunt, met him through the comments on a link-sharing website.

Bashaw, who no longer has a day-to-day role at Product Hunt, credits the startup's success to Hoover's "community organizing efforts" and his willingness to be an advocate for himself and his ideas. "One thing I learned from Ryan, maybe there will be some people who are not interested in hearing about it, but the opportunity cost of not offending some people is insanely high."

When we spoke with Bashaw, he had just finished giving a presentation about building Product Hunt to a group of more than 50 people attending a Product Hunt meetup event in New York. "It's definitely crazy," Bashaw said late that night, still marveling at the crowd. The event is just one of several meetups that have taken place in the U.S., Canada, Israel and The Netherlands.

"This is a startup with a very small number of people and they are able to harness this energy coast to coast," says Steven Sinofsky, a former Microsoft executive and now partner at Andreessen Horowitz, which recently led a $6.1 million funding round in Product Hunt.

Sinofsky recalled one moment in particular when he went to get coffee with Hoover at a cafe he has gone to for nearly as long as Hoover has been alive. He compared Hoover's reception from the tech crowd sitting in the cafe to the reception John Travolta's character received walking into the disco in Saturday Night Fever. "The founders want to talk to him and he wants to talk to the founders," he said. "He knows them all at this personal level."

Alexis Ohanian, cofounder of Reddit and an investor in Product Hunt, compares Hoover's penchant for online community building to the founders of 4chan and Flickr. "The truth is he's already well on his way to building a very special platform for communities to share & discuss their favorite things," Ohanian said in an e-mail to Mashable. "Few people understand community on this level (like Caterina and moot) and he’s one of them.”

The next big thing for Product Hunt

"It's Friday. Treat yourself to a new fit."

That's the email Product Hunt subscribers find in their inbox on Friday morning touting a new collection called Fashion Hunt. The curated list includes links to more than a dozen fashion-related items, ranging from an online fashion community to a startup selling fashionable wearable technology.

These themed collections are a way for the Product Hunt team to add more content to the site each day and also to test the waters. "When we start identifying a big enough group, we'll expand and create a separate community," Hoover says. He expects Product Hunt will eventually be home to communities for fashion, games, movies and music. Some of those communities may have different looks — fashion may be more visual and music will require audio embeds — but all be part of ProductHunt.com.

Over time, these new communities may help Product Hunt expand beyond the limits of the early adopter tech community. It could be a place where anyone goes to find out about new things in categories they're interested in and hear directly from the creators, whether those creators are app developers or film directors.

The downside, at least for those VCs who took to Product Hunt in its first months, is that it could get too popular and lose its status as the best kept secret in tech. "As more people start using it, it becomes less valuable to investors," Hoover admits. "They probably liked it better when it was less known."

If that happens, those investors will just have to hunt for something new.