Product Hunt Moves Beyond Tech Into Gaming

Are there early adopters outside of tech? Product Hunt is ready to find out.

Thursday it added its first category outside of tech: Gaming. A limited group of people will be able to post new games and game trailers, whether mobile, video games or desktop, to the feed. Although the gaming feed is still in beta, anyone who is logged in to the site will be able to vote up the games they like, leading to a curated, ranked list of the best new products for aficionados to peruse.

For those who’ve never heard of Product Hunt, the service is a Reddit for products, crowdsourcing the best new tech apps and hardware into an easy-to-read feed. It’s a place where early tech adopters, investors and tech press go to find the latest gadgets and gizmos and bond with other like-minded folk.

Product Hunt

The passion of the early-adopter tech crowd is well documented, and Product Hunt is an insider staple of the startup industry.

But its real challenge is expansion into new categories, and gaming is Product Hunt’s first reckoning moment. The founder, Ryan Hoover, raised $6.1 million in venture investment from the startup venture firm Andreessen Horowitz and others on one premise: There are early adopters outside of tech. He believes that people who are obsessed with fashion, music, movies, gaming, sports and other topics will want to use a service that surfaces the newest, hottest stuff in those areas.

Like any risky startup, it’s based on an unproven thesis. Gaming is the first test. Hoover decided the best way to grow would be into categories related to technology, and gaming is one of them. There’s overlap between both fan bases; Product Hunt users would post new games to the tech section.

For the gaming feed, Product Hunt redesigned its page layout, which was primarily text based, to feature visuals. It also hired Russ Frushtik, the former executive producer of gaming site Polygon, to run the category and help build a gaming community.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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