Our new Web3 feed

Today, we’re excited to roll out our new Web3 feed, a place to discover the latest Web3 projects and dive into how Web3 makers are working to change the Internet as we know it.

Nearly 6,000 Web3 projects have launched on Product Hunt in the last few years and 35,000 Product Hunt members are already following the crypto topic on our site, despite only adding it a few months ago. Web3-related keyword searches make up over 32% of the top 8 most searched terms on our site.

We know our community is hungry for Web3.

The new Web3 feed sprung up originally as a project from Product Hunt’s annual internal hackathon. Led by Web3 engineer, Tim Carambat, the team envisioned how Product Hunt could look as a platform and community driven by Web3 values. That meant not just slapping on a crypto tag for new products, but thinking about the specific needs of Web3 makers who seek audiences for their products, of users who search for products and an understanding of the space, and of a community that values each other’s contributions.

Although Tim has since transitioned from Product Hunt to founding his own Web3 company called Rampp, we felt optimistic about the foundation we had laid and continued to build onto it.

The Web3 feed highlights new products with features specific to Web3, like chain filters and Twitter follower count, to help the crypto-curious find new tools and understand the hype behind certain projects. We think that by bringing these projects together, the feed also paints a picture of how Web3 stands to change the way we think about the Internet.

We're also partnering with experts to help our users do their own research on Web3. Our goal is twofold: to provide access to more educational content for understanding the space, and to start real discussions around the potential of Web3 and current pitfalls that hinder its potential. In other words, there’s something for everyone, whether you still don't understand NFTs or you’re ready to dive into advanced topics like post-scarcity economics with David Phelps.

Like many of you, we’re still at the beginning of understanding this space in full, so we’ve still got a lot planned, but want to hear from you. Make sure to drop us your feedback.

If you want to learn more about how the idea came to be, check out this short interview with Tim too:

The original idea for the hackathon came because I was very much into Web3, and still am. And there's this tweet that's been going around and it keeps getting repeated on Twitter that asks “Where is the Product Hunt of crypto to feature all these products?” And I thought “Well we're already Product Hunt. So why don't we just add crypto?”

That’s what started it, but then I saw some advantages to wallet connectivity. Product Hunt, at its core, is a community website. It’s about the community. So what if we had a way for people to go and connect their wallets so that we could reward them later with a token or NFT, that shows how much we care about contributions. We already have that with the karma points, but it'd be nice to have an on-chain representation of those contributions. So that's kind of where the original idea came from — this wallet-connect button and then a very simple version of just finding Web3 products and putting them on a specific page dedicated to that.

Soon after, other team members realized that this page could really take another direction and it could actually be a fully dedicated Web3 experience where we can showcase products across different blockchains plus all these other little features that can exist on products that are very specific to just Web3 — Is it a Dapp? Is it DeFi? Is it about NFTs? These are all specific, and not really like a regular product. So with some design help from Julie, we found a way to enhance the page by showing current tokens and what their prices are — and Web3 products that have recently launched but [with the ability to] filter by just Ethereum or Solano. This circles back to Product Hunt’s mission, which is to be at the forefront of tech. So if that's the case, let's put our best foot forward and show people that we are doing that.

Product Hunt is already Product Hunt. So [we could have] just added Web3 [as a topic], or we could actually intentionally support those products. Web3 products slightly vary from SaaS products, which is primarily what existed when Product Hunt was coming up. Now we've got this different kind of product model, and being able to intentionally support those and not shoehorn them into the Web2 model is actually something that I think is really important. People can click [on a product] and find out that it's Web3, so we can provide an experience that intentionally puts Web3 differentiators at the forefront. Being able to filter down on those specific attributes like chain or model (like DeFi or NFT) — those are important differentiators that show our intention is to help products that are launching in this space.

One thing that I learned from our launch is that every Web3 product has a shared responsibility in education because people will come from all different backgrounds when landing on your tool, service, or platform. Yes, [every maker] should always provide education about their own specific product. But with Web3, [sharing] what they're getting involved with, why is that important, how is it different, and why it matters — these little tidbits of education that people pick up add to someone's entire experience of Web3.