My most ambitious side project yet

If you’re new here, hi—I’m Ryan Hoover—founder of Product Hunt and early-stage investor at Weekend Fund. I also helped write Hooked and occasionally publish essays. This newsletter highlights my latest experiments, essays, and curiosities. If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe here, along with 25k+ others. :)

1. I just launched my most ambitious side project ever. It’s called Ryan Party!! I built it in 15 mins using Adaptive (Weekend Fund is an investor). I know. It’s a big deal.

2. My favorite part of ChatGPT is its memory. The more I use it, the more it understands me to provide more relevant and accurate responses. For example, when I ask it health-related questions, it knows what supplements I take, my biomarkers, DEXA scan results, and my goals. My buddy, Jeff Morris Jr., writes about this in The New Moat: Memory.

3. Palmer Luckey recently joined Rick Rubin’s podcast. It’s worth a listen. I was delighted to hear Palmer is as big of a Chrono Trigger fan.

4. Linda recently invited me to do an AMA on Farcaster. It’s been a minute since I’ve done one of these (my first was on reddit 11 years ago). Here are a few of my responses:

5. I’ve been using Aqua Voice since its launch on Product Hunt to reply to emails and Slack faster. It takes effort to change habits from typing, but I really like the product and have been interested in new ways of communicating. So much of our time is spent translating what’s in our brain into buttons on a keyboard.

6. Shout-out to my friend and former teammate, Erik Torenberg, on the new role at a16z. His announcement led me to pull up my first email exchange with him in 2013.

7. If you had $1M to put into cash-flow-generating opportunities, what would you invest in? There are 300 replies with ideas in this thread.

8. I recently saw Maybe Happy Ending on Broadway with my gf. It’s about two AI robots that fall in love. The set design is especially well done. 

9. It’s easier to be nice than it is to be kind. I’m trying to embrace more of the latter.

10. Add this chill mix to your morning coffee. Side note: YouTube is eating into my music listening. I wish Spotify incorporated more mixes, leveraging its algo and what it knows about me to curate the best sets, but I understand how this could be net negative to their business model.

11. You might be tired of me praising Max Cooper. Well, this won’t be my last time. He recently released a visual of his latest album, capturing hundreds of anonymous quotes responding to the question, “What would you like to express which you cannot in everyday life?”

12. I don’t karaoke often, but here are some of my go-to’s when I do. Yes, I created a Spotify playlist. :)

13. I don’t know who needs to hear this but: Check in on your homies.