Exclusive: Jason Levin, Head of Growth at Product Hunt, explains why he suddenly quit

Indie hacker X was set ablaze on Wednesday with the surprising news that Jason Levin, the Head of Growth at Product Hunt, was quitting:

Now, Jason explains what happened for the first time in this exclusive interview.

Stephen: Thanks for making time, Jason. So, let’s get right into it. Why’d you quit?

Jason: So I landed in Austin, TX at the Product Hunt offsite on Sunday for the week. All is going fine. Then, on Wednesday morning, I get partnered with the CTO for a feedback session. 

For context, I had been proposing new features for 6+ months — stuff like a Stripe integration to track your launch-by-launch metrics, a dashboard to track your launch social media metrics, a way to give you a weekly download of upvoters' names to add into your sales funnel, etc. All of my ideas would've helped indie hackers and founders, but they never would get shipped.

So finally during this feedback session, I tell the CTO that I wish we shipped more cool stuff and just did simple quick landing pages for new features like Pieter Levels and he says, “Who?” I ask him if he’s joking and he’s not. He asks me who again. I couldn’t believe it. It was like something snapped in me and I realized I was wasting my time. Within 20 minutes, I packed my bags, called an Uber, and was at a new hotel.

You can’t be CTO of Product Hunt and not know who Pieter Levels is. It’s disrespectful to the community to have a person in the role who KNOWS NOTHING ABOUT THE COMMUNITY and I think that’s why the tweet went viral and resonated so hard. Nice guy, but not the right person for Product Hunt. 

Stephen: How did the CEO react?

Jason: You can see his reaction on X:

Stephen: Why go public with it?

Jason: I tweeted it because I want the best for the Product Hunt community. There's thousands and thousands of indie hackers working their asses off day and night counting on Product Hunt and they deserve better. 

Thanks to the last 9 months tweeting from the Product Hunt account, I got to know many of them. I wasn't just tweeting, I was DMing, jumping on phones, flying across the country to host events, and becoming homies with tons of indie hackers like Steven Tey, Abishek, Ryan Gilbert. I literally did everything I could from a distribution standpoint: retweeting launches, dropping comments, and signing up to test new products all the time, but there's only so much you can do from just social media alone. You can't just have crazy marketing progress and no technical progress. Especially in the age of AI and Cursor and Claude there's no excuse for not shipping. 

At the end of the day is all I've gotta say is it's a bad sign for your startup when the social media guy knows more about the Stripe API than the CTO... 

Stephen: Are you saying that PH is in real trouble going forward?

Jason: No comment. 

Stephen: So, what’s next for you?

Jason: Once the Product Hunt tweet went viral, I knew I needed to say what I was doing next ASAP. So I announced I was going full-time on building my SaaS for meme marketers. It's called Memelord Technologies and already has 500+ paying subscribers and is profitable. 

Last year, I published a book called Memes Make Millions covering all the meme marketing tactics I learned from my time working with startups. The book has sold 1000s of copies, but I realized there was a problem: I can give people good tactics, but people still need help finding good dank new memes to use in their marketing.

So three months ago, I launched a daily newsletter called Meme Alerts where I curate new viral memes for marketers all for $6.9/month. It was growing like crazy so I was like maybe I should build my own editor and pre-load it with all the new viral memes I find! I had no clue how to do that but I wanted so bad to make something that people would love using. I drank a ton of Red Bull, got no sleep for like two weeks, and grinded like the indie hackers I learned from best. 

Now, there's two features: 

Feature #1: Meme Alerts (we use AI/humans to surface new viral memes and send you a daily email).

Feature #2: Editor (think Dingboard, BUT with saved projects and assets. PLUS we pre-load the new viral memes daily from Meme Alerts for quick posting).

The paid newsletter ended up being the MVP for the SaaS (hot tip if you've read this far: I really think more people should try this. It's free. I didn't even buy a domain until I was at like $1,500 MRR lol I just set up a free beehiiv newsletter!!)

After posting the launch tweet, my phone has been going insane. Stripe signups nonstop. Bugs and rate limits. Friends texting me and calling me. I'm running on about four hours of sleep and three cold brews and some flaming hot cheetos and I'm the happiest I've ever been in my life.

If you want to follow my journey from here, make sure to sign up for Memelord Technologies for the best $6.9/month of your life. If you enjoyed reading this, I write about my adventures every week for 150+ weeks straight in my newsletter.

Stephen: Thanks Jason. Good luck with everything.

Jason’s departure is the latest chapter in what has been a tumultuous few years for Product Hunt. Originally a YC-backed startup, the company was acquired by AngelList in 2016 for $20 million. It was then spun back out in 2020 and in 2021 inspired the investing fund Hyper, which has since been shut down.

In September 2023, former Tandem CEO and Product Hunt maker Rajiv Ayyangar was brought on as CEO with the goal of helping the company reach its “immense possibility” by making it easier for people to find the best products for their needs and better supporting makers beyond their initial launch. That October, he let go of around 60% of the staff in design, product, sales, and other roles. At the time of publishing, Mr. Ayyangar did not respond to our request for comment.

However, despite all the drama, frequent complaints from indie hackers, and an increasing number of competitors, Product Hunt remains a giant in the industry with dozens of daily launches, millions of monthly page views, and 800,000 newsletter subscribers.