Sky Gidge

    skygidge@icloud.com

    FUTIAN resident Archie Hicklin, 23, has a ritual when he wakes up every morning.

    “I check email, check WeChat and check Product Hunt,” said Hicklin, 23, originally from London in the United Kingdom.

    Producthunt.com began as an email mailing list about cool new products — whether software, gadgets or other media — and evolved into its current form as a “must-read for those in tech,” according to Business Insider.

    The website lists new products based on their popularity, with a team of people submitting new products or media, voting on them and commenting on them.

    Product Hunt is also well-known for the “meetups” held in cities ranging from Singapore to Moscow. Tomorrow a meetup will be held in Shenzhen for the first time.

    “The weird thing was that there was so many hardware products on Product Hunt that it seemed only natural that there should be a meetup in Shenzhen,” said Hicklin, a designer at a camera company and the organizer of tomorrow’s meetup.

    Hong Kong has already had four Product Hunt meetups, according to organizer Nick Zieber, 29, from Oregon in the United States.

    “People were coming from Shenzhen to Hong Kong when we did our first meetup,” said Zieber about the September 2013 gathering.

    Zieber said he will be one of about five people who will travel from Hong Kong for tomorrow’s get-together.

    Zieber cited Hong Kong-based startup Notey — a website that sorts blogs by topic — as benefiting from being featured on the Product Hunt website.

    “It had a huge impact on it,” said Zieber.

    Notey raised US$1.6 million in funding, according to a February 2016 article on techcrunch.com.

    “You don’t need to be a developer, you don’t need to have tech expertise, you just need to be interested in discovering new things,” said Zieber about the networking event.

    Hicklin said tomorrow’s event isn’t likely to be large — he said he expects fewer than 50 people — but he hopes the meetups will continue and grow.

    “I think Shenzhen is a really interesting city for startups and I hope there can be stronger ties between Hong Kong and Shenzhen’s tech communities,” said Zieber. “The best case scenario is people end up starting a company.”

    The meetup will take place at Taps Brewpub in Nanshan at 7 p.m. tomorrow.