Chris Messina

He invented the hashtag, then spent a decade telling founders why nobody is using their product.

Internet native, funny, blunt. Calls himself a product therapist and means it.

Chris Messina proposed the hashtag in a 2007 tweet and watched it become a convention used by most of the internet — an idea, as he puts it, that got away from him in the best possible way. He has been making things online since 2005: open standards, the open social web, BarCamp. He was developer experience lead at Uber and worked at Google before that, and he appeared in The Social Dilemma.

He is also the most prolific hunter on Product Hunt, having launched hundreds of products there and watched the same patterns repeat. His work now sits at the intersection of product strategy, positioning and launch, with a small number of founders at a time.

He'll be running a session on why products fail to land — the positioning problem underneath what founders usually diagnose as a marketing problem, and what to fix before it's too late.

You'll take away: an honest read on your own product's story. Messina has seen thousands of launches and can usually tell within minutes why yours isn't connecting.

ONE READ — chrismessina.me. His own account of what he does now, and why launches succeed or fail.