(Bloomberg Business) -- They came by the hundreds, spilling outof Ubers and Lyfts to wait in a line snaking for two blocks fromthe front door of Jones, a bar in San Francisco’s Tenderloindistrict. A passerby asked if a band was playing.

No, the draws were free beer, Ryan Hoover and Product Hunt, thehot arbiter of the coolness of the hundreds of apps, services andgadgets released in any given month. More than 3,700 people RSVP’dto an invitation Hoover posted on Facebook for his website’sfirst-anniversary party, a sidewalk-jamming testament to tech’sreign and Hoover’s particular brand of celebrity. Hip-hop artistNas and New York Knicks forward Carmelo Anthony, both startupinvestors, are regular Product Hunt readers.

“I haven’t seen anything that captures the magic of the times welive in the way Product Hunt does,” says Groupon Inc. co-founderAndrew Mason, whose new company, the travel guide service Detour,scored a Product Hunt shout-out last year. “It just captures on onepage the breadth and depth of entrepreneur innovation that ishappening right now.”

Hoover, who's 28, is one of the most visible benefactors of thetech boom, an earnest, hustling, unconventional power broker in thelet’s-create-a-company culture glorified and mocked in TV shows andmovies. Products hyped on Hoover’s site can expect a boost insales—and occasionally queries from investors.

Venture capitalists put $48.3 billion into U.S. startups lastyear, the most since 2000, when the last boom was blowing up.Hoover got more than $6 million of it. In the past 120 days, heraised the money from VCs like Andreessen Horowitz, hired fiveemployees and has gone from working out of a coffee shop nearTwitter Inc. to an $8,000-a-month apartment he converted into anIkea-furnished office.

This month, his company collected the “Best New Startup” honorat the Crunchies, Silicon Valley’s annual awards show.

Product Hunt didn’t win for its revenue or roadmap toprofitability—it doesn’t have those. Like many entrepreneurs,Hoover’s focused on building an audience and influence. If amoney-making enterprise grows from there, great.

“I started Product Hunt not expecting it to be a business,” hesays.

And he’s not naive about his access to capital.

“In a different environment, when the money was much harder, I’mnot sure we’d be able to raise as much,” he says. “It’d bedisingenuous for me to say we didn’t benefit.”

For all its clout, Product Hunt doesn’t have a lot of frills.It’s a website and e-mail newsletter that every day singles out 50or so recently-introduced things Hoover, his team and a group ofdiscerning volunteers decide are noteworthy. Readers “vote up”what they like, moving them higher on the site, where they get moreattention. Startups are so hot in Silicon Valley that the industryneeds a startup to curate them.

As readership’s grown, Product Hunt has become a virtual townsquare for tech’s cheerleaders, with people posting feedback aboutnew products and startup founders like Groupon’s Mason answeringquestions about their latest inventions. Hoover has guarded who cancomment, limiting the number to 8,000 thus far who were brought inthrough an invitation system. Mason says the biggest challenge forProduct Hunt will be ensuring it’s not overrun by the Internet’sdefault to vitriol.

The products popularized are a microcosm of the startup world.They’re often clever, occasionally wacky and mainly appeal topeople like Product Hunt's founder—men and women in their 20sand 30s with disposable incomes andcheck-your-iPhone-200-times-a-day obsessions with technology. A recent batch of productshighlighted include various delivery service for some random items,from cannabis accessories to bacon to underwear.

Among the number of buzzy if indeterminately successful appsProduct Hunt has flagged: messaging services Taptalk and Yo;link-sharing app Point; credit-card protection service Final; andwork-automation software company Workflow.

"People shouldn’t be so damn judgmental about people creatingthings—a silly app is just something fun."

Hoover embraces a free-from-cynicism philosophy, and is anunapologetic defender of even the silliest of creations. One of hispersonal favorites is an app called Mindie, which can make a10-second music video to share with friends or, in his case, hismom. Another that he enjoys, Drake Shake, superimposes a picture ofthe hip-hop artist Drake in a photo of your choosing.

“People shouldn’t be so damn judgmental about people creatingthings—a silly app is just something fun,” Hoover says. “‘Noteverybody is trying to change the world, and part of my frustrationis people start complaining that we are spending our time wastingit on things that don’t matter when not everything is supposed tomatter.”

Tall, with blond hair and greenish eyes, he’s easily recognizedaround town by tech workers and aficionados, and by app inventorswho buttonhole him. His usual mode of transportation is walking,and he often wears the tech uniform of jeans and a hoodie. He livesin the Tenderloin, an easy stroll to the Mid-Market tech-landneighborhood brimming with offices for the likes of UberTechnologies Inc. and Square Inc.

Being the toast of the town hasn’t unsettled him, he says.

“It’s somewhat flattering, but it’s just different because it’snever happened before.” But he adds, “I have to be hyper awareabout what I do and what I say.”

At the anniversary party last month, many guests were aspiringHoovers, obsessing over their own startups and hoping to havefounded one of the few that won’t end up failing.

One, Erik Chan, is working on a Web platform where people canbuy stakes in their favorite products. Another, Sydney Lai, holdsthe job title “Startup Evangelist” at F50, which helps newcompanies connect with potential investors. Some asked Hoover topose for pictures.

“I’m going to make this into a poster,” said Nick Haase, thefounder of the brand-marketing app Loot, half-jokingly.

A week earlier, at an office-warming party, former MicrosoftCorp. executive Steven Sinofsky served as the photographer,snapping pictures as Hoover mingled and his guests drank beer andate pizza.

“Any new company in the early stage success is going to be aproduct of the founders themselves,” says Sinofsky, who’s on theProduct Hunt board and a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. (BloombergLP, the parent of Bloomberg News, is an investor in AndreessenHorowitz.) “The idea for Product Hunt is a natural evolution ofRyan himself.”

Growing up in Eugene, Oregon, Hoover was captivated by computersand filmmaking. He and his friends made horror movies, sometimesstarring his kid brother; they’d sneak into his room to scare him,and tape it. His parents ran a video-game store when he was young,and now own a recycling company.

With a business degree from the University of Oregon, Hoovermoved to San Francisco to build developer tools for the video-gamecompany Playhaven. He says he stayed about three years, quittingwhen he tired of the work. With some savings but not much of aplan, he blogged about tech and introduced himself to people headmired, such as investor Paul Graham and news aggregator Diggco-founder Kevin Rose.

He had an itch to start something of his own.

“His dad would always say to find a niche and fill it,” hismother Shari Hoover says. “Ryan would always try to think ofsomething that was new and creative so somebody else would wantit.”

What the tech world needed, he concluded, was a centralappraisal hub for the stream of apps and other products. He startedwith the newsletter, making the picks himself, and pulled in hisfirst round of financing last year. He declines to disclose hissalary, but says Sinofsky set the sum for him.

Product Hunt’s success story could have a lot to do withHoover’s energy and networking dexterity. He wakes up at 5:30 a.m.to scour the Web for worthy items. The browser on his Macbook Prooften has 20-plus tabs open, and there are more than 300 apps onhis black iPhone 6. He seems to be constantly texting, e-mailing,blogging, podcasting or posting comments on the site. He writesthank-you notes—on paper—to readers.

“I didn’t think this guy was as well connected as he is,” saysOr Arbel, co-founder of the one-word messaging app Yo. “I found outthat Ryan was one of the most connected people in thecommunity.”

Arbel credits Product Hunt with some of the app’s overnightattention. A post about Yo popped up on Product Hunt nine monthsago, an online discussion of its merits ensued and before long, Yowas being written about by media outlets and the company raised$1.5 million.

While Hoover’s a champion of startups, he’s fine with the factthat the market will decide whether what Product Hunt determines isworthy will succeed.

“A lot of them aren’t going to survive,” he says. “It’s not abad thing. It’s simply impossible for everything to succeed.”

Now Hoover says he plans to introduce offshoots for other areas,including music, films and fashion. The first spinoff for videogames is likely to be out later this year.

Has it all gone to his head? He laughs about being sotech-famous, and shrugs off the possibility there’ll be a backlashagainst Product Hunt as it grows.

“When a band is unknown, everybody loves them because you can’treally hate them, because they are just some people trying to dosomething cool,” he says. “But when they become popular, they soldout or aren’t cool any more. The perception is that it lost some ofthat allure—even though it’s still amazing.”