Does Product Hunt still work?

The short answer: it works if Product Hunt features your launch, and it almost never works if it doesn’t. The catch is that almost nobody gets featured any more. In 2022 there were about 2,430 launches a month and 35.9% of them were featured. In 2026 there are about 20,291 a month and 3.2% are. Of the 355,055 launches since 2022 that weren’t featured, 140 reached 100 votes. That’s about one in 2,500. So before you plan a launch, plan for the likely outcome: a day with a handful of votes, and the customers coming from somewhere else.

I pulled every Product Hunt launch from January 2022 to October 2026 through Product Hunt’s own API, 399,558 in all: how many launched each month, how many were featured, every launch that reached 100 votes, and every launch posted on the 15th of each month so I could see what a typical one gets. Then I read 68 founders’ own write-ups of their Product Hunt launch on Reddit, to see what the votes turned into.

Product Hunt is two websites now

There’s the Product Hunt people picture: the homepage, a ranked list of the day’s featured launches that people actually visit and vote on. And there’s everything else: launches that went live but never made the homepage. They have a page, and almost nobody sees it. Here’s how many launches landed in each, and how often each reached 100 votes:

The two columns on the right are the whole story. A featured launch reached 100 votes somewhere between a third and most of the time, depending on the year. An unfeatured launch did it between 5 and 57 times a year, out of tens of thousands. Being featured isn’t a bonus on top of a launch. It’s the launch.

And the number of featured slots hasn’t kept up. Featured launches peaked at 15,020 in 2023, then fell by more than half in 2024 and fell again in 2025. They picked up a little in 2026, to about 21.8 a day, while launches went to about 676 a day. Product Hunt still has a few dozen homepage spots a day, and about eight times as many launches asking for one as in 2022.

The typical launch now gets one vote

To see an ordinary launch, not the winners, I took every launch posted on the 15th of each month, whatever the day of the week, and looked at the votes each one has now:

In 2022 the middle launch got 7 votes. In 2026 it gets 1. 94.7% of 2026 launches have fewer than 10 votes. A featured launch in 2026 still has a median of 105. The gap between the two kinds of launch has always been large, but when a third of launches were featured, plenty of people ended up on the right side of it. Now 97 in 100 don’t.

The number of launches that get noticed is back where it was

This is the same pattern I found on GitHub and Show HN in Why is nobody using what I built? The number of launches reaching 100 votes rose from 3,782 in 2022 to 6,571 in 2023, and has fallen back since, to 3,658 so far this year, while launches went from 29,155 a year to 202,912 in ten months. So the share that get there keeps falling:

13% of 2022 launches reached 100 votes. 1.8% of 2026 launches have. That isn’t because 2026 launches have had less time: almost all of a launch’s votes arrive on its day, and 2026 already has 3,658 launches over 100, about the same as all of 2022. There’s a fixed amount of attention on Product Hunt, and many more launches sharing it.

It’s tempting to blame AI products for the flood. The share of launches tagged Artificial Intelligence did jump, from 8% in 2022 to 29% in 2023. But it has stayed at about 29% since, while launches went up six times. The flood is everything: more people building everything, faster.

So is a Product Hunt launch worth doing?

Votes aren’t customers, so I read what founders said their launch actually brought. Of the 68 founders who wrote up their own launch on Reddit with numbers, the middle one reported 686 visitors, 100 sign-ups and 3 paying customers. The ones who finished in the day’s top five did better: a median of 1,438 visitors, 307 sign-ups and 13 paying customers. The ones who finished outside the top 20 or got under 30 votes reported a median of 36 visitors and 0 sign-ups.

These are the people who chose to write about it, and they finished far higher than a typical launch (a median rank of 6), so treat them as what a good day looks like, not an average one. I went through what they said in What does a Product Hunt launch actually bring? The short version: a top-five day brought a few hundred sign-ups and, in the middle, about a dozen paying customers, much of the traffic was people the founder brought themselves, and the effect mostly ended with the day.

What I’d do before launching on Product Hunt

1. Plan for not being featured. 97 launches in 100 this year weren’t. If your plan only works when Product Hunt puts you on the homepage, it isn’t a plan yet. Decide what the day is for if it doesn’t happen: a page to link to, a badge, a reason to email people.
2. Check whether your category gets featured. Launches for builders (Development, Open Source, No-Code) reached 100 votes two to four times as often as average since 2025; money, home and consumer products about half as often or less. The odds for 59 categories are in Which Product Hunt categories still get noticed?
3. Bring your own people. The founders with good days mostly arrived with an audience: an email list, a following, a community. Two estimated that half or more of their visitors and votes came from their own outreach, not from Product Hunt. If you have nobody to tell, build that first. It’s worth more than the launch.
4. Know what a good day takes. In 2026 the most-voted launch of a typical day had about 456 votes and the fifth about 194. The numbers by year and by day are in How many upvotes does it take to top Product Hunt?
5. Pick the day on purpose, and don’t expect it to save you. Thursday had the best odds of being featured in the last year and weekends the worst, but the gap is under two percentage points. See What’s the best day to launch on Product Hunt?
6. Treat it as one day, then go where your buyers are. The founders who got customers in Where did founders find their first customers? rarely credited a single launch. They kept showing up somewhere their buyers already were, for weeks.

What I can’t tell you

I can’t tell you how Product Hunt decides what to feature. Every featured launch is recorded as featured from the minute it went live, so the data can’t show whether featuring came first and the votes followed, or the other way round. What it shows is that featured launches get the votes and others don’t.

Votes aren’t visitors or customers, and some votes are bought: founders in the Reddit write-ups describe being offered upvotes for money within minutes of going live. Product Hunt also ranks the day with its own formula, not purely by votes, so a launch’s vote count isn’t its official rank. And the 15th of each month is a sample of days, not every day: 2026 has 10 of them.

How I did it

Launches and featured launches: Product Hunt’s public API (GraphQL, version 2) with a developer token, counted for every month and every day (UTC) from 1 January 2022 to 27 October 2026, all launches and featured launches separately. Votes and featured status are as they stood on 27 October 2026.

Launches that reached 100 votes: for every month, every launch sorted by votes, collected until the votes fell below 100. Typical launches: every launch posted on the 15th of each month (UTC), 13,631 in all, with votes, comments, topics and featured status. I don’t use comment counts, because makers usually post the first comment on their own launch.

Founders’ write-ups: Reddit posts from r/SaaS, r/SideProject, r/startups, r/indiehackers, r/Entrepreneur, r/microsaas and r/buildinpublic whose title mentions Product Hunt and a result, read one by one. Only founders reporting on their own launch with at least one number count. Duplicates, mid-launch updates and posts that looked like disguised ads were left out, which left 68, almost all from 2024 to 2026.

Get the data

Every number on this page is free to quote. The download has what I worked from, so you can check your own launch against it:

• 59 categories, year by year since 2022: how many launches, how many were featured, and the odds of reaching 100 and 500 votes. Find out whether your category is crowded before you pick it.
• Every day since January 2022: launches, featured launches, how many reached 100, 250 and 500 votes, and the votes of the day’s 1st, 3rd, 5th and 10th most-voted launch.
• Every month, with the share of featured launches that reached 100 votes.
• The 68 founders’ launch write-ups: rank, votes, visitors, sign-ups, paying customers and whether it lasted, with a link to each post.

Leave your email and it downloads straight away (a zip of four CSVs and a README). You’ll also get the newsletter when I publish the next one of these.

Cite as: GTM for One (gtmforone.com), “Does Product Hunt still work? 399,558 launches, 2022 to 2026”, https://www.gtmforone.com/blog/does-product-hunt-still-work.

I’m building GTM for One for the part a launch doesn’t solve: working out who would actually want what you’ve made, and writing to them one at a time.