I pulled data on 3,069 Product Hunt launches. Solo founders reach the top 10 less than half as often as teams of 5+.
Disclosure: I run LaunchPact, a prep and support tool for PH launches. Part of the data below comes from my own platform.
I got annoyed that every "how to launch on Product Hunt" post is one person describing what they think worked for them. There's no denominator. Nobody writes up the launches that flopped. So I looked at what I actually had access to.
First dataset: 3,069 launches featured between Sept 2025 and July 2026, across 314 days.
The thing that jumped out was maker count.
- 1 maker: median 107 votes, top 10 finish 35.8% of the time
- 2 makers: median 133 votes, 56.2%
- 3-4 makers: median 195 votes, 70.2%
- 5+ makers: median 215 votes, 74.2%
It goes up at every single step. A five person team places in the top 10 more than twice as often as a solo founder.
I don't think this is because bigger teams build better products. I think it's that five people means five sets of contacts getting a text on launch day. You don't need to be 5x better, you just need 5x the address book. Bigger teams also tend to have more money and more launch experience, so maker count is partly standing in for all of that — I can't separate those cleanly.
Video showed a similar pattern: 59.0% top 10 with video vs 44.8% without. Same caveat, having the budget and time to make a video says a lot about you before anyone watches it.
Honest limitation, because someone will check: this is not every Product Hunt launch. It's weighted toward the top of the leaderboard, median 8 launches a day, and 55% of them finished top 10. PH features more than that daily. So these comparisons are between launches that were already doing okay. The real solo vs team gap is probably wider than what I measured, not narrower.
Second dataset is from my platform, where founders make tracked commitments to support each other's launches and fulfilment gets verified by screenshot rather than self-reported. 3,534 resolved agreements, 7,068 individual commitments.
43.6% of them fell apart.
But the interesting part is how they fell apart. Of the ones that broke down, 81.8% had exactly one person follow through and get nothing back. Only 18.2% had both sides no-show.
I expected the opposite. The obvious story is that everyone quietly bails because they assume the other person will bail. That's just not what happened. In four out of five failures somebody kept their word and ate the loss.
Which makes it a coordination problem rather than a people-are-flaky problem. Individually people followed through 73% of the time. But both sides have to show up, and 73% twice in a row is 56%. Decent individuals, unreliable pairs.
Two smaller things:
When reciprocity does happen it's fast. Median gap was 13 hours, 59% inside a day. If someone hasn't reciprocated within 24 hours they're not going to.
And only 3% of fulfilled commitments included a comment. Voting is free, commenting means you actually opened the product and formed an opinion. Nobody's competing there.
Obvious bias in that second dataset: these are people who signed up for a platform built around mutual support. They're more cooperative than founders generally. So treat 73% as a ceiling, not an average. If you're asking for help in a Slack group with no tracking, expect worse.
Full writeup with methodology and the rest of the tables is on my site if anyone wants it, happy to link in a comment instead if that's the preference here. Also happy to run cuts of the data nobody's asked for yet — by category, day of week, whatever.