40% of Product Hunt's top launches from 2015 to 2018 still run on their domain. Startup Launch List is now a casino
Published 22 October 2026
We took the most upvoted Product Hunt launch of every day from 2015 to 2018, 1,461 launches, and loaded each one's homepage on 22 October 2026. 591 of them, 40.5%, still run the same product on the same domain. The 95% interval is 38% to 43%.
We expected the top launch of the day to hold up much better than a random one. It barely does. In our earlier random sample of 1,600 launches from the same four years, 48% still showed the same site or the same company's site. For the top launches the matching figure, same product plus same owner with a new product, is 51%. The two checks used different models to read the pages, so a gap of 3 points is within what the method can tell apart.
What happened to the 1,461
Source: FundingWatcher, October 2026.
| State in October 2026 | Launches | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Same product | 591 | 40.5% |
| Same owner, new product or shutdown notice | 149 | 10.2% |
| Domain does not resolve | 149 | 10.2% |
| Parked or for sale | 122 | 8.4% |
| Different owner or content | 101 | 6.9% |
| Gambling site | 48 | 3.3% |
| Error page, no response or bot check | 301 | 20.6% |
The last row is sites we could not read: 140 returned a 4xx error (55 of them a 403, often a Cloudflare check), 51 a 5xx error, 58 did not answer and 52 showed a bot check or a blank page. Some of these are live. If all of them were, the share still running would be 61%, so the true figure sits between 40% and 61%.
The year barely matters
| Launch year | Top launches | Same product | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 365 | 139 | 38.1% |
| 2016 | 366 | 137 | 37.4% |
| 2017 | 365 | 157 | 43.0% |
| 2018 | 365 | 158 | 43.3% |
The gap between 2016 and 2018 is about 6 points, close to the noise on 365 launches a year (about 5 points either way).
More upvotes, more survivors
| Upvotes | Top launches | Same product | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| under 500 | 523 | 187 | 35.8% |
| 500 to 999 | 586 | 235 | 40.1% |
| 1,000 to 1,999 | 276 | 126 | 45.7% |
| 2,000 or more | 76 | 43 | 56.6% |
The 15 most upvoted launches in the set include Startup Stash (22,344 upvotes), Hunter, Carrd, Buy Me a Coffee, Feather Icons, Humaaans and Google Fonts, and all of those still run on their domain.
Top launches that became gambling sites
48 domains now serve casinos, sports betting or lottery pages. The biggest:
| Launch | Year | Upvotes | Domain | Page title today |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Startup Launch List | 2015 | 5,602 | startuplaunchlist.com | Glory Casino Online, Bangladesh |
| Screely | 2018 | 3,107 | screely.com | Thai football betting |
| SpreadShare | 2017 | 3,073 | spreadshare.co | Toto Macau lottery forum |
| Instaaa | 2017 | 1,928 | instaaa.com | Casino Journal |
| Tetra | 2017 | 1,676 | asktetra.com | Tiger Exchange betting IDs, India |
| FoundersKit | 2015 | 1,594 | founderskit.co | Sweepstakes casino sites |
Startup Launch List was a list of places to launch a startup. It was the top launch on its day with 5,602 upvotes. Its domain now sells online casino play in Bangladesh. 3.3% of top launches went this way, close to the 2.9% we found for random 2014 to 2019 launches in 1 in 35 old Product Hunt launches is now a casino.
How we counted
Our copy of Product Hunt has 32,375 launches dated 2015 to 2018. We put each launch on a day in Pacific time and kept the one with the most upvotes. Upvotes are the totals when we collected the launches, not at the end of launch day, and 170 of the 1,461 days have fewer than 10 launches in our copy, so on some days our top launch is not the one Product Hunt ranked first. The domain is the one Product Hunt linked to when we collected the data, after redirects.
A rotating proxy requested each homepage over HTTPS, then HTTP. When neither loaded, two public DNS resolvers decided whether the domain still resolves. For pages that loaded, Claude Haiku 5.5 compared the launch name and tagline with the page title, final address and text, and we read a sample of each verdict by hand. A few "different owner" verdicts are pages that copy the old product's name, so that row carries some noise.
Data
CC BY 4.0.
- top_launches.csv, all 1,461 launches with upvotes, domain, state, HTTP status and page title
- state_by_year.csv
- METHOD.md