PHBench - Predict the next Series A from a ProductHunt launch

@rajiv_ayyangar, thank you so much for hunting us!

Hey PH Community 👋

We're Yagiz, a Senior Technical Product Manager at Amazon and an independent researcher and Yigit, co-founder and GP of Vela Partners. Today, we're launching PHBench in collaboration with the University of Oxford (Ben Griffin and Rick Chen) and Vela Partners, the leading quant VC.

And yes, the irony of launching a Product Hunt benchmark on Product Hunt is completely intentional 🙂

Here's the origin story. We kept asking a question nobody had answered: Can you predict which Product Hunt launches will raise Series A funding, based solely on what you see on launch day (votes, rank, team size, category, timing)?

So we built PHBench. We collected 67,292 featured PH launches going back to 2019, matched them to Crunchbase funding records, and identified 528 verified Series A raises within 18 months. Seven years of data. Every featured launch.

Three findings I think this community will find interesting:

→ The signals work. Our model is 4.7x better than random. Statistically significant.

→ The strongest predictor isn't votes alone. It's team size × community engagement together. A large coordinated team achieving high traction is more predictive than either signal alone.

→ B2B categories convert at 3x the baseline rate. API, Payments, Fintech. If you launch a developer tool on a Tuesday with a big team and high engagement, that's a strong signal.

We also tested three frontier Gemini models on the same task. The most capable model performed the worst. Better reasoning doesn't help with pure numbers.

The dataset is available on HuggingFace. The leaderboard is live. The code is public. Can you beat our baseline?

The paper is on arXiv and has been submitted to the NeurIPS 2026 Evaluations & Datasets Track.

Would love your feedback — especially from anyone who's launched on PH and gone on to raise Series A. You're in our dataset :)

Been quietly working on this with Yagiz, Yigit and Rick for a while.

While I mostly focus on using founder profiles to predict raises, PHBench tries the same prediction but from the product side. A similar question but from the other side.

Have a go at the leaderboard if you fancy; the data's on HuggingFace.

Really cool idea, Good luck! @ihlamury @yigit

Are you using only launch day signals, or do you include post launch traction like follows and comments over the first week?

Interesting, most people assume raw upvotes are the proxy for quality. So the finding about team size × community engagement being a stronger signal than votes alone is genuinely counterintuitive but very curious. Have you looked at whether solo founders who hit high engagement are penalized by this model? Do they show up as a distinct cluster? Would love to see how the signal degrades for truly first-time founders vs. repeat ones. Incredible dataset, congrats on getting years of data cleaned!

X Corner Random Encounter: A Quick Take on PHBench 🧠

Huge congrats to Yagiz, Yiğit, and the Vela Partners team on this launch!

I just bumped into Yagiz and Yiğit at the X corner an hour ago. I threw a quick challenge at their core assumption, and they gave me some incredible, patient replies. Here is our quick chat. (With help from Gemini to organize my thoughts into this post!)

My Question on Twitter: Many top launches already raised seed money. They use PH as an amplifier, not a starting point. It feels like the high engagement vs. Series A is more of a correlation rather than causality—the "strong signal" might just be a lagging indicator of their pre-existing capital/resources.

Yagiz's Backdoor Insights: Yagiz dropped a total golden nugget. He told me: "88.3% of the 528 launches that raised Series A in our dataset had prior seed funding."

(And oh my god, that means I’m officially part of the 11.7% "naked" bootstrapped builders trying to survive with zero funding, haha! 😅)

Yagiz honestly framed that PHBench is a predictive benchmark, not a causal study. They don't claim causality. But he noted that while a funded team can buy upvotes, consistently landing Rank #1 is harder to manufacture.

Yiğit's Side Note: Yiğit also shared another fascinating data point with me: "Consistent social media posters increase their likelihood of success. However, not posting doesn't decrease your chance. It’s just neutral."

I guess those successful but quiet builders must have massive "invisible" networks that online data simply cannot capture.

My Takeaway: This conversation completely shifted my view. PHBench is essentially a "Funnel Accelerator" for VCs.

It does not discover hidden gems from absolute scratch. Instead, it predicts which already-backed teams have the top-tier GTM execution to dominate the market on launch day. If you already have seed money, PH is the ultimate stress test for your team.

My Personal Note:

To wrap up, I want to say how much I truly appreciate their hard work. Data cleaning and dataset building are brutal, sweating jobs. Really appreciate to see them doing all this heavy lifting and unselfishly open-sourcing the whole thing to the community. Thanks a lot.

Really excited to bring PHBench to you guys! By extending the short-term productivity signals on Product Hunt to predict long-term funding materialization, we help to identify outlier products that are truly valuable in the VC environment. We think it will be greatly beneficial to the Product Hunt community.

Come to beat our baseline and get to the top of the leaderboard!

So excited to see this live! This has been a labor of love, collecting data, running +100 experiments, and testing LLMs against good old gradient boosting.

The leaderboard is open. If you can beat us, you're the new champion. Who's in?

Would be interesting to see a breakdown of false positives: high PH engagement but no Series A. That’s often where the real insight is.

After today's launch, we all expect to see PHBench's chances of hitting Series A based on its own model. Good luck!