We x-rayed 94 recent launches. 74% ask you to trust them with empty hands.

We pointed UXXRAY at 94 recently-launched products, the ones scrolling past on Show HN and Product Hunt, and walked each funnel the way a first-time visitor would: landing page, pricing, sign-up, checkout. No opinions. Just what's measurably on the page: the conversion tactics, the proof, the design tokens, a score for each. Then we read the autopsy.

Finding 1: 74% show up with no evidence

74%

Of the 94 launches, 70 surfaced zero social proof. Not a thin testimonial. Not a logo wall. Not a "1,200 teams already use this." Nothing. The average launch page carries 0.7 proof points; the best one carries eleven. That's the headline failure, and the cheapest to fix. A launch page is a stranger asking for your email, your card, or your afternoon, and three in four ask with empty hands.

Finding 2: the median launch page is nearly empty

Score the funnels and the distribution is bleak: 62% land in the bottom band. Only 2 of 90 scored "Excellent," in the frozen July 2026 study of 94 launches; the live leaderboard below reflects today's corpus, not this snapshot. The median launch isn't badly designed, it's barely designed. A hero, a button, and a hope.

Finding 3: nobody makes an argument

The tactics that actually persuade are the ones nobody ships:

• Only 6% publish a us-vs-them comparison table. 94% won't name a rival
• Only 12% put proof above the fold, where it's actually seen.
• 1 of 94 launches uses a countdown timer. urgency is rarer than Twitter thinks

Launches copy each other's layouts religiously and each other's arguments never.

Finding 4: two ways to win, and almost nobody does either

The top of the study set splits cleanly into two winning strategies:

Be unmistakably clear, or be visibly vouched for. The bottom 62% do neither.

What to steal this week

• Add one proof point above the fold. That alone puts you past 89% of the cohort, as measured today.
• Name your alternative. A comparison table puts you in the rarest 6%.
• Don't fake urgency. 99% skip the countdown, and they're right. Earn the click with clarity, not a timer.

Method: 94 recent Show HN + Product Hunt launches, 128 funnel walks, July 2026. Deterministic extraction, no LLM opinions; every claim is backed by an on-page evidence string. Live, current figures: The Launch UX Index.

What this study could not see

Every number above comes from walking each funnel to its end. That turns out to matter more than we could show with 94 launches: on a later, larger corpus of 1450 funnels, scoring only the landing page changed the published band on 41% of the 255 we scored both ways. Read the depth census →

That study is a separate, frozen 2026-08-09 snapshot on a different corpus. It does not restate or revise the July 2026 figures on this page.