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ProfScout
Find the professors who actually reply to cold emails
ProfScout helps undergrads and grad students find professors to cold email for research opportunities, internships, and grad school. It ranks 53,000+ professors by reply-fit (research overlap, active funding, new labs) using OpenAlex, ORCID, NIH and NSF data, with verified emails and an outreach tracker.
Every guide on getting into research says the same thing: write a great cold email. I spent a long time doing exactly that and getting ghosted anyway. The problem was never the email. It was that I was emailing professors who had no funding, a full lab, or hadn't published in years.
So I built the thing I wanted: a search over 53,000+ professors (9.5M papers from OpenAlex and ORCID, cross-checked against NIH RePORTER, NSF, and live faculty pages) that scores each one on how likely they are to reply, not how famous they are. You get a verified email, the one recent paper worth anchoring on, and a tracker for drafts, sends, and replies.
Two things on purpose:
It never writes the email for you. Professors can smell generated emails. You get a fill-in-the-blank structure and write it in your own voice. That's the main difference from Reachly, which drafts the email with AI. ResearchPath and Google Scholar don't write emails either, but they also don't tell you who is likely to reply: ResearchPath lists faculty-posted openings, and Scholar gives you papers, not funding or lab status.
No sponsored results. Professors can't pay to rank higher.
Where it is right now: 2,300+ students signed up, 2,600+ professors unlocked, 4,800+ emails found. $10/month or $30/semester.
Happy to answer anything about how the reply-fit score works or where the data comes from (profscout.com/our-data has the full breakdown, including where it can be wrong)./
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About ProfScout on Product Hunt
“Find the professors who actually reply to cold emails”
ProfScout was submitted on Product Hunt and earned 0 upvotes and 1 comments, placing #252 on the daily leaderboard. ProfScout helps undergrads and grad students find professors to cold email for research opportunities, internships, and grad school. It ranks 53,000+ professors by reply-fit (research overlap, active funding, new labs) using OpenAlex, ORCID, NIH and NSF data, with verified emails and an outreach tracker.
ProfScout was featured in Email (36.8k followers), Productivity (664.7k followers) and Education (79.5k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 220.8k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted ProfScout?
ProfScout was hunted by Gladwyn Li. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
Want to see how ProfScout stacked up against nearby launches in real time? Check out the live launch dashboard for upvote speed charts, proximity comparisons, and more analytics.
Gladwyn Li
Hey PH, I'm Gladwyn, 18, and I built ProfScout.
Every guide on getting into research says the same thing: write a great cold email. I spent a long time doing exactly that and getting ghosted anyway. The problem was never the email. It was that I was emailing professors who had no funding, a full lab, or hadn't published in years.
So I built the thing I wanted: a search over 53,000+ professors (9.5M papers from OpenAlex and ORCID, cross-checked against NIH RePORTER, NSF, and live faculty pages) that scores each one on how likely they are to reply, not how famous they are. You get a verified email, the one recent paper worth anchoring on, and a tracker for drafts, sends, and replies.
Two things on purpose:
It never writes the email for you. Professors can smell generated emails. You get a fill-in-the-blank structure and write it in your own voice. That's the main difference from Reachly, which drafts the email with AI. ResearchPath and Google Scholar don't write emails either, but they also don't tell you who is likely to reply: ResearchPath lists faculty-posted openings, and Scholar gives you papers, not funding or lab status.
No sponsored results. Professors can't pay to rank higher.
Where it is right now: 2,300+ students signed up, 2,600+ professors unlocked, 4,800+ emails found. $10/month or $30/semester.
Happy to answer anything about how the reply-fit score works or where the data comes from (profscout.com/our-data has the full breakdown, including where it can be wrong)./