Honestly, this looks like a horrible way to create software. The money and effort spent on the waitlist could have been spent on a minimally viable project instead.
Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
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Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
#12Never in my life have I signed up on a waitlist. And nobody else I know ever has. I have enough spam in my inbox, why actively invite more?
Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
#13Never in my life have I signed up on a waitlist. And nobody else I know ever has. I have enough spam in my inbox, why actively invite more?
I’ve signed up for waitlists and bought things from some of them, and I’ve launched products to waitlists I built (and made some sales on launch day).
I think a few things helped with that, but one difference that stands out is where the subscribers came from. Mine were mainly from Twitter or people already reading my blog, so they already knew who I was to some degree and had some reason to believe I could help them. It’s a much harder job to sell to random people who came from an ad, who start off with a lot less trust. Any missteps in the copy/problem you solve/etc are magnified because random people are just looking for any reason to hit the back button.
Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
#14> I started posting MRR goals on Twitter around $50k/mo > When the waitlist reached 100 people $500/month for every person on the waitlist?
My impression is they were excited about the rate that people were joining the waitlist more than the number on the list. They were assuming that if n people were joining the waitlist every month they would get n * 10% new customers per month post launch.
Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
#15> applying Adobe Lightroom presets (image filters) on many images quickly and cheaply
This sounds to me like a thing people might pay for.
But I would (strongly) guess most photographers don’t know what an “API” is or why they’d want to pay monthly for one, or how to wire up “curl” to it somehow. People who know that stuff will cobble this together in a script.
As a simple desktop app I could see a utility like this doing well in that audience though. $29-49 one time payment, apply all the presets you want, save lots of time.
Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
#16I'm still trying to wrap my head around what this tool is achieving. Running filters on many files? Does this mean that your business dies if the original tool gains the ability (and nice GUI) to run batch jobs on its own?
Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
#17I put up a landing page with a contact form for a potential product a year ago. Ran search ads on Google. Also got 99% spam. Is Google Ads just completely broken or did I do something wrong?
Large companies have entire departments to game Google and its ad platform, with the luxury of insane amounts of money.
Small businesses are outgunned, the money is best spent elsewhere.
Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
#18I’m really surprised by how negative many of the reactions here are. I found the overall concept and approach very interesting and entirely plausible, though obviously it didn’t work out at all in the end. If there was a better technique to validate the signups, that could have helped pivot to a different product with actual interest. And I loved the research to target a specific search keyword with traffic but few results.
My criticism (seems everyone has one!) is that building your own billing, and spending two weeks on the first version before you have any customers, is a massive overkill. Really all you need is to track usage. Don’t even bother trying to automate on your own at this stage…
Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
#19Confirmation bias is a killer. The lesson you learned is worth much more than you lost.
I can't stress this enough: don't use search ads for anything but laser targeted direct response marketing. It's somewhere between useless and actively harmful for anything else.
The only things I do anymore are 1. talk to actual sales prospects and 2. content marketing. Everything else is a handout to Google and Facebook shareholders.
Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
#20Honestly, this looks like a horrible way to create software. The money and effort spent on the waitlist could have been spent on a minimally viable project instead.
The point of an MVP is to do the minimal to prove viability. A waitlist gives you an iteration of that in a tiny space of time. In OP's case they failed to critisie their MVP (marketing site and waitlist) enough. But if they had, they'd have only wasted a few days.