Well since LLM is the fad of the day you should have built an API that uses AI to generate Lighroom settings. :)
Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
21–30 of 40 posts
Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
#22Never 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 was on the Analogue Pocket waiting list and also the Framework computer waiting list. Still on both actually, though I've had the chance to purchase it (well at least the Pocket) and have not yet.
Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
#23I'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?
Being first might be very lucrative. I might remember wrong here, but instapaper was an iOS only experience (with a kindle addon), and they are still rocking on, and the founder cashed out a long time ago. Every browser seem to have an instapaper built in nowadays, Mozilla even bought a competitior (formerly read it later now pocket?)
So yeah, buildin inside someone's moat might give you a cap on how big you will be able to become and will make you a tenant, but it could still be worth your while.
Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
#24> 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…
But… this is a built in feature of Adobe Lightroom.[2] And it is not even some hard to find feature. I learned about it in the first tutorial of Adobe Lightroom i ever watched.
1: https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-lightroom/batch-edi...
Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
#25You were forecasting 50k MRR before your waitlist hit 100 signups?
Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
#26> 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…
But… this is a built in feature of Adobe Lightroom.[2] And it is not even some hard to find feature. I learned about it in the first tutorial of Adobe Lightroom i ever watched. 1: https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-lightroom/batch-edi...
Hah, this is a perfect example of why it's important to build products for an audience you know and understand. (I've barely used Lightroom and clearly I'm not part of this audience)
On the other point though, there's a case to be made for building products to make things easier/better/more discoverable/etc even if when they already exist. One example: there are is ton of screen recorder software out there despite the fact that QuickTime on Mac can record the screen.
Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
#27> I started posting MRR goals on Twitter around $50k/mo > When the waitlist reached 100 people $500/month for every person on the waitlist?
A huge part of the failure here is misunderstanding the budget of the target audience. The author genuinely thought that photographers have hundreds of dollars of cash hanging around to spend on this SaaS tool, even after meeting a customer who explained that they weren't willing to pay for this. How many hours would this tool save per day? One at most? Even generously valuing the customer's time, the ability to reco…
I didn’t think that photographers had the cash, I thought that developers handling photos in some way had cash. Such as the various AI photo generator sites that might want to homogenize the style of images they create for ads, headshots, etc.
For actual photographers, they’re probably manipulating all of the photos on their own computers with Desktop software.
Photoshop’s pricing for this is 15 cents per image which is prohibitively expensive for nearly any image generation use case.
That’s actually the type of tool I was playing around with implementing when I came across this as an issue I wanted to solve for myself.
Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if I could keep this up and convert 10-20% of waitlist users $5000/mo for 10% of the list. Unless he factored in the list growing further. The website has pricing and it does say $500/mo for the pro version. So maybe 100 was a typo and he had 1000 on the waitlist.
As far as I know, typical conversion from a waitlist is below 2% and that's after you're fairly sure you're dealing with people and not bots. Neither 100 nor 1000 emails is even remotely enough, both amount to nothing.
Most of what I read actually referenced 20% as an average for paid waitlists if there’s a fast enough turnaround behind a release. Here’s one example:
https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/what-is-good-waitlist-con...
Obviously not without proper diligence!
Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
#29> 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.
Yeah, this is what I was thinking.
Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
#30Never 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 was on the Analogue Pocket waiting list and also the Framework computer waiting list. Still on both actually, though I've had the chance to purchase it (well at least the Pocket) and have not yet.
do you think a big reason you signed up is that these are brands you were already aware of?