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Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)

jrhizor.dev

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Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)

#31

Post by jrhizor »

dceddia wrote: post #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…

That’s why I found the search volume interesting. It seemed like there was more overlap between developers and photography tools than I thought.

Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)

#34

Post by yumong »

nicbou wrote: post #32
yumong wrote: post #12

Never 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?

Sometimes you want to keep track of something promising, and hear from it when it's ready.

I'm aware that that's the theory.

But if it's really promising and ready and I care enough then I'll notice anyway.

Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)

#35

Post by qingcharles »

alangibson wrote: post #19

Confirmation 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 sharehol…

PPC is the absolute fastest way to lose your shirt.

One thing that stands out is that OP wasn't bidding on "intent" keywords, sounded more like people were searching for info on Lightroom API than a product they would pay for. That's much harder traffic to convert.

Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)

#36

Post by simple10 »

alangibson wrote: post #19

Confirmation 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 sharehol…

Agreed on Google Search Ads. I've run a lot of pre-launch campaigns, mostly for e-comm and SaaS products. Meta ads is still the best way to go if you're going the ad route. YouTube is 2nd best option if you're good at making videos. For growth hacking, Producthunt and Facebook & LinkedIn groups can work. For SaaS, LinkedIn ads can work if you really know your audience and know how to run ads. Cold email also works well for SaaS if provide upfront value and not spam people.

But Google Search Ads is highly competitive and lots of bot traffic. IMO, it's best for retargeting during pre-launch.

Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)

#37

Post by NoahKAndrews »

yumong wrote: post #34
nicbou wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes you want to keep track of something promising, and hear from it when it's ready.

I'm aware that that's the theory. But if it's really promising and ready and I care enough then I'll notice anyway.

Not everything that's useful to me is broadly applicable enough that I can expect to stumble upon it after launch

Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)

#38

Post by nicbou »

yumong wrote: post #34
nicbou wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes you want to keep track of something promising, and hear from it when it's ready.

I'm aware that that's the theory. But if it's really promising and ready and I care enough then I'll notice anyway.

Some people think differently, and thats whom it caters to

Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)

#39

Post by bastawhiz »

jrhizor wrote: post #27
bastawhiz wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Serious question: did your product use Adobe software in any way to produce output for your users?

Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)

#40

Post by bluelightning2k »

Just wanted to say I really enjoyed your write-up and certainly feel for you. It seems you did everything right.

Possibly the sign-ups were generic bots, trying unsophisticated contact-form spam. I can see how a wait-list and contact form look similar to a bot, especially one which is optimized to treat basically anything with an email address and a text field as a contact form.

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