Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
jrhizor.dev
Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
1–10 of 40 posts
Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
#2Sounds like the fake emails were from "subscription bombs". Bad actors will bulk sign up targets to flood their inboxes and hide worrying notifications like security alerts.
https://www.spamhero.com/support/125230/I_am_being_attacked_...
I use to work on a newsletter service and we had to combat this constantly.
Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
#3> I started posting MRR goals on Twitter around $50k/mo
> When the waitlist reached 100 people
$500/month for every person on the waitlist?
Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
#4> I started posting MRR goals on Twitter around $50k/mo > When the waitlist reached 100 people $500/month for every person on the waitlist?
> 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.
Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
#5I've run into a similar experience with bots signing up for our waitlist although we ended up with some active users via those sign ups. Around 4% of the waitlisted users signed up for an account (free product). I think the insight about focusing on the red flags is pretty accurate. Not enough to just have waitlist signups and assume it will convert.
Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
#6> I started posting MRR goals on Twitter around $50k/mo > When the waitlist reached 100 people $500/month for every person on the waitlist?
> 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.
Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
#7You learned some great lessons there, but I would challenge one item early in the "script":
> 2. Verify if it’s a problem from search volume.
It contextually depends, but correlating a problem-to-be-solved with search analytics can be really tenuous. I'd suggest a different phrasing:
Verify it it's a problem by speaking with customers.
Do it better the next time!
Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
#8I 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?
Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
#9I 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?
> Is Google Ads just completely broken or did I do something wrong?
I'm not sure it's an *or* type of situation here
Re: Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
#10> 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 recoup the cost of the subscription at $500/mo is essentially impossible for everyone except a tiny fraction of a percent of potential customers—and I'd suspect those folks don't know they would want or care about the tool.
The author was—at every step—more concerned with making a profit than solving a problem. You'll simply never build a compelling product (and turn a profit) if you don't even know who the people who are supposed to buy the product are.