How to make the most of pre-launch waitlist?

[cathryncui]

Hey All,

Does anyone have experience with pre-launch waitlists and would be open to sharing their experience and learnings?

1. How long did you hold folks on the waitlist to get the desired conversion?
2. Did you use an off-the-shelf waitlist solution or did you build it yourself?
3. What would you change if you were to run it again?
4. What worked and what did not work?

Thank you.

[NaomiNwosu]

At my last company, we built quite a large waitlist (25-100k…can’t remember the exact size). We found that while it was good for hype and PR, converting people wasn’t that easy because people had often forgotten about what we were by the time that we launched.

I think it can work if you actually onboard people from the waitlist pretty quickly.

Think it really depends on how long you plan to launch afterward and why you’re doing it. Waitlists are great if you want to tinker on the product with a small number of users, less great if you’re not ready to launch and just doing it to get emails.

[cathryncui]

Thanks for sharing, @NaomiNwosu

1. How long did you hold folks on the waitlist to get the 15% conversion?
2. Did you use an off-the-shelf waitlist solution or did you build it yourself?
3. What would you change if you were to run it again?

[NaomiNwosu]

Hey @cathryncui ,

1. Anywhere between 1-6 months
2. Built it ourselves, we basically had X amounts of groups and you needed Y invites to move up groups, we invited the top referrers first. There were also some prefilled tweets that people could pick from.
3. I’d onboard the top group super early and get them hyper-engaged with the product (think Superhuman) and allow them to invite their friends to skip the list. Also do more A/B testing with messaging and build a better product before onboarding people. We were all pretty green so it wasn’t the best execution!

[cathryncui]

thanks so much - that’s very insightful