I'm thinking of building my own waitlist software, talk me out of it please.
Good morning everyone.
We have just started working on a new product (plum mail, replace you email keep your email address)
Now we are at the stage where we want to start inviting people to our waitlist, but we don't yet have a waitlist.
I am about to start building our waitlist, which will probably live on heroku and keep everything in Postgres. At least one person has suggested to me that I build it myself to keep control of the process.
However it does seem like a case of reinventing the wheel, and so I am looking for any recommendations for some kind of waitlist as a service.
What have you used?
What was great/aweful about it?
The features I need are
- verified email addresses
- the ability for people to bump up the list by referring others
- the ability for people high up the list to be able to reserve there username
- some simple protection to stop people taking advantage of the process.
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I literally sold 1200 copies of my latest product using a waiting list built with nothing but an email address. No landing page, no email list software. Just gmail.
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/experimenting-with-part-of-heys-launch-strategy-on-my-new-book-9b30f96086
We tried the approach of getting users to email us. here is the write up https://www.indiehackers.com/post/we-ran-a-waitlist-where-our-users-had-to-email-us-inspired-by-hey-this-is-what-we-learnt-7acd8bb553
Nicely done!
This is a great idea, and thanks for the write up.
I will consider it. One idea I was also considering was getting someone to tweet at us. More publicity, but not everyone has twitter.
My gut reaction (take it with a grain of salt) is that this can very quickly become complex and a distraction from what you're actually trying to build. It also feels like a very fleeting problem for most people starting their business and that's also not a bunch that you'll likely squeeze a lot of revenue out of if that's the eventual idea here.
I had the same gut reaction, but the argument some made is that for a while this might be the most important part of the business.
Is the waitlist and the features that you've listed something that would benefit directly your customers and/or the problem that you're solving, and is it the most important thing that you should be working on? If yes, the go for it. If not, go for an existing solution and focus on whatever else is important for the problem that you're solving.
I've used MailChimp for waitlists before and you could do a mix of automation and manual work for small scale.
Following
My advice would be to just use Mailchimp and skip the whole bumping up the list aspect unless you’re absolutely sure there’s going to be enough demand and hype to really make that effective (think hey.com level hype). I’ve spent way too long on waitlists for past projects only to have my 1,000 person waitlist bring in like 10 real users.
Let's say I need to make a big bet, so the success case is quite a lot of hype.
When you sent to long on waitlists what were you using?
No point reinventing the wheel you can use the product I built for this: https://referralhero.com/
👍
Certainly I option, I was hoping to hear people experiences with some of these.
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.
I haven't, have you? how was it?
I did find it in a google, as well as viral-loop referralhero and a few others.
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.