Build a waitlist before you build the product.
A waitlist shows you whether people want what you’re making, and gives you someone to launch to. You can have one running in an afternoon. This guide goes from the first page to the day you send the invites.
Decide what the list is for
Most waitlists have two jobs. They show whether anyone wants the product, and they give you people to launch to on day one. Knowing which job matters more to you decides how much you ask at signup and how you choose who gets in first.
Then write the promise in one sentence: what the product does for whom, and what joining gets them. If you can’t write that sentence yet, your page won’t be clear either.
Set a rough timeline as well. A list that waits a few weeks is easy to keep warm. If launch is many months away, plan more updates, or start the list closer to the date.
Pick what people get for joining, and only promise what you’ll deliver:
- Early access before the public launch
- A launch price for people on the list
- A say in what gets built first
- A place in a small first group, with a direct line to the team
Put up one page
A waitlist needs one page with a headline, a sentence or two about the product and a signup form. That’s enough to start. Screenshots and a demo video can come later, once you have them.
If you already have a site, put the form near the top of the home page and again at the bottom of longer pages. If you don’t, use a hosted waitlist page and share the link. Waitlark gives every project a hosted page in your brand, and it can run on your own domain.
Set a share title, description and image for the page. Many visitors will arrive through a link in a chat or a post, and the preview is the first thing they see of your product.
Keep the signup short
Ask for an email address and nothing else, or one question at most. Each extra field is one more reason to leave. Whatever else you want to know can come right after signup, when people are already on the list.
Turn on double opt-in: people get an email with a button to confirm their address. It keeps typos and other people’s addresses off your list, and it shows that the owner of each address agreed to hear from you.
Under the form, add a line of fine print that says what you’ll send and links to your privacy policy.
Send the first emails
Two emails go out on their own as people join. The confirmation email has one job: getting the person to click the confirm button. The welcome email follows once they’ve confirmed. It tells them where they are in line and what happens next.
Send both from your own domain, with your product’s name as the sender. People decide whether to open an email by who it’s from, and the name of a tool they’ve never heard of is easy to ignore.
After that, write to the list every few weeks with a short update. A list that hears nothing for months forgets why it signed up, and your invite arrives as a surprise.
Keep an eye on how many people confirm. If a lot of signups never click the button, check the spam folder of a few common mail services, and make the page after signup say where the email comes from.
Bring people to the page
A page nobody visits collects nothing. Share it where the people you’re building for already spend time: a community you’re part of, a newsletter in your field, your own social accounts and the people who asked you for this in the first place.
Tag every link you share with UTM parameters, so you can see which channel brought signups and how many of those people confirmed. Look once a week and put more time into what works.
Share more than once. A post on day one reaches the people who were around that day. A screenshot of progress two weeks later reaches others, and gives earlier signups something to pass on.
Give every person on the list a personal share link. Someone who joined because they want the product is often the best person to tell the next one.
Plan launch day early
Decide how people get in well before launch. Inviting everyone at once is risky: if onboarding breaks, it breaks for all of them. Inviting in batches gives you time to fix things between groups.
Also decide what happens to the list once everyone is in. You can close the form or turn it into a normal sign-up, and delete the waitlist data you no longer need.
Settle these a few weeks ahead:
- Who goes first: the next people in line, people who gave a certain answer, or people you pick by hand
- How big the first batch is, and what you want to see before you send the next
- Whether invites carry a personal link or a code, and when they expire
- How your product creates the account when someone accepts
- What you tell the people who are still waiting