Open up to your list one batch at a time.

Small batches first

A batch is a group of people you invite at the same time. A small first batch shows you where onboarding breaks and whether your servers keep up, while there are still few people to apologise to.

A common pattern is a small first group, a larger second one a few days later, then bigger batches until everyone is in. The sizes depend on what your product and your team can handle.

Batches help your team too. Support questions come in waves you can keep up with, and you can talk to the first users one by one.

Decide who goes first

Your page and emails made a promise about the order, so keep it. If you said “first come, first served”, invite by position. If you promised early access to people who shared, the top referrers go first.

Running a private beta? Then you can review each person and approve only those who fit, such as shops above a certain size. Within the promise you made, you have room to choose:

• By position: the next people in line, which is easy to explain
• By answer: the people the first version fits best, such as everyone on one platform
• By hand: design partners, friends who’ll give blunt feedback, people who wrote long answers
• By referrals: the people who earned it with their share link

Send one-time links or codes

Give each person their own invite. A shared code can end up in a public post, and then you no longer decide who gets in.

A personal link is the smoothest option: one click takes people into sign-up with their email address filled in. A code works better when people sign up somewhere a link can’t reach, such as a mobile app. Either way, make it single-use and let it expire, for example after seven days.

Make codes short and easy to type, without characters that look alike, such as 0 and O. Keep track of which code went to whom, so you can see who used theirs.

Connect the invite to your product, so the account can be ready when someone clicks. Waitlark sends a signed webhook when someone is invited, and your app can create the account from it.

Before the first batch, send a real invite to yourself and follow the whole path: the email, the link, the sign-up and the first screen in the product.

Remind once, then let it go

Some people miss the invite. It lands in a busy week, or in a tab they forgot about. Send one reminder a day or two before the link expires, and stop there.

If many invites go unused, look at the subject line and at how long the link stays valid. Send a new link to anyone who asks, and move people who never respond to a later batch.

Check before the next batch

Give each batch a day or two before you send the next. Look at what happened, fix what you can, and only then invite more people. Write down what you saw for each batch, so you can compare the next one with it.

The numbers tell you where to look. If many people opened the invite but few created an account, check the invite email and the first screen. If people sign up but stop halfway, fix onboarding before you send more people into it. Before each new batch, go through this:

• How many people opened the invite, and how many created an account
• Where people stop during onboarding
• Questions that reached support more than once
• Errors, slow pages and server load
• What the first users say when you ask them

Keep the rest of the list informed

While the first batches get in, everyone else is still waiting. Tell them invites have started, how the order works and roughly when they can expect theirs. Silence at this point makes people think they were forgotten.

Some people on the list will have lost interest by now, and that’s fine. An invite with a working link and an easy way to unsubscribe is all they need from you.

When everyone has an invite, decide what happens to the waitlist. Close it, or turn the form into a normal sign-up. Then delete the data you no longer need, and keep only the people who agreed to hear from you after launch.