Ask fewer questions, at the right time.

Ask what changes a decision

Before you add a question, write down what you’ll do with the answer. If it decides who gets in first or what you build next, keep it. If it’s only interesting, leave it out.

Skip anything sensitive, such as health or religion, and anything you can look up yourself, such as the size of a company with a public website. Good waitlist questions usually help with one of these:

• Fit: is this someone the first version is built for?
• Priority: who should get in first?
• Roadmap: which feature, platform or integration matters most?
• Wording: how do people describe the problem themselves?

One question at signup, the rest after

At signup, every field is one more reason to give up. Ask for the email address and at most one question you need for sorting, such as role or platform. Make it a single choice, so it takes one tap.

Ask everything else right after signup, while people are still on the page. They’ve already joined, so a question now feels like being asked for their opinion. Show one question per screen with a progress bar, save each answer as it’s given and let people skip.

The question at signup can be required if you need it to sort people. Make everything after signup optional. People who feel forced pick any answer to get past the screen, and that answer is noise.

Waitlark splits questions this way: for each one, you choose whether it’s asked on the form or in the welcome flow right after signup.

Pick the right kind of question

The format decides how easy the answers are to use. Choice questions are quick to answer and easy to count. Open questions take longer, and they give you the words people use, which you can reuse on your landing page.

For choice questions, make sure the options don’t overlap, add “Other” and keep the list short enough to read without scrolling. The kinds that work on a waitlist:

• Single choice: role, company size, platform, how soon they need it
• Multiple choice: tools they use today, problems they run into
• Short text or URL: their website, shop or profile, so you can look them up
• Long text: “What would you use this for?”, asked once
• Feature voting: people pick what they want most from a short list

Word questions so they’re easy to answer

A clear question gets a clear answer. Read each one out loud before you publish it, and fix anything you’d have to explain.

• Ask one thing per question. “What do you use for email and newsletters?” is two questions.
• Keep it neutral. “How much do you hate your current tool?” tells people what to answer.
• Say why you ask when it isn’t obvious, such as “So we know which integration to build first.”
• Add an “Other” option with a text field, and read what people type there.
• Use a fixed time frame. “In the last month” is easier to answer than “usually”.

Example questions per kind of product

Start from these and cut what you won’t use. Three or four questions after signup is plenty for most launches.

Write them in the words your audience uses. “What’s your stack?” works for developers and puzzles a shop owner.

• B2B software: your role, company size, the tool you use for this today, how soon you need a fix
• Consumer app: iPhone or Android, how often you run into the problem, what you do about it now
• Developer tool: main language or framework, where you deploy, team size, a link to your GitHub or site
• Tool for online shops: shop URL, platform, orders per month, the apps you already pay for
• Physical product: country for shipping, which size or colour you’d want, what you use instead today
• Course or community: your level today, what you want to be able to do, hours you can spend each week
• Marketplace: buyer or seller, your city or region, what you’d sell or look for

Put the answers to work

Read the answers every week while the list grows. Count the choice questions, and read the open answers while there are still few enough to read them all.

Look at the skips too. If many people skip one question, it may be unclear, too personal or asked too early.

Then use them:

• Pick the first batch, such as everyone on one platform or everyone who needs it this month
• Rewrite the landing page in the words people used
• Choose what to build first, from the votes
• Compare channels: people from one source may want something different from people from another
• Write a personal note to the people who gave the most detailed answers