The CEO thought this was a good way to build up anticipation, and make sure things were fully polished before opening the floodgates.
We got a few waves of attention, which meant we had about 30k emails on the list at some point.
Of course, this large number put more pressure on us to “get things perfect before we launch”, and it was over a year before the CEO decided it was time to let everyone in.
But by the time we did, people had lost interest, and our conversion rate was abysmal. While a bit buggy and unpolished, the product was still very functional a year before, and had we just let people in we’d probably have gotten very valuable feedback a year early.
(I left the company a long time ago, and it is now in zombie mode)
I should add that the waitlist strategy isn't always the right one. If you are a new team building a product in an unfamiliar space, it might be better to start with a small group of users. We've been fortunate to have a succesful product in a similar space, so we can take a little bit more of a risk.
I have no flippin' idea how the other 5 found my landing page. I haven't been running ads or anything. I was going to wait till I actually launched (hopefully in a few weeks).
My thought process was the same. Pay for Adwords, et al., to drive people to a page that basically says "Sorry, we're not ready yet, but sign up for our mailing list, maybe?" Not sure that's a good idea.
The idea that you should have a small scope and narrow focus is the one very common piece of startup advice I struggle with. In my experience at Winnie, whenever we "thought small" growth would stall out. I think if your product is just better with higher numbers of users, get as many people into it as you can.
And I know who am I, nobody. But as a person who hears about some service like "We'll help you get hired by these new methods of looking over resumes" great. sign me up. I sign up "Sorry we're in private beta at this time." like what? Why did I Go through all of that process to be told it's not available.
I understand its not exactly fun to be at the receiving end of that treatment but i fail to see what values it is really violating
I fully understand that the design pattern solves a difficult problem that we all have: how to know if someone would really be willing to buy your product. Because if you ask, many people will say they would buy it, but when it comes time to pull out their credit card they don't do it.
But it's still tricking the customer into doing something he or she wouldn't ordinarily do if they had known what the button really did.
What is wrong with building the functionality first, get paying customers, and from there scale? At least that way, you'll have the money to scale.
you have also to consider that solution don't grow in a vacuum. the moment you build something, you can count of having ten competitors out there doing the same or similar thing, akin to convergent evolution someone else is experiencing the same need you're solving right now and among those someone is building a solution. if you want to monetize your solution, unless it's a physical thing, you need to be the first out there and the faster growing.
additionally, if the strategy involves financing at some point, a big cache of user waiting/registered is good leverage and something you can build without having a product if you have the resources to do both - more financing, more money to grow and outgrow competitors.
people sometime demonize growth but unless your startup is something that inherently doesn't scale growth and lock-in are practically the first filter to weed the competition.
We were able to sign up a few thousand people to our new product waitlist through two main channels: exhibiting at conferences and answering questions on Quora. In the past, I would have just done a small beta with friends, but I guess I'm getting a little wiser over the years :)
Going big from the beginning is really a tough one. I already got burned at a previous startup by not narrowing the focus enough, but it really depends on the market and the type of product you are building. We're building a product for college students, which is a big group, so it's a toss-up whether to go after a certain category of students or go after them all. We're casting a wide net for now with the idea that our product will resonate with certain subgroups which we can focus later.