I was browsing Twitter with no particular aim and I found a tweet where someone was asking about the efficacy of waitlists. It immediately peaked my interest since I also have some sort of a waitlist up for Remotium.io

I'll outline below a list of ideas I extracted from that thread.

Waitlists are not inherently right or wrong. Depending on the type of product you are building, the time it takes for you to build and the frequency of your updates, a waitlist might be an amazing choice.

If you spend 8 months building and then launch out of the blue, with no prior build-up, some people might have already forgotten about you. That's why you need to start providing a bit of context in the weeks leading up to the launch. 

This prevents your launch, which would normally be a good thing, become a turnoff for people who forgot about you. 

Spending too much time building could also be dangerous if a similar product launched during that time. Spend time detailing why you exist, why it took so long and provide all the context in the world so that people who are maybe flirting with the new product, are still rooting for you and remain in the "warm leads" zone.

As a matter of fact, launch as soon as you have something. Launch multiple times. Don't wait for The Big Launch ™️ and hope to get press and a lot of excited customers. Use the fact that you're anonymous and very few people know you, to launch features, as unpolished as you might believe them to be.

Some people said they are more excited about the updates and progress of a product if they paid to get access to the list. Making a paid waiting-list seems to ensure people that you mean business and you haven't just created a "FOMO" list to trick people into believing they're missing on something great.

Someone mentioned they had a waitlist of ~8k people out of which only 25% signed up, after a 8-12 months wait. Don't expect that everyone who is on the waitlist will convert. Unless you have a really personal strategy to get under people's skin, you might not see higher numbers.

But, at the end of the day, would you want people signed up for your product because they want it or because you emotionally hacked them? 😄

To top it off, if you are developing an app aimed at workers, and judge the tenure to be 12-18 months on average, with a cycle that's more than 4 months you'll have almost 5% out of those emails on the waitlist bounce. Great insight provided by the same person.

Enjoy!