Of course, the conversion rate won't be high especially if the time between the user signing up and the launch date is very long. But it is still possible to keep the interested users engaged and some of them (not sure how many) will be the seed for the first set of actual users.
> And on the flip side, I personally am very reluctant to give out my email address to an entity that is essentially a company that doesn't exist yet, with a product that doesn't exist yet. Even if I'm very interested in the product in theory. (In this particular case I'm not in your target group.)
I think that's fine. Your email, your choice. But the company does exist and the product is in the design phase.
> Finally, here you write that you are essentially only collecting emails at the moment, while the submission button on the website says "Get Early Access". That is very vague, but to me it suggests that you are at least actively working on development and will have a beta or at least an alpha sometime soon. So I find this very dishonest. Dishonesty is not a great look for an entity that harvests emails, or one that hopes to provide financial services.
This is totally valid criticism. I hope to convey that by signing up, you will be the first set of users to get access to the product when it launches. And while we haven't started development, we are in the design and user testing phase. The whole idea is to test ideas before developing.
> All in all, I don't think this is the "right" way to launch this product at all.
I don't think there's one right way to launch. The only theory being tested here is to test each and every single idea before going into development. Since this product will be more expensive to build, it is even more important now.