Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way) | Hacker News Reader

Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)

jrhizor.dev

98 pointsjrhizor39 comments

Confirmation bias is a killer. The lesson you learned is worth much more than you lost.

I can't stress this enough: don't use search ads for anything but laser targeted direct response marketing. It's somewhere between useless and actively harmful for anything else.

The only things I do anymore are 1. talk to actual sales prospects and 2. content marketing. Everything else is a handout to Google and Facebook shareholders.

PPC is the absolute fastest way to lose your shirt.

One thing that stands out is that OP wasn't bidding on "intent" keywords, sounded more like people were searching for info on Lightroom API than a product they would pay for. That's much harder traffic to convert.

Agreed on Google Search Ads. I've run a lot of pre-launch campaigns, mostly for e-comm and SaaS products. Meta ads is still the best way to go if you're going the ad route. YouTube is 2nd best option if you're good at making videos. For growth hacking, Producthunt and Facebook & LinkedIn groups can work. For SaaS, LinkedIn ads can work if you really know your audience and know how to run ads. Cold email also works well for SaaS if provide upfront value and not spam people.

But Google Search Ads is highly competitive and lots of bot traffic. IMO, it's best for retargeting during pre-launch.

Sounds like the fake emails were from "subscription bombs". Bad actors will bulk sign up targets to flood their inboxes and hide worrying notifications like security alerts.

https://www.spamhero.com/support/125230/I_am_being_attacked_...

I use to work on a newsletter service and we had to combat this constantly.

You learned some great lessons there, but I would challenge one item early in the "script":

> 2. Verify if it’s a problem from search volume.

It contextually depends, but correlating a problem-to-be-solved with search analytics can be really tenuous. I'd suggest a different phrasing:

  Verify it it's a problem by speaking with customers.

You can still use all the tools, but in the end you want to talk to those who you intend to serve. At that point, you'll have zeroed in on the actual problem they may have and are willing to pay you to solve.

Do it better the next time!

> applying Adobe Lightroom presets (image filters) on many images quickly and cheaply

This sounds to me like a thing people might pay for.

But I would (strongly) guess most photographers don’t know what an “API” is or why they’d want to pay monthly for one, or how to wire up “curl” to it somehow. People who know that stuff will cobble this together in a script.

As a simple desktop app I could see a utility like this doing well in that audience though. $29-49 one time payment, apply all the presets you want, save lots of time.

But… this is a built in feature of Adobe Lightroom.[2] And it is not even some hard to find feature. I learned about it in the first tutorial of Adobe Lightroom i ever watched.

1: https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-lightroom/batch-edi...

Hah, this is a perfect example of why it's important to build products for an audience you know and understand. (I've barely used Lightroom and clearly I'm not part of this audience)

On the other point though, there's a case to be made for building products to make things easier/better/more discoverable/etc even if when they already exist. One example: there are is ton of screen recorder software out there despite the fact that QuickTime on Mac can record the screen.

That’s why I found the search volume interesting. It seemed like there was more overlap between developers and photography tools than I thought.

Never in my life have I signed up on a waitlist. And nobody else I know ever has. I have enough spam in my inbox, why actively invite more?

I’ve signed up for waitlists and bought things from some of them, and I’ve launched products to waitlists I built (and made some sales on launch day).

I think a few things helped with that, but one difference that stands out is where the subscribers came from. Mine were mainly from Twitter or people already reading my blog, so they already knew who I was to some degree and had some reason to believe I could help them. It’s a much harder job to sell to random people who came from an ad, who start off with a lot less trust. Any missteps in the copy/problem you solve/etc are magnified because random people are just looking for any reason to hit the back button.

I was on the Analogue Pocket waiting list and also the Framework computer waiting list. Still on both actually, though I've had the chance to purchase it (well at least the Pocket) and have not yet.

do you think a big reason you signed up is that these are brands you were already aware of?

Sometimes you want to keep track of something promising, and hear from it when it's ready.

I'm aware that that's the theory.

But if it's really promising and ready and I care enough then I'll notice anyway.

Not everything that's useful to me is broadly applicable enough that I can expect to stumble upon it after launch

Some people think differently, and thats whom it caters to

I’m really surprised by how negative many of the reactions here are. I found the overall concept and approach very interesting and entirely plausible, though obviously it didn’t work out at all in the end. If there was a better technique to validate the signups, that could have helped pivot to a different product with actual interest. And I loved the research to target a specific search keyword with traffic but few results.

My criticism (seems everyone has one!) is that building your own billing, and spending two weeks on the first version before you have any customers, is a massive overkill. Really all you need is to track usage. Don’t even bother trying to automate on your own at this stage…

> I started posting MRR goals on Twitter around $50k/mo

> When the waitlist reached 100 people

$500/month for every person on the waitlist?

> if I could keep this up and convert 10-20% of waitlist users

$5000/mo for 10% of the list. Unless he factored in the list growing further.

The website has pricing and it does say $500/mo for the pro version. So maybe 100 was a typo and he had 1000 on the waitlist.

As far as I know, typical conversion from a waitlist is below 2% and that's after you're fairly sure you're dealing with people and not bots. Neither 100 nor 1000 emails is even remotely enough, both amount to nothing.

Most of what I read actually referenced 20% as an average for paid waitlists if there’s a fast enough turnaround behind a release. Here’s one example:

https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/what-is-good-waitlist-con...

Obviously not without proper diligence!

A huge part of the failure here is misunderstanding the budget of the target audience. The author genuinely thought that photographers have hundreds of dollars of cash hanging around to spend on this SaaS tool, even after meeting a customer who explained that they weren't willing to pay for this.

How many hours would this tool save per day? One at most? Even generously valuing the customer's time, the ability to recoup the cost of the subscription at $500/mo is essentially impossible for everyone except a tiny fraction of a percent of potential customers—and I'd suspect those folks don't know they would want or care about the tool.

The author was—at every step—more concerned with making a profit than solving a problem. You'll simply never build a compelling product (and turn a profit) if you don't even know who the people who are supposed to buy the product are.

I didn’t think that photographers had the cash, I thought that developers handling photos in some way had cash. Such as the various AI photo generator sites that might want to homogenize the style of images they create for ads, headshots, etc.

For actual photographers, they’re probably manipulating all of the photos on their own computers with Desktop software.

Photoshop’s pricing for this is 15 cents per image which is prohibitively expensive for nearly any image generation use case.

That’s actually the type of tool I was playing around with implementing when I came across this as an issue I wanted to solve for myself.

Serious question: did your product use Adobe software in any way to produce output for your users?

My impression is they were excited about the rate that people were joining the waitlist more than the number on the list. They were assuming that if n people were joining the waitlist every month they would get n * 10% new customers per month post launch.

Yeah, this is what I was thinking.

Just wanted to say I really enjoyed your write-up and certainly feel for you. It seems you did everything right.

Possibly the sign-ups were generic bots, trying unsophisticated contact-form spam. I can see how a wait-list and contact form look similar to a bot, especially one which is optimized to treat basically anything with an email address and a text field as a contact form.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around what this tool is achieving. Running filters on many files? Does this mean that your business dies if the original tool gains the ability (and nice GUI) to run batch jobs on its own?

Being first might be very lucrative. I might remember wrong here, but instapaper was an iOS only experience (with a kindle addon), and they are still rocking on, and the founder cashed out a long time ago. Every browser seem to have an instapaper built in nowadays, Mozilla even bought a competitior (formerly read it later now pocket?)

So yeah, buildin inside someone's moat might give you a cap on how big you will be able to become and will make you a tenant, but it could still be worth your while.

I put up a landing page with a contact form for a potential product a year ago. Ran search ads on Google. Also got 99% spam.

Is Google Ads just completely broken or did I do something wrong?

> Is Google Ads just completely broken or did I do something wrong?

I'm not sure it's an *or* type of situation here

Large companies have entire departments to game Google and its ad platform, with the luxury of insane amounts of money.

Small businesses are outgunned, the money is best spent elsewhere.

I've run into a similar experience with bots signing up for our waitlist although we ended up with some active users via those sign ups. Around 4% of the waitlisted users signed up for an account (free product). I think the insight about focusing on the red flags is pretty accurate. Not enough to just have waitlist signups and assume it will convert.

Well since LLM is the fad of the day you should have built an API that uses AI to generate Lighroom settings. :)

One should really consider the product validated after the cha-ching sound of the transaction. They will tell you whatever you want so that they were left alone and didn’t have to part with the moneys.

Honestly, this looks like a horrible way to create software. The money and effort spent on the waitlist could have been spent on a minimally viable project instead.

The point of an MVP is to do the minimal to prove viability. A waitlist gives you an iteration of that in a tiny space of time. In OP's case they failed to critisie their MVP (marketing site and waitlist) enough. But if they had, they'd have only wasted a few days.

You were forecasting 50k MRR before your waitlist hit 100 signups?

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