I think a waitlist was a mistake
March 27, 2024
I decided to change the CTA on my pre-launch landing page to funnel users into the Discord instead of adding them to a waitlist.
My reasoning is that I've come to the conclusion that a dusty list of people who might sign up for the launched product is not as beneficial as engaged community members in a Discord channel.
I've spent about $400 on ads (across Twitter, Facebook and Reddit) at this point and gotten around 50 signups, and 9 discord members.
I've noticed that targeting Discord members seems to be a much harder buy-in than the simple "Get early access" waitlist signup I had before. However, I spent 75% of the $400 prior to making this change, so it's possible I would have had a better ROI even with less follow through in the funnel.
The largest problem I forsee is that I know that once I send out launch emails to those people who joined the waitlist, there's again another funnel contraction. Those who open the email will be a percentage of those that get it, and those that click on a link to product hunt or something INSIDE of that email will again be a percentage of a percentage.
There's no way for me to keep those leads "warm" like I can with people joining the Discord.
And most importantly, there's no way for me to get feedback from a dusty old email list.
That was my biggest deciding factor. I'm still way too early in the product discovery phase to be considering a waitlist as validation. Focusing on it when I launched the landing page was a mistake in my opinion.
I do see an issue with my current strategy though. The ads are a phenomenally bad way for an indie builder to get the word out. They're expensive, and it's an additional skillset to learn (ad development, segmentation, audience, copy, etc). It's also incredibly expensive, and the second I stop paying, it all goes away.
I'm going to look at different ways to promote the product like influencer marketing, content creation alongside build-in-public, and SEO as my biggest expansion mechanisms now.
If you have any ideas for me about how I can best utilize my limited resources (time and effort, of course), lemme know in our Discord!