Blog
Stories, playbooks, and shipping notes from waitlists in the wild.
We read fifty public waitlist pages that had been live for months and collected almost nothing. The failures rhymed, and the rhyme is good news.
Attaching a reward to a countable action creates a game. The three attacks are predictable, and one architectural decision defeats most of them.
A waitlist converts on four emails sent close together, each doing exactly one job. Most founders send the wrong one first and dilute the only send that matters.
Total signups goes up whether or not anything is working, which is precisely why it is the number founders watch and the least useful one available.
A shared subdomain is free, instant, and costs you three things that are expensive to recover. Two of them you cannot recover at all.
We shipped 1,031 launch page templates and watched which ones founders choose. The aesthetic varies wildly. The structure of the ones that convert does not vary at all.
Nobody's first hundred came from Product Hunt. They came from a dozen direct messages, two communities, and one piece of writing only you could have written.
The gap between an eight percent page and a forty percent page is almost never design. It is whether a stranger can state what they get after four seconds of looking.
Referral rewards are a pricing problem. Sharing costs the sharer real credibility, so the reward has to clear that bar — without destroying the queue it is denominated in.
Launch day is a conversion event, not an acquisition event. If you have not spent the preceding quarter building the audience you convert, the day has nothing to convert.
Newsletter
Honest writeups, conversion teardowns, and the experiments we ran so you don't have to. No fluff, no pitch.
One email every two weeks · Unsubscribe anytime
