from Hacker News

Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)

by jrhizor on 5/18/24, 7:04 AM with 39 comments

• by alangibson on 5/19/24, 3:56 PM

  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.

• by caitlinface on 5/19/24, 12:57 PM

  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.

• by jroseattle on 5/19/24, 1:34 PM

  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!

• by dceddia on 5/19/24, 3:16 PM

  > 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.

• by yumong on 5/19/24, 2:43 PM

  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?

• by tibbar on 5/19/24, 3:55 PM

  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…

• by bachmeier on 5/19/24, 1:06 PM

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

  > When the waitlist reached 100 people

  $500/month for every person on the waitlist?

• by bluelightning2k on 5/20/24, 7:58 AM

  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.

• by yumong on 5/19/24, 3:41 PM

  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?

• by bjornsing on 5/19/24, 1:51 PM

  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?

• by shipit1999 on 5/19/24, 1:21 PM

  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.

• by DeathArrow on 5/19/24, 4:30 PM

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

• by llIIllIIllIIl on 5/19/24, 7:54 PM

  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.

• by cynicalsecurity on 5/19/24, 2:42 PM

  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.

• by dyeje on 5/19/24, 6:03 PM

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