In my opinion, a waitlist is one of the best tools to validate your startup idea or product. It helps you gauge interest and see how many people are excited about your solution. If there’s no hype or interest, you can pivot or abandon the project and try something else with minimal resources invested.
A waitlist is the best tool for validating your startup—prove me wrong!
byu/1017_frank inEntrepreneur
Posted by 1017_frank
3 Comments
Kinda. Those guys on the waitlist handing you cash right off the bat is the best form of validation.
WRONG!
Take it from someone who launched a waitlist that got picked up by a popular newsletter and got hundreds of singups – including well-known VCs. People will easily give you their email address out of curiosity. It does not validate your startup. Please don’t be fooled by this!
When we finally launched our product, only a tiny fraction of the people who gave us their emails bothered to created an account.
There’s a lot of work to do beyond just deploying a waitlist. You need to keep the people on the waitlist excited & informed on your progress. You need someone on your team with a strong social media game – which can be difficult if you have a small team. There are tactics you employ to make your waitlist go viral but that can suck your time away from actually building the startup.
If you create a hot waitlist and don’t launch the product quickly enough, people will lose interest – we learned this the hard way. Of course, it depends on what you’re building but unless it’s an industry-defining product, people will move onto something new within a week.
Another lesson I’ve learned from my experience is to actually meet your potential users in person if possible and talk to them. Build a personal relationship with them. And If you can, build an early version of your solution and let them try it as you continue to talk to them.
I’m not saying waitlists are not worth building. I don’t think they are the best validation tool for your startup and they shouldn’t be relied upon. You need to speak to actual users and build fast.
imo, it is a good, basic start. But not enough to validate your startup’s initial PMF.
To get a better sense of your idea’s potential impact, I would have a short survey to the ones that have registered, to understand why they signed up and what their expectations are.