[HN Gopher] Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
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Building a Waitlist (The Wrong Way)
Author : jrhizor
Score : 77 points
Date : 2024-05-18 07:04 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (jrhizor.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (jrhizor.dev)
| caitlinface wrote:
| 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.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > I started posting MRR goals on Twitter around $50k/mo
|
| > When the waitlist reached 100 people
|
| $500/month for every person on the waitlist?
| kichik wrote:
| > 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.
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| 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.
| jrhizor wrote:
| 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!
| bastawhiz wrote:
| 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.
| jrhizor wrote:
| 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.
| onionisafruit wrote:
| 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.
| jrhizor wrote:
| Yeah, this is what I was thinking.
| shipit1999 wrote:
| 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.
| jroseattle wrote:
| 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!
| bjornsing wrote:
| 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?
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| _> Is Google Ads just completely broken or did I do something
| wrong?_
|
| I'm not sure it's an *or* type of situation here
| kmbfjr wrote:
| 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.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| 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.
| bluehatbrit wrote:
| 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.
| yumong wrote:
| 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?
| dceddia wrote:
| 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.
| eatonphil wrote:
| 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.
| volkk wrote:
| do you think a big reason you signed up is that these are
| brands you were already aware of?
| nicbou wrote:
| Sometimes you want to keep track of something promising, and
| hear from it when it's ready.
| yumong wrote:
| 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.
| NoahKAndrews wrote:
| Not everything that's useful to me is broadly applicable
| enough that I can expect to stumble upon it after launch
| dceddia wrote:
| > 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.
| krisoft wrote:
| 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...
| dceddia wrote:
| 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.
| jrhizor wrote:
| That's why I found the search volume interesting. It seemed
| like there was more overlap between developers and photography
| tools than I thought.
| yumong wrote:
| 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?
| bananskalhalk wrote:
| 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.
| tibbar wrote:
| 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...
| alangibson wrote:
| 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.
| qingcharles wrote:
| 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.
| simple10 wrote:
| 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.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Well since LLM is the fad of the day you should have built an API
| that uses AI to generate Lighroom settings. :)
| dyeje wrote:
| You were forecasting 50k MRR before your waitlist hit 100
| signups?
| llIIllIIllIIl wrote:
| 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.
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