Build The Waitlist Before You Build Your Product
A landing page is a great way to test the overall viability of your idea. The best thing about it is that you can create one and send traffic to it even when there’s no product at all. Just offer people to join the waiting list saying that the app is in closed beta for now. The most exciting part is that you can do a lot of exciting things with people who did sign up. They are the audience you can work with while building your product.
Waitlist and customer development
The main focus of an early-stage startup is to learn more about the target audience and the market. The best way to do it is through customer development. When people sign up for the waitlist, you have an outstanding opportunity. You have access to the list of people with a severe enough problem to click an ad, take time to read through the landing page, and join the waitlist to be the first one who’s notified that the solution is available. If you didn’t know how to reach out to people for interviews to validate your idea, now you have a perfect way to do it.
You might think that this idea of creating a waitlist is BS, and no one would ever sign up for it. Well, it does work. I’ve personally seen a dozen of cases when this worked out quite well. When people have a problem that they urgently want to solve, they will do much more than just signing up for a waitlist.
Story of the Ghost blogging platform.
The blogging world is dominated by Wordpress. If you’re a blogger, chances are you will need to hire a Wordpress developer or agency. They would design and build your blog, add all the necessary plugins, and continuously support you during your journey.
Surprisingly, a lot of software developers hate Wordpress, the granddaddy of blogging platforms. Maybe “hate” isn’t the right word, though. We just don’t want to deal with it because of how outdated the technology is. For a tech person, a blog is something that could be done in a much simpler way without the bells and whistles added to Wordpress over the years.
This is why Ghost was created by John O’Nolan back in 2013. The idea was floating around for some time, and in 2013 John created a Kickstarter campaign. His goal was to get £25,000 as initial funding. The community was so in need of a new platform and so fed up with quirks of the Wordpress, that full amount was collected in just 11 hours. John continued his campaign for a month and collected a total of £196,362. The money was used to build the first version of Ghost released the same year.
“Build it, and they will come” is not going to work
Maybe your users won’t be as moved as the technical savvy blogging community. Maybe you won’t be as comfortable with starting a Kickstarter campaign as John was. But the idea that people won’t care enough about some problems to sign up for a mailing list now might just be a false assumption — you should test it.
I know that most likely you’ll be resistant to do anything related to this. I’ve been there, and I also thought that marketing is some tactic that “real” products don’t need. Build it, and they will come, right? Unfortunately, this can’t be farther from the truth. The internet is crowded nowadays, and it gets more crowded day by day. Everyone and their dog is online, advertising their business. You have to start marketing your product and approach it the same way you should approach product development — by starting lean.
Lean marketing
You’ve probably heard about the “lean startup” methodology and the concept of MVP, right? The whole point of MVP is to build fast and learn fast. The landing page is an MVP for your marketing and it should come way before any other MPV. If you can’t get people to sign up for the waitlist, you might have a hard time getting them to sign up and use your app.
You need to accept that marketing is part of your job as an entrepreneur, whether you want it or not. If you do marketing right, it’s not salesy or pushy. Id what you’re building is what people really want and need, they will thank you for your marketing. I’m sure you have seen ads that were about something you were happy to stumble upon somewhere on Instagram.
It’s crucial to run marketing experiments in parallel to building your product. It’s easy to think that you need to start marketing after you launch, but it’s an iterative process, and it would be too late to start it then.
Use your waitlist for email marketing
Have you thought about the advertising channels you will use? SEO is controlled by Google, and you have competitors there. Paid ads are also controlled by search engines or social networks. You can partner up with people who own mailing lists and blogs to get access to their audience, but they still control the channel. It’s important to have an independent marketing channel that you can control.
What you need it email. It is so much more than a way for one on one communication. Once someone signs up for your mailing list, you know that this person is interested in your cause, whatever it is. Plus, you know that this person gives you permission to communicate with him or her more about the problem you’re solving. The coolest thing is that you can do it any time you want until the person unsubscribes or marks your emails as spam (you need to be extra careful). No one can charge you or prevent you from sending emails to your subscribers.
Email marketing is pretty unique. On the one hand, it’s always one-on-one communication because you’re sending emails directly to someone’s mailbox. On the other hand, you can easily automate your emails same way a lot of people automate chatbots. Once a person signs up you can send a pre-programmed sequence of emails to her and then adjust that sequence based on the emails she reads or links in emails she clicks. User’s actions are a great way to learn more about people without asking questions directly, and also personalize the communication.
People who join your waiting list are the most valuable audience, and you need to treat them well. When your product is ready, all you will have to do is to tell them that it will be out in, say, a week, and they will sign up as soon as you open the registration.
A landing page and a waitlist are a great way to get started with marketing your product and helping people. Jay Abraham calls this “strategy of preeminence.” I learned this from Andre Chaperon, who’s a guru of email marketing and really knows what he’s talking about. Strategy of preeminence is simply doing the best you can to help your audience. It’s not about the product itself, it’s not even about marketing, research, competition and all that. The point is in using whatever opportunity you have to help people you want to work with. It means genuinely caring.
