A few days after getting into Y Combinator, one of the first things I did was toss up a quick landing page with a waitlist. This (very) simple site ended up being one of the most impactful decisions I made early on.
Here's a screenshot from the Wayback machine, the arrow is where all the magic happens.
Our first investors and users all originated from this simple waitlist, so the value to effort ratio was off the charts.
It was a great way of gauging early interest and served as the launchpad for the company when we (finally) launched a year and a half later. While I wouldn’t recommend you keep up a waitlist that long, I do think it’s valuable to have from day one.
With ~15 minutes of your time, you will be able to start talking to your customers and building things they want.
That’s the most understated part of a waitlist and inbound leads in general, everyone that joins shows at least some intent signal and most will be willing to chat. I had almost 300 onboarding calls (over Zoom) in the first year.
All of them were from inbound interest via the waitlist!
It materially changed the trajectory of our company. Here’s how to do the same for yours.
If you'd like, you can create a free Loops account but you're welcome to follow this guide with a different provider as this advice is general and applicable across most email sending platforms.
Step 1: Set up your form
In Loops, navigate to app.loops.so/forms, style the form on that page to match your brand colors and copy it as either HTML or JSX, then paste it into your site. That’s it, you’re done.
If you use Framer, Webflow or a different host, we have similar simple guides on integration.
If you’d prefer to use your own form, you can do so and just swap in the Loops endpoint following this guide.
Step 2 - Set up a triggered Loop
This is where the magic happens. Head over to app.loops.so/templates and select the template titled “Welcome to the Waitlist” (also pictured below).
You will immediately get a fully built-out Loop (essentially an automation) like the one above that will trigger whenever a user submits a Loops form.
This is the template I used for a year and a half. It is incredibly simple and effective. Customize the text in the email to fit your business and you're good to go.
Users will reply to this email.
After they reply and it feels like a good fit, you should send a booking link (calendly, cal, or google) and tadah, you’re talking to users.
I received thousands of replies over the course of the 18 months Loops was in Waitlist mode.
That's it! Bonus: Shortcuts, Recordings and More
Set up a few text expansion shortcuts once you get in a rhythm. I use Raycast’s Snippet’s feature (pictured above) for text expansion which lets me type a few letters that then expands to my full calendly link.
I use the same feature on iOS which is a built-in feature offered.
I found recordings to be a waste of time and unnecessary friction. For the first 60 calls or so, I recorded the calls. I found that it causes the person on the other end to feel as if they need to carefully pick their words. Conversation flowed better once I stopped recording.
Find a few questions that work well, but make sure to mix them up so you don’t get in a rut. It took me ages to realize this, but if I asked users what their pain points were at the beginning of the call then made sure to touch on them during the conversation, the chance of it going well increased quite a bit.
Finally, follow up over email to the original email thread. Thank people for calls and their time after the fact.