Collect a waitlist with LinkedIn posts like 'top 200 companies hiring now'

Dan… 20k, 50k, 100k, etc. We've tried everything, right? I've tried all the hacks and stuff along the way. So like what works for us might not work for you, what works for one company might not work for another. I started to realize also why, so maybe people can avoid some of the mistakes I've made. Pretty much from that first viral LinkedIn post, it took us about 2 months to build a product. So we were building a waitlist. It was maybe at that time

Danthat I'd heard about Tabs, and that was the first experience I heard about like Oliver doing UGC stuff, and it actually took off. It did pretty well. We got, I think, 40 or 50k waitlist sign-ups in the first 2 months of just playing around with this core idea that obviously the idea was going viral, so we kept pushing on it. I kept making posts on LinkedIn about here are the top 200 companies hiring now. We would get emails that way, and then I would make some UGC posts, we'd get some emails that way for the site, so it's just like anything to get waitlist sign-ups. And by the time we launched, and I think it was April,

Danwe had, you know, a lot of sign-ups and a lot of people excited, filled out Typeforms, all this stuff. And then we launched, we got our first subscription. As soon as we got the first subscription, I was like, "This is going to be a billion-dollar company." Like I know for a fact, like, you know, we've done B2B before, we've done different types of businesses, but as soon as we did that like first consumer sub, I was like, "This is fucking huge." The problem with that is, only about like half a percentage of the waitlist converted to even signing up. Like the waitlist did not convert at all.

DanNo one paid for it. No one cared. Everyone forgot about it, it seemed like. And that was heartbreaking because I was like, "What the hell did I do all this work for?" And so then the next few weeks were just literally guerrilla marketing, boots on the ground, trying to get as many people to sign up and pay as possible. At that time, it was Hacker News. I did a big push on Hacker News, I scraped emails manually, scraped posts, I reached out with like heartfelt messages like, "Hey, I think you should use this." And that's how we got our first like 100, maybe 500 users

Dan… December, were just like manual grinding to I think it was maybe 20k MRR, like that. And it was me and one engineer, his name is Rohan. It was really, really hard. It was like at that point we had almost run out of money, you know, we were a few weeks away. Host: Is there anything you would do now with the knowledge you have now to change the waitlist strategy? Like do you think it's possible that you could have had a higher converting waitlist?

DanNo, I think waitlists are useless. I think it's good to signal intent. You don't need to like bring people into a waitlist. Like you should be just using that time to get people to pay. It's going to be harder, but it's going to give you more results, even if they're paying for some small version of your product, like get them to pay. It's so much more valuable than a waitlist. If I could do it all over again, I wouldn't do waitlists at all. I would instead test the idea. I would definitely test it. Like let's say I'm launching a new app right now. I want to launch a running app. I run a lot and I want a a live AI coaching running app. Thought about this idea, I've wanted to launch it before.

DanThe first thing I would do is spend probably 1 to 2k max on a handful of influencers with a super tight value prop, test it. I wouldn't do UGC, cuz I think it takes too long to iterate and I think maybe like what Cal AI got right is they like put it in the hands of influencers first for super cheap and just like tested it with proven distribution. Like does this message resonate? Will it convert to subscriptions? I think they got good paying …