Forget about HN for a moment and ask yourself who benefits from a waitlist announcement vs waiting to announce your launch until the product actually exists. The only party who benefits from a waitlist is the owner of the list. That’s great for that person, but spam contact harvesting pollution for everyone else, which is ultimately destructive to the community. “Great for me but destructive pollution for the community” defines an antisocial act. Is selfish community harm something that you want people to associate with your brand?
This is not entirely true. What about services that actively want to add people, but just need time to scale up their resources? Then they can add users as they have the capacity to. I signed up on Beeper’s waitlist a few months ago and just got access last week. I am extremely happy with their service and believe it was well worth the wait. There was no spam and destruction, only a short wait and then I got access. Can you see how it is potentially beneficial to do this rather than hope you get the exact amount of users you can handle at any moment in time?
It’s not Product Hunt, so please don’t post “lead gen” stuff here. If you have a blog post on a related topic that mentions your product, I think that is usually OK, as it’s not link spamming.
He’s asking a question if waitlists are a good launch strategy.
This may not be Product Hunt but it is Hacker News, a forum ran by Y Combinator, which is a startup incubator.
I think its perfectly fine to ask questions about startups here without having to warn people about “lead gen”.
In addition to the other link posted, see also this for Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
Waitlists are a no-go for ‘Show HN’ launches
HN likes things that are interesting and generally prefers more details rather than less. You could write a blog post about a really interesting aspect of your product, or of building your product, and share that, or you could share a usable demo of your product.
Dang, HN’s moderator, have written about this before. Here is a recent example:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35178503
Generally speaking, a waitlist isn’t interesting and doesn’t add value because users can’t try the product. It might be valuable to the creator but it can wait to be announced on HN when the product is ready.
As some others have suggested, you could write a detailed blog post about the values and share other details to see if that is valuable to the community and perhaps offer an opt in on your blog instead.
Good luck!
Community policy aside.
Does your question mean that you’re worried about people will take your idea and build the product themself?
In most cases, that will not be the case. One can’t just simply take an idea, rush to build it and release it overnight and be a competitor with you. Building a product is much harder than that. And even if you get a competitor, it’s a good way to validate your idea.
Um, not really. It was more about wanting to know if this is something that can be considered, or it doesn’t interest people at all.
Might as well straight up do a product launch on ShowHN if it’s not cool to choose this approach.
Appreciate your input though. 🙂
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