Latest / Solopreneur Sessions with Fexingo: One-Person Businesses, Freelancing, and Independent Work / How a Solopreneur Used a Waitlist to Build Hype Before Launch
Transcript
- Lucas: So there's this solopreneur — let's call her Sarah — who spent eight months building an online course about financial modeling for freelancers. Really thorough, video modules, downloadable templates, the whole thing. Luna: Okay. And she launched it to crickets? Lucas: Close. She launched to about seventy sales in the first week. Which sounds decent until you realize she'd spent over a thousand hours building it. She basically created a product nobody knew they needed until she told them. Luna: Ouch. So the problem wasn't the course, it was the launch. Lucas: Exactly. And that's what we're talking about today — the idea that you can build demand before you build the product, using a waitlist. Not a pre-order, not a beta, just a list of people who say 'I'm interested, tell me when it's ready'. Luna: I've seen this work really well in certain niches. Let's get into the specifics. Lucas: Let's look at another case. A writer I know, Rachel, wanted to launch a paid newsletter about sustainable investing. Instead of writing a bunch of sample issues and then asking people to subscribe, she put up a single landing page. It said: 'Join the waitlist for the smartest sustainable investing newsletter. Launching in March.' She drove traffic from a few LinkedIn posts and a Reddit thread. Luna: How many sign-ups did she get? Lucas: Three thousand eight hundred in about six weeks. And here's the key — she didn't send a single newsletter during that period. Just a confirmation email and a reminder a week before launch. Luna: So the scarcity was built into the waitlist itself. Like, 'this isn't available yet, so you want it more'. Lucas: Right. And there's data on this. A study by Sumo — the tool company — looked at over a thousand waitlist campaigns. They found that the average conversion rate from waitlist to paid customer was about 23 percent within the first month of launch. But campaigns that sent a single reminder before launch had a conversion rate of 31 percent. Luna: Interesting. So the reminder matters. But what kind of reminder? Not just 'hey, we're launching'. Lucas: Rachel's reminder was smart. She sent an email that said: 'On Monday, the newsletter opens to the public. Waitlist members get 48 hours of early access and a 20 percent discount. That's it.' No long build-up, no teaser content. Just a clear offer with a deadline. Luna: And that worked because the waitlist had already signaled interest. Those people were primed. Lucas: Exactly. And the numbers back it up. Rachel converted about 1,100 of those 3,800 into paid subscribers at fifty dollars a year. That's fifty-five thousand dollars in revenue from a landing page and two emails. Luna: Which is a lot more than Sarah's seventy course sales. So what did Sarah do wrong? Lucas: She built the entire course first, then tried to sell it. She had no audience, no list, no signal of demand. She basically built a product in a vacuum. The waitlist approach flips that — you test demand with the lowest possible investment. A landing page, a little traffic, and a countdown timer. Luna: But isn't there a risk that people forget about you if you go silent for weeks or months? Lucas: That's the biggest pitfall. You can't just collect emails and then disappear. Rachel sent exactly two emails during the waitlist period — the confirmation and a one-week-before reminder. But she also had a countdown timer on the landing page that updated automatically. That kept a sense of motion without flooding inboxes. Luna: So the landing page itself does some of the work. What else should be on that page besides a countdown? Lucas: Social proof is huge. Rachel included a line like 'Join 3,800 other investors waiting for smarter sustainability data.' That signals that other people trust this. Also, a short testable claim — something that makes the value clear. Her headline was 'The only newsletter that tracks ESG scores of every S&P 500 company in real time.' Very specific. Luna: I like that. It's not 'learn about investing.' It's a concrete promise. Lucas: And it's checkable. You can verify whether she delivers. That builds trust even before launch. Luna: Let me push back a little. Doesn't this only work if you already have some kind of audience or distribution? If you're starting from zero, a landing page won't get thousands of sign-ups. Lucas: Fair point. But Rachel didn't have a huge audience. She had about two thousand followers on LinkedIn. She wrote five posts over six weeks, each one sharing a small insight about sustainable investing, and ended with a link to the waitlist. That was it. She also posted once in a subreddit about ESG investing. That post got about twelve thousand views and drove maybe a third of her sign-ups. Luna: So the key is going to where the audience already is, not building your own from scratch. Lucas: Exactly. And that's a much lower bar than most solopreneurs think. You don't need a hundred thousand followers. You need to find the hundred people who care about this specific thing and show them something useful. Luna: And then the waitlist becomes proof that there's demand, which you can use to build momentum for the actual launch. Lucas: Right. And when you finally launch, you're not cold-starting. You have a list of people who raised their hand. That changes the psychology of the launch completely. Luna: You know, these conversations we have on the show — they take time to research and produce. And we keep them free and ad-free because that's how we want to share them. But it's listener support that makes that possible. Lucas: Yeah, a couple of dollars a month really does make a difference. If these episodes have moved your work forward in any small way, you can find us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: It genuinely helps keep the lights on and lets us keep digging into these stories. Thanks to anyone who's contributed. Lucas: Alright, back to the waitlist strategy. One thing that came up when I was researching this — there's a difference between a waitlist and a pre-order. A waitlist is purely an expression of interest. No money changes hands. A pre-order involves payment upfront. Which one is better? Luna: I think it depends on the product. For a course or a newsletter, waitlist makes sense because you're still building trust. For a physical product or a software tool, a pre-order might work better because people want to lock in a price or a spot. Lucas: Yeah, and there's data on that too. For digital products, waitlists tend to convert at a higher rate to eventual purchase than pre-orders, because there's no friction at sign-up. Luna: Right. You're not asking for a credit card, just an email. That's a much smaller ask. Lucas: And then when you launch, you have a warm audience. You can even use the waitlist size to negotiate partnerships or sponsorships. Rachel told me that when she launched, she had sponsors ready because she could show a list of 3,800 potential buyers. Luna: That's smart. So the waitlist becomes an asset beyond just the launch. Lucas: Exactly. It's a signal to the market that there's demand. And for a solopreneur, that kind of leverage is gold. Luna: What about the follow-up after launch? Do you keep sending emails to the people who didn't convert? Lucas: That's a delicate balance. Rachel sent one more email a week after launch to the non-converters, saying 'The early-bird discount is still available for another 48 hours.' After that, she moved them into her regular newsletter. She didn't keep hammering them about the paid product. Luna: So she respected the fact that they might convert later, but didn't annoy them. Lucas: Exactly. And about 15 percent of her eventual subscribers came from that later follow-up. So it's worth doing, but you have to be careful not to burn the relationship. Luna: I think there's also a lesson here about the launch itself. When you have a waitlist, you can afford to launch smaller and iterate. You don't need a big splashy launch day. Lucas: That's a great point. Rachel's launch was just an email to the waitlist. No webinar, no affiliates, no ad spend. And she made fifty-five grand. That's a pretty good return on a few LinkedIn posts and a landing page. Luna: It's almost counterintuitive. You spend less time and money on the launch, and you make more because you've already built the audience. Lucas: Right. And that's the core idea — validate demand before you build. If nobody joins the waitlist, you know you need to pivot or rework the offer. That saves you months of wasted effort. Luna: So the waitlist is a low-risk test. And if it works, you have a running start. Lucas: Exactly. I think for any solopreneur thinking about launching something — whether it's a course, a newsletter, a consulting package, even a physical product — starting with a waitlist is one of the smartest moves you can make. Luna: Alright, so practical takeaways. One: build a simple landing page with a clear promise and social proof. Two: drive traffic from a few targeted posts in places your audience already hangs out. Three: send a confirmation and a reminder, don't over-email. Four: launch with a time-limited offer to the waitlist. Lucas: That's a solid framework. And the data suggests that if you can get even a thousand people on a waitlist, you're looking at a very viable launch. The average conversion rate of 23 percent means about 230 customers from day one. Luna: Which is way better than launching to silence. I think we've all been Sarah at some point, building something in a vacuum. This is a much saner approach. Lucas: Yeah. And the best part is, it's free to try. So if you're sitting on an idea, maybe start with a landing page instead of a prototype. See who shows up. Luna: I like that. Thanks, Lucas. Lucas: Thanks, Luna. See you next time.