Why Celi never had a waitlist, and what we used instead

I’m spending the week manually creating Celi accounts for anyone who wants one.

If you’d like one, claim a username here or reply to this email.

Celi is a networked social relationship manager that naturally nudges you into more frequent and meaningful connections with your most important people on their most important days. 

But it hasn't always been that.

Over the past year, I've conducted research, user interviews, and ran beta tests to refine our product and understand what Celi needed to be.

During this time, we consciously decided to omit creating a waitlist, a common approach for collecting interested users before launch.

Instead, we opted for a launchlist.

Our thesis was that launchlists are a more effective way to capture high-intent users and accelerate learning at launch.

The Waitlist Problem

While waitlists are a popular choice for pre-launch startups, they have a significant drawback: they prioritize conversions over capturing intent.

Waitlists often ask for the bare minimum information from an interested user to get a conversion.

Usually just an email address.

This ease of joining can lead to false positives and a lack of true interest from potential users. 

People may join a waitlist out of curiosity or a momentary interest, without a genuine commitment to using the product when it launches.

According to Rob Fitzpatrick, author of The Mom Test, there are only three true interest signals: time, money, and reputation. 

Waitlists fail to capture any of these signals.

Put another way, waitlists are unreliable indicators of genuine user interest that provide inaccurate demand assumptions for your product.

So, what's the alternative? 

The Launchlist Solution

A launchlist seeks to capture a time, money, or reputation commitment from potential users.

Celi's launchlist added friction to capture higher-intent users at the cost of a lower conversion rate. 

By asking for more information upfront, we sought to ensure that those who signed up were genuinely interested in our product.

For our launchlist, we decided to collect the minimum information necessary to create an account for each user. 

This allowed us to streamline the onboarding process at launch. 

Instead of asking users to create their accounts from scratch, we were able to pre-create accounts, send login credentials, and enroll users in a welcome campaign that introduced them to Celi.

As a result, launchlist users entered our product further down the funnel compared to traditional waitlist users, and gave us a larger pool of engaged users to learn from on day one. 

This meant that we could focus more on observing their behavior and gathering feedback to inform our product roadmap, rather than spending time encouraging people to sign up.

We also used our launchlist to test our account creation process, going so far as to capture SMS, WhatsApp, and email consent, a level of friction no waitlist has ever had. 

Based on user feedback and behavior, we’ve been able to create a more polished and effective onboarding experience for our users.

A unique element of our launchlist is a scarcity component.

We asked users to claim their desired username, creating a sense of urgency and exclusivity. 

We found that including this encouraged potential users to commit to our launchlist, as people often want platform-to-platform consistency in their digital identities, and know usernames are unique per platform.

The gold standard of launchlists

While drafting this letter, I came across an even better example of a launchlist from the founders at Popcorn who are building the phone plan for the future.

As I understand it, Popcorn pairs cellular and satellite technology to offer unlimited global cell service.

As someone paying T-Mobile $108 per month for 5GB of high-speed data per month in 215+ countries and calling at $0.25/minute, I was interested. 

So I joined Popcorn’s waitlist. 

In doing so, I learned that Popcorn first captures email and then directs a prospective user to a typeform to answer a few qualifying questions. 

At submission, Popcorn’s founding team sends a short note of gratitude to your inbox and invites you to schedule a call with them.

It’s a launchlist masterclass as it combines the high conversion rates of a waitlist with the intentional friction of a launchlist, adds a post-submission touchpoint to confirm the relationship, and seeks a time commitment from potential users.

It’s a cosmic chef’s kiss.

The case for short and fast waitlists

While I believe in the power of launchlists, it's important to acknowledge that there is still a case to be made for short and fast waitlists.

An email-only waitlist will add more people to your funnel, providing an opportunity to immediately follow up and engage in one-on-one conversations.

During these conversations, you can learn from potential users before you build and possibly even engage them more than the launchlist theory suggests.

Moreover, a group of Harvard psychological scientists found that asking more questions, particularly follow-up questions, increases people's positive impressions, suggesting that engaging with users after they join a short waitlist can be just as effective in building relationships and gathering insights.

The bottom line on launchlists

The bottom line is this: If your waitlist only captures emails, you may be in for a harder road ahead.

While adding friction to a product may feel uncomfortable and go against conventional wisdom, Celi found success by bucking this trend.

By focusing on genuine user commitment and gathering valuable insights from day one, our launchlist accelerated our learnings at launch, helped build a better product, and protected us from building without real traction.