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Founders, marketers, growth people1, we need to have an honest conversation about waitlists.
Early-stage startups frequently hit these questions:
Should we do a waitlist?
Will a waitlist boost growth?
Will a waitlist make us cool, edgy; hype, vibey?
Reality: A waitlist is rarely the right thing for your startup.
Waitlists are permissible over short timeframes. They should exist for a few months at most. Anything longer and waitlists hurt conversion by >3x. The longer you keep it around, the worse these problems will become.
Ultimately, if you invoke a waitlist, you create a ticking time bomb that you must diffuse before it explodes.
Supply Constraints
When does a waitlist make sense?
Invoke a waitlist when you have a genuine supply constraint that prevents you from delivering your ideal customer experience.
That is it.
Nothing else about optics, brand, or hype should be your primary rationale.
What are the three forms of supply constraint?
1. Hard product constraint
There are constraints, often physical, that stop you from serving more customers.
Examples:
Hardware businesses have a fixed number of units.
Capacity businesses like airlines or concert venues have a limited number of seats.
Marketplace businesses like Uber might not have enough drivers.
Software businesses might not support a customer’s device or platform.
It is perfectly fine to waitlist customers that you’re just not able to serve. Practically speaking, you have no other choice.
2. Soft product constraint
Parts of the product experience aren’t where you want them to be.
Examples:
Software products may not cover all desired use cases yet.
Security companies might want to fix a backlog of known bugs.
AI labs may want to ensure model safety and alignment before scaling.
It’s reasonable to have a waitlist that limits how many new customers you onboard until you meet the quality bar.
3. Service constraint
You don’t have enough teammates to deliver some service component of the customer experience.
Examples:
Enterprise SaaS companies might not have enough implementation specialists to set up new customers.
DTC companies might not have enough support operations to guarantee smooth customer experiences.
Healthcare companies might not have enough clinicians to meet demand.
A waitlist that buys time to scale your team is very reasonable.
In all three cases, alleviating the supply constraint must be a top priority to drive sustained growth.
Waitlist Costs
Having explored legitimate reasons to invoke a waitlist, what are the downsides to running a waitlist?
1. Lost customer interest
Waitlists cause signups to lose interest.
Signups have the best likelihood of converting to customer the moment that they sign up.
A waitlist halts that momentum. A meaningful percentage of those signups will stop caring, pick a competitor, or become unreachable over time.
When I was in charge of Superhuman’s waitlist at the same time as its live funnel, I was able to compare conversion rates:
Waitlist signup → paying customer (within 7 days): ~3%
Live signup → paying customer (within 7 days): ~10%
The live funnel was >3x as performant as the waitlist funnel.
There were no other differences in the populations in each group. The only difference was the waitlist had been made to wait.
Furthermore, performance sharply decayed the older the waitlist was.
3% conversion to paying customer was for signups who had been on the waitlist for approximately 6 months.
Conversion halved for each year further back the waitlist ran, from 3% → 1.5% → 0.8%, and so on.
2. Foregone startup momentum
Momentum is oxygen for your startup. Momentum is everything.
A waitlist by its very definition slows momentum.
Any momentum loss comes at great cost — often difficult to quantify.
Who knows which use cases you could have discovered, what sales you could have landed, or hires you could have closed, if it weren’t for the waitlist?
These costs should be weighed heavily against any potential upside.
3. Distraction maintaining the apparatus
Maintaining a waitlist is work.
You spend precious brain cycles managing a queue when you could have been building and shipping.
The waitlist becomes an entity unto itself; a beast that needs feeding; a tail wagging the dog.
I regularly see this in my advising. When a startup begins to optimize the waitlist it is clear they are falling into this trap.
They might ask questions like: “Should we send nurture emails, run webinars, and host contests to sustain waitlist interest?”.
These questions come from a good place: A sense of duty to potential future customers. If we don’t keep the waitlist engaged, won’t they get upset? And if they are upset, won’t they think badly of us, harming future growth?
But the reality is that customers signing up for a service don’t want to be kept entertained.
They just want the product.
There is rarely a message worth sending a waitlisted signup other than an invite to the product.
The other common question indicating the startup is getting distracted is: “Should we hire somebody to keep growing the waitlist?”.
This comes from a desire to hit growth milestones at the same time as building the product.
But “size of waitlist” is little more than a vanity metric; a weak proxy for true demand, retention, and revenue.
Local Optima
Here are the most common (bad) reasons to run a waitlist.
Be careful any time you hear these arguments.
They are all legitimate reasons. But I consider them local optimizations when faced with a supply constraint.
They are not ways that a startup should globally optimize growth.
1. A waitlist enhances user experience
Humans love anticipation.
We talk excitedly about things we are waiting for. We are taught that “good things take time.”
This effect is twofold.
Those on the inside feel special for making it past the waitlist
Those on the outside feel anticipation for eventually getting in (the velvet rope effect)
If you’re running a waitlist, it’s smart to play into these feelings. There are all sorts of fun and games to be had:
Brag about the size of your waitlist
Let outsiders see their waitlist position
Give insiders a way to prioritize outsiders
Limit the number of outsiders that insiders can bring in
Allow outsiders to skip the waitlist in exchange for acts of virality
But these games don’t last forever. They do eventually get stale. You should kill off your waitlist well ahead of this fatigue setting in.
2. A waitlist enhances our brand
We all know products where limited supply elevates brand perception. Consider Supreme, Air Jordans, early Tesla.
In some cases, ‘limited edition’ is a long-term growth strategy, especially in fashion or luxury goods.
However, this is not the case for most scaling businesses.
Eventually you need to ramp up production, or customers will question your competence — eroding the brand you worked so hard to build.
3. A waitlist lets us nurture prospects, increasing conversion
The hypothesis is that a waitlist lets companies educate prospects.
As a result, more may convert to paying customer than if they had been able to purchase right away.
The fallacy in this thinking is forcing everyone to wait in order to educate some prospects.
A better approach is to give high-intent prospects an immediate pathway to customer while capturing contact details for low-intent prospects.
Then, low-intent prospects can be intensely nurtured toward conversion.
4. A waitlist creates hype, increasing reach
The hypothesis is that the notoriety of a waitlist might generate more signups than any other marketing effort.
The short-term hype of a waitlist might reach more customers, but this effect lasts for at most a few months to a year — and sometimes much less.
Ultimately, if the product is genuinely good, then authentic word of mouth is a far more potent growth engine than any waitlist tactic.
5. A waitlist can manufacture a specific growth curve
A waitlist might give a startup the ability to create an impressive looking growth curve.
Specifically, the startup can allow 5 customers off the waitlist this week, 10 customers next week, 20 the week after, and so on.
The usual reason founders might want to do this is for an upcoming fundraise. This is fine as a short-term hack, but it must be time-bound.
Bonus: All of the above
What if the combined effect of all the above reasons yields a globally better outcome than giving customers immediate access?
This might be true for a brief amount of time. But after that window, we stray into the realm of fuzzy thinking.
A collection of weak reasons for a waitlist can easily obfuscate the core truth that it’s slowing down growth.
Case studies
Superhuman
I ran Superhuman’s waitlist from start to finish.
We had hard product constraints, soft product constraints, and service constraints.
The hard product constraints were not supporting all mail providers and mobile devices.
The soft product constraints were not having all the features customers expected. We also had a strong commitment to deliver incredible speed and reliability to every customer.
The service constraint was our desire to manage all customer interactions exceptionally well as a core differentiator versus incumbents.
Highlights
We pulled every lever to make our waitlist fun!
We told existing customers they could refer to help prospects skip the waitlist. We told prospects they just needed a referral from existing customers.
As a result, a constant stream of referral match-making unfolded over email, on Twitter, and in real life.
The waitlist ultimately accrued well over 500,000 signups and drove significant brand momentum.
Lowlights
Our waitlist’s success resulted in it sticking around far longer than the supply constraints.
At first, this was fine. It wasn’t broken, so we didn’t fix it.
But the shine wore off over time. Little by little, the waitlist created more fatigue than excitement with prospective customers.
The shift was subtle. Like a frog in boiling water, it was difficult to notice the exact moment it became a burden. Some even saw it as a key part of our brand.
Removing it was technically trivial — but, to my surprise, culturally momentous.
OpenAI DALL·E
OpenAI opened a waitlist for DALL·E 2 in April 2022.
The underlying reasons were a blend of hard and soft product constraints: GPUs, cost, and a desire to responsibly deploy new AI technology.
Highlights
Website, email, and Twitter/X messaging around the waitlist’s purpose, timing, and mechanics was extremely clear. The official OpenAI account and key individuals like Greg Brockman led from the front with clarity on invite status.
Most importantly, OpenAI sunset the waitlist just 5 months after invoking it.
Lowlights
Competing tools like MidJourney and Stable Diffusion gained huge traction during this period: X was awash with compelling output from DALL·E 2 alternatives.
One can’t help but wonder whether a direct release might have performed better than a waitlist? See also: Images in ChatGPT 4o.
Superpower
Superpower launched a waitlist in 2024 for their all-in-one health super app.
Superpower’s reasons for a waitlist were hard product constraints and service constraints. The service includes a blood draw which involves human and shipping logistics, as well as clinician support to interpret results and take action.
Highlights
The waitlist quickly amassed over 150,000 signups. This gave early market validation without the company having to fully solve the product and service supply chain.
The team artfully positioned this signal. This drove further brand awareness, helped close crucial hires, and allowed the team to raise capital.
And best of all, the waitlist is no more! Sign up here, use GAURAV at checkout for $50 off.
Lowlights
Like DALL·E 2, Superpower could have provided more clarity on why the waitlist was in place, invite mechanics, and timeframe. More transparency would likely have banked even more trust with future customers.
No startup’s product is ready on day 1.
Waitlists help capture demand while ramping supply. And like any growth tactic, waitlists can be optimized.
However, startups with waitlists should intensely focus on fixing their supply constraints so that they can kill their waitlist.
Know a founder contemplating a waitlist or running one too long? Forward this and help them out.
What did I miss? What was your favorite waitlist experience? Hit reply or add a comment.
I frequently lament that there's no good short noun for people who work in Growth. You can be a PM, engineer, designer, marketer. But if you work in Growth?
Haven’t tried much on waitlist, but doing smoke tests with lifetime deals and pricing tiers before product exists seems to tell some idea on which icp, messaging and channels may work.
What do you think on these smoke tests?
Fantastic read, Gaurav! Loved it. Thanks for sharing honest insights.
Superhuman did indeed create an impression that having a waitlist is a cool thing, thanks for breaking the myth. :)