Hey everyone,
I’m a founder who has started up multiple ventures in the past. Most have failed but each time (for some reason) I kept bouncing back and trying again. One thing I found during my career was to build a waitlist and test our different landing pages to drive growth even before your product was created. I tired this many times and got no where. It was super frustrating and I kept wondering what I was doing wrong - especially seeing how other people did it in a few weeks or grew to 100K users in 1 month.
My latest project Cuppa is a customer success hub for teams. We basically help reduce churn and increase customer revenue by streamlining team workflow.
When I started our latest project ( www.cuppa.so ) - I was super hesitant about doing another waitlist but we needed something that allowed us to manage interested leads whilst we developed. So we tried to do something a bit differently:

1. Unlike traditional “Waitlists” - we made it a “Book a demo” button and created a form using (tally.so) to qualify leads. This was great because it allowed us to focus our efforts on reaching out to companies that were genuinely interested and that would give us great feedback.
2. I’m not a marketing genius but a friend of mine told me that, depending on the type if business (B2B or B2C), having a presence in some shape or form is super important. We tried Instagram and stupidly spent money on ads to try drive traffic to our site so we could monitor how people reacted to our landing page. For us, that was a big waste of time and money haha. Instead, we found that a combination of SEO and LinkedIn helped us get in front of the right people. So for me the key thing is DISTRIBUTION. How can you distribute what you have in front of people? There is a really good book called “Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth”. We used that as our bible and tried a lot of channels. I only mentioned Instagram because that seems to be the go-to for a lot of new founders. If you want more info on what we have tried, send me a DM and I’ll write a more in-depth version of our Bullseye method.
3. It takes time! 7 months in some part sounds like a long time and in other parts not so much. But we were patient and had weekly goals that helped us drive growth. We were (and still are) writing 3-4 articles a week to drive SEO traffic as well as scheduling meetings with people who signed up. (Lots of Zoom calls!). I think because we are B2B, we were talking to quite a few people and formed great connections. So the more meetings we did the more our waitlist grew from word of mouth.
4. We slowly prioritised who should be let in first based on team size and that led us to more growth in our wait list. We chose companies that had strong relationships with other companies (partnerships). As they saw the benefits of our platform they were naturally spreading the word of our company. Again word of mouth.
   Overall - it worked for us eventually, although it wasn’t the massive explosive growth you read on Tech Crunch. Hoped this helps people and I am happy to write more about our experience in more depth and list books that has helped us over the years.
   For anyone curious about what we are doing. Check us out and support us at www.cuppa.so haha 😛
   Good luck to everyone trying to build something. Just keep chipping away.