If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is there to hear it, did it make a noise. Easily one of the most popular quotes of the modern world. While novel in its approach we can apply it greatly to product.  If you write a ton of code, and spend countless hours testing it, and it has every feature you can imagine, but you can’t generate a user base, does your product matter? This is where an MVP can add a ton of value.

Waitlisted’s goal is to help makers quickly validate their ideas, and present them to the masses to answer a simple question. Is my marketing, messaging and user base potential enough to generate enough interest to get a user to fork over the most basic of currency; A contact.

Minimum Viable Product – MVP

Validate your product with an MVP, test your idea and your ability to market before spending time and money on building every idea you have. In the end, let your users and your data drive what you build, or you might make something no one wants or no one sees.

Spend more time in the early days building your reach and interest and less time building features that solve problems that you don’t know your users will have.  Find out the real problems people who are interested in your product have and build for that.

Making product often comes down to solving for X. But the math rarely works out when we guess what it is, rather than using data to balance the equation of users to product.

If you have a great idea for our product, join our waitlist, sign up for our slack and let us know.

Special: Sign up for Waitlisted today and pay only 60 dollars for your first year.

If you are creating product, odds are you are going to need some software. This can range from stock art and design, to business mapping tools. You may even want to list your own product in an effort to share it with the masses of makers building products.

Visit Startup Stash

Startup Stash is an awesome place where those two worlds collide. Waitlisted is listed on Startup Stash under the MVP directory. We help creators quickly bootstrap new concepts by allowing them to effortlessly and robustly create viral marketing campaigns.

Find more tools like waitlisted along with promoting you own product to thousands of other early stage startups by listing it FOR FREE, on startup stash.

This is a curated directory so don’t feel too bad if your product doesn’t get listed, or if it takes a while. Hopefully you will at least find some useful resources.

When you are planning out your hot new product consider this? Before you spend months working to build out your features and designs, spending money on developers and user experience testers, ask the simple question. If I put up a nice looking landing pagee, explain my grand concept for the application, and get 1,000 people to look at it, would anyone give me their email address?

While it may take a somewhat fully baked usable product, to get a potential customer to open their wallets, if you idea is good enough, exciting enough, all you should need to get an email is promise of more. If you are truly solving a problem that a market faces, people will be interested enough to give you their email in hopes of a follow up to announce your epic launch.

If they don’t, you may want to rethink your idea. Not all failures are because the product is bad, but sometimes its not well explained or your execution leaves something to be desired. Its important to find alignment though, with the market, before proceeding to build the wrong product. Use you mailing list, MVP, waitlist as a way to explore the market and find your true customers. Learning early will save you time, money, and failure in the long run.

Reach out to us or sign up for a free trial, and launch your perfect MVP today. Not only does waitlisted help show value by delivering you the emails of interested users, we take it to the next step by helping you find fanatic customers who care enough to share your product before its live.

If you’ve never heard of Uber, Congratulations, You’ve been living under a literal rock. One of the great pioneers of the sharing economy.

All Jokes aside, Uber is a Mammoth of a company, that i’ve written a few blogs about over the years, and its meteoric rise to Startup Stardom has lead to quite a few ambitious entrepreneurs trying to crack the code  required to create the next uber.

A common trend amongst the most ambitious Uberprenuer is creating the “Uber for X” and this will be the focus of this post.

Simply put, the biggest misconception around Uber for X, is that Uber’s value proposition is transportation, logistics or delivery. The truth is, that Uber’s value is that it alleviates the need for you to own a car that you only use a few times a week, for a few minutes a day.  The real Uber for X’s get that and they aren’t trying to compete in things you can do with cars / drivers because that pool is closed, its a waste of breath, they own what they can, and they own it hard. No gold left in those mines.

To participate in the Uber for X economy today, focus your attention at alleviating other high cost / maintenance verticals, around products people need but use infrequently use.

A great case came up recently with Chicago start up, PrintWithMe. Hearing about what they were doing, they were truly the Uber of Printing. They’ve solved the problem of finding a printer, configuring it to print, and maintaining it. Ink, paper etc, managed. No longer do I need a clunky piece of shelf plastic for the 10 things I need to print a year.

Figure out what Vertical you can disrupt by alleviating ownership, then become the Uber for X, then launch it with Waitlisted.

Waitlisted started to solve a few problems but at the top of these was giving startups interesting ways to engage prospects. The problem we saw was that companies were spending their precious dollars building sign up forms that engaged their early customers. The classic example of this is Robinhood, who I would credit with really bringing waiting lists to the forefront. At waitlisted we wanted to provide a similar technology and platform to everyone. We wanted startups and marketers to be able to focus on building their unique products, and to leverage us to help them grow their sign ups. That is exactly what we are doing.

The next question we must answer is, why have a waiting list at all? Why not just use MailChimp and collect email address directly?

At the forefront of all other arguments, is that of limited capacity. Waitlisted helps solve startups’ capacity problems by acting as an engaging buffer that a mailing list cannot. It also incentivizes referrals by granting users faster access to your capacity. 

How waitlisted addresses the Capacity Problem

The next question you might ask is, What is Capacity? Capacity is the number of users you can support. This is a reality for any startup. It can be a function of what your servers can support or it can be a function of what your staff can support. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that your capacity is how many requests per second your web server can handle, the biggest bottleneck is often how many customers your team can service. 

There can be too many users.

The truth is too many interested users can Ruin your product, but it doesn’t have to. For one taking feedback from thousands of users day one with a limited staff would be like drinking from a firehose, good ideas broken into cohorts over time, tracked as features grow and change will allow you to see what is working and what isn’t.

Releasing everything day one, and getting horrible feedback also sends a bad social message that could be avoided by inducting smaller cohorts and iterating on problems as they come up. On top of all this, you could experience the slashdot effect or perhaps the ProductHunt effect where a massive one day influx of users overwhelms the amount of infrastructure you expected to need. By hosting your landing / signup page somewhere like Instapage, and using our Waitlisted plugin to manage your cohorts and drive social gamification, you are more likely to have a solid long term launch strategy that works.