notessamuele onelia

The 1,000-Person Waitlist Built Before Launch

The Story

Tom didn’t know whether MarketingIdeas.com would become a blog, a resource, or a newsletter. He bought the domain anyway and started promoting it (Source 1).

“I started speaking in conferences and being a panelist or keynote speaker, and every time I plugged it and told people to join the waitlist of MarketingIdeas.com without knowing what it’s going to be in the future.” (Source 1).

The pitch at the end of every talk was a one-liner: “I’m launching a newsletter soon to share more ideas like these. You can sign up now.” (Source 2). The landing page was barebones (Source 2).

Almost 700 people signed up to the waitlist before launch (Source 3). By the time he sent issue #1 in August 2023, “I had like a thousand people that got my first email, which is amazing because when you start with zero and you just send out emails, no one reads them. It feels really bad.” (Source 1).

Tom kept the practice up after launching: “I made it my mission to mention the MarketingIdeas.com waitlist whenever possible: 🎤 Guest speaking gigs, 🎙️ Podcast interviews, 📱 Social media posts, 📝 Blog articles, 🤝 Networking events.” (Source 3).

The line that pushed people to sign up: “The sooner you join, the sooner you’ll get access.” (Source 3).

Lesson for Creators

Build the audience before you decide what to give them. The hardest part of a newsletter isn’t writing issue #100, it’s writing issue #1 to zero people. A waitlist solves that. You don’t need a fully-formed product to start collecting emails - you need a domain, a one-line promise, and a habit of mentioning it whenever you have someone’s attention. The 700 to 1,000 people Tom collected before launch didn’t just give him an audience - they gave him momentum and feedback that made him keep going past the lonely early issues most creators quit during.

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