Best practices on pre-launch emails

Folks will line up for anything. For brunch, for performances, for newly-opened stores. It’s a global phenomenon. You’ll spot people lining up in New York or Hong Kong, Osaka or London. Lining up past a perfectly fine restaurant, waiting for the one over there that Michelin or TikTok said is best.

Lines are contagious, under the right circumstances. Stands and stores are quiet until someone takes a chance and walks up. Then like clockwork, another less interested person will pause and take a glance, not so much because of the products but because others took an interest.

You wouldn’t want to miss out on something interesting. Thus the perhaps apocryphal tales of someone staring at a crack in the wall at a museum and a line forming around them to observe the “art.” There’s also the more forced virality like clubs that allow no one other than paid influencers in the first few days as queues get successively longer, or the supposedly thriving business of hiring people to wait in line at a newly opened café to make it appear popular.

“People like to follow the herd. This is the problem today,” complained one person in an article about hired queuers for a new tea shop in China. But the queuers themselves? “I don’t mind a wait for things I love,” Nigisty Lulu told the New York Times after queuing for brunch.

There’s a recipe for what makes people queue up. Curiosity. Anticipation. Novelty. Enough detail to whet your appetite—either reviews, or the current length of the line, or a tantalizing whiff of what’s on offer. FOMO, of course. And the possibility of actually getting what’s on offer—there’s an end of the line in sight, you should get to try the thing before it’s sold out or closed.

Therein lies the secrets to a pre-launch newsletter for your product. And a hint of why you shouldn’t trust in your pre-launch newsletter too much.

Coming soon

Everyone wants to launch their new product to an audience waiting to buy it. Thus the cookie-cutter startup launch script: Create a landing page with some copy and perhaps a video about the product, with an email address field and a button to “join the waitlist” or “get notified when we launch.”

Dropbox launched in 2007 with little more than a blue box, two sentences of copy, and an email signup form. That, paired with a video promoted on Hacker News, was enough to get their first 5,000 signups. Another video went viral on Digg and took that pre-launch list to 75k subscribers.

Mint, the finance app from 2006, was said to have launched with 20k subscribers on its email list. Kit neé Converkit founder Nathan Barry launched his first book with 800 subscribers, then just-over-doubled that for his next book’s launch. Robinhood, the stock trading app, says a million people signed up for their pre-launch app.

Clearly, the strategy works. Better landing page copy or videos might boost signups, as will getting in front of more people (Dropbox on Digg-style) or building in referral mechanics (Robinhood, which bumped you up the line if you invited others).

You don’t want everyone, per se. The Mint team “wanted a waiting list of personal finance interested people in different segmentations.” Hone your pitch on the initial landing page, videos, and other promotional material to attract the types of people who are most likely to want to buy your product. “Focus on what the potential buyer cares about, rather than just listing features,” advises Barry.

With the interest and email addresses coming in, though, now what?

Introduce your product

Gmail was early to the formula. It launched, April 1st, 2004, with a landing page linking to an FAQ—with an email signup form at the bottom of the page. “If you'd like to be updated about Gmail, feel free to submit your email address below,” the team promised.

Early Gmail invites were seeded to Googlers and, presumably, folks who signed up on the FAQ page. Each account could invite four others. Demand was so high, Gmail invites started popping up on eBay for hundreds of dollars.

Superhuman’s head of growth Gaurav Vohra, 16 years later, would remember above all “the exclusivity. It was really hard to get [a Gmail invite], and that made me crave it,” he recalled.

Yet for all that demand, the thing that struck me most about Gmail’s invitation email is that it assumed you wouldn’t know anything about Gmail:

“If you haven't already heard about Gmail, it's a new search-based webmail service that offers: • 1,000 megabytes (one gigabyte) of free storage • Built-in Google search that instantly finds any message you want • Automatic arrangement of messages and related replies into ‘conversations’ • Text ads and related pages that are relevant to the content of your messages”

The launch email mentioned features (1GB of storage, 500x the 2MB of storage Hotmail offered at the time), benefits (emails as conversations), and even potential downsides (ads, no matter how relevant they are, are still ads).

That was followed by a “Gmail is different. Here’s what you need to know.” email that arrived when you first opened your new Gmail inbox. And that wrapped up the Gmail invite email list’s duty.

It’s a popular formula. Stripe Billing did it, with a launch email including three bullet points. The Basecamp team went even simpler, launching their Hey email app with a single sentence: “Refresher: Hey is the brand new email service from the makers of Basecamp,” followed by your invite code and signup instructions.

You’re not Google launching Gmail or Basecamp launching Hey, but with luck and perseverance you’ll at least have a bit of their level of interest for your product. So the first lesson from Gmail is a bit of humility. People are busy. They’ll forget what you’re building, and why they signed up. They might have not fully understood in the first place, and jumped in line because it seemed cool at first glance.

Your launch email should tell people, succinctly, what you’ve built. Search based webmail with tons of storage and conversations (and also ads). Rewrite that for your product. Expand on it, a bit, but not too much. You’re going for something that people can read in a minute, that is interesting enough that they’ll take the moment to sign up, buy, and try what you’ve built.

Build anticipation

One email’s the minimum; no reason to collect email addresses if you’re not going to reach out. And daily emails would be too many. You’d burn out your list before you launch.

Strike a balance. Email every so often—once a week, or once a month if your launch is a bit further off—each time sharing behind-the-scenes details that make people excited to see your product launch.

If you have an existing mailing list, you can use it to cross-promote—but here, you have to be even more careful to not overdo it. “People hate cross-promotion of products,” worried the UserMaven team when launching a new product, “so we kept it to the bare minimum (3 emails in total) to get the word out without annoying those subscribers.” Strum Machine balances that with a dedicated “backstage pass” newsletter for their most devoted fans, as a separate pre-launch list for people most interested in their app (and with more frequent updates, behind-the-scenes details, and early bird discounts to match).

A similar balance works for a new product with a new mailing list. The Downcrawl game team, for example, announced their new tabletop game in May. A week later, they dug into the game’s details. A month after that, they wrote about the game’s new mechanics. Then an email a month about additional mechanics and features, until mid-October when they announced their crowdfunding campaign. Enough details to get the fans excited, enough left up to speculation to keep people interested for more.

Successful Kickstarter projects are my favorite example, if only because I love the peek behind the scenes that project updates offer. It’s different, of course, since on Kickstarter you’ve pre-paid, but the updates from the best Kickstarter projects keep you excited about what you’ve ordered and more understanding of delays when they inevitably happen. Their mix of sharing early-stage product sketches, behind-the-scenes factory or printing press photos and details, and factoids about the process of putting something new into the world build anticipation for the launch date.

“Give the prospect one or two useful takeaways for reading your emails,” suggests Patrick McKenzie for sales emails, advice that applies equally to pre-launch messages. Because the second greatest risk beyond boring your followers is over-promising and under-delivering. You don’t want to hand out samples of your food while people are waiting in line; you want them to catch a whiff of it in the air, motivating them to stand in line a bit longer.

Launch soon

But everyone has a limit to their patience. Overnight for an iPhone in the early years, a few hours for a popular restaurant, maybe 15 minutes for something new you just stumbled upon.

Email signups get a bit more leeway, but we’re still human. We might not walk out of the line but we will forget why we were in your email line in the first place. “People lose interest in your product or completely forget about it in 2-3 months,” suggests @navnet on IndieHackers. “The best way is to build your product as soon as possible and not rely completely on the waitlist users to convert.”

Lenny Rachitsky crunched the conversion numbers from a range of pre-launch email lists. 20% of people will convert to a paid software subscription, if they’re on an invite list less than a month. That drops to only 10% if they’re on the invite list for more than three months, a figure that aligns with the estimate of how quickly people forget a product.

“My belief about it is that a waitlist kills your business,” said @PaulHoule on Hacker News. “While they are ‘waiting’ most of them have lost interest.”

I wouldn’t take it quite that far, but the point stands. As PeterKa commented in the Times, “there is something to be said for the required patience and the acceptance of delayed gratification, as well as the value of the communal experience with strangers.” That’s part of why we’re all willing to join in beta lists.

You want to capture that interest and start the required patience with your landing page, nurture it with emails, and launch to give that hit of delayed gratification—the sooner, the better. If it takes a bit more time, build goodwill with your emails. The dwindling list effectiveness should be an incentive to keep going, but a bit of honesty and a real-world look at what shipping a product entails is still worth sharing.

Ask what they want

The conversations don’t have to be entirely yours, either. One-way only goes so far. The people who were willing to get in line for your product? Odds are, they’ll be willing to tell you why they’re waiting in line, all their hopes and dreams they have for what you’re building.

“The people who signed up for the waitlist were willing to talk with us,” said one builder on the Y Combinator subreddit. Another said the same, adding “But after I removed the waitlist, new users who signed up don't provide any feedback at all.”

The best time to ask folks and get their participation in what you’re building is pre-launch. The Basecamp team did that before launching Hey for Work, their take on Google Workspaces, with a survey about the types of companies most interested in their email service. And as I was writing this piece, another pre-launch app emailed, with questions that presumably will help shape their product’s focus.

Subscribers love it, because they get to be part of the process, and will feel a bit of ownership and warm fuzzies when they see their idea help shape your product. Your team will benefit from it, because you’ll get ideas you never could have found otherwise, and will be able to hone your documentation and marketing around the use cases pre-launch subscribers anticipate.

Be ok if people don’t buy

Even in the best of circumstances, though, everyone in your email line won’t buy your product (just as most people who rubberneck a popular stand at a weekend market won’t make a purchase, either). You might get a 3% purchase rate. Or 20%, if you’re lucky.

And that’s fine. “You don’t necessarily have to be buying anything to, like, enjoy the shopping experience,” as a Mr. Russell quipped on New Yorkers’ love of queuing up. A certain type of folks like trying and testing new products. Builders and makers like ourselves tend to be a key part of that demographic. We’ll sign up and perhaps even share new creations, which is part of the benefit your project might see from a pre-launch list. But there’s also no way every early adopter can use every new product.

What we might do, though, is be inspired by your journey. Your product will live on in our minds, long after it’s launched. And someday, one day, we might need what you’ve built and come back around.

That’s your waitlist’s true value, the friends you’ll make along the way. You never know how many longtail conversions you’ll get that started out with your “Thanks for joining us on our journey” email.