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Stop "Generating Signups." Start Manufacturing Demand.
- Lukas Holschuh
- July 17, 2025
- 01:59 pm
Inside this article, you’ll discover:
Why your waiting list is probably a ghost town, and the strategic mistake you're making.
- How to stop passively collecting emails and start actively manufacturing demand for your unreleased product.
- The single ad copy framework that's perfect for selling a future that doesn't exist yet.
- Why a low "Cost Per Signup" is a dangerous vanity metric, and the only metric that truly predicts launch day success.
Plus, for more advice, schedule a free consultation and audit so you’ll know exactly where to improve or launch with confidence. This isn’t theory – it’s actionable insight that you can use immediately, designed to take your ads from wasteful to winning.
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Let's be honest. Your "waiting list" is probably a ghost town. A handful of signups from your friends, your mum, and a few bots from a test campaign you ran. You followed the steps, ran some ads, and now you're staring at a spreadsheet, wondering why nobody seems to care about your big launch.
It's because you've made the classic mistake: you tried to collect leads instead of manufacturing demand.
A powerful waiting list isn't a passive collection of emails. It's an active, growing asset of people with a burning problem who have come to believe you are the only one who can solve it. It’s a concentration of unresolved demand that you, and only you, have promised to satisfy. This isn't about "boosting signups"; it's about engineering anticipation from the ground up.
Part 1: You Can't Manufacture Demand for a "Nice-to-Have"
Before you spend a single pound on ads, you must be ruthlessly honest about the problem you solve. Is your product a "vitamin" (a nice-to-have improvement) or a "painkiller" (a must-have solution to an urgent problem)? You cannot build a powerful waiting list for a vitamin. People don't wait for vitamins; they wait for a cure.
This is the "Isolate the Nightmare" principle. Your entire strategy hinges on finding a specific, painful, and expensive problem. No one will join a waiting list for "a better project management tool." That market is saturated and the problem is vague. However, they will crawl over broken glass to join the waiting list for "the first platform designed to stop scope creep in fixed-fee projects for creative agencies." The first is a product; the second is a promise to end a recurring nightmare. If you can't articulate the nightmare your customer is living through, you have no business asking them to wait for a solution.
Part 2: You're Not Selling a Product, You're Selling the Future
This is where most waiting list campaigns fail. They try to sell features for a product that doesn't even exist yet. "Our new app will have AI-powered dashboards and seamless integrations!" Nobody cares. Remember, your features are meaningless until they solve a problem.
Since the product isn't available, you cannot sell the present. You must sell a vision of a better future. The single best copywriting framework for this is the Before-After-Bridge (BAB). It's practically designed for waiting lists.
Before: You start by painting a vivid, painful picture of their current reality. You must describe the hell they are in right now with more clarity than they can. "Your creative agency is constantly losing money on projects. You're bogged down in endless revision cycles, your team is burning out, and every client email feels like a potential argument over scope."
After: Then, you show them heaven. You describe the world that will exist for them once your solution is in their hands. "Imagine every project finishing on time and on budget. Your team is happy and creative. Your clients see you as a strategic partner, not a vendor to be haggled with. You are finally, predictably profitable."
Bridge: Finally, you position your unreleased product as the one, true path from their hell to your heaven. "Our new platform, [Product Name], is the bridge. It gives you ironclad control over project scope without stifling creativity. Join the waiting list now to be the first to get access and lock in an exclusive 50% off for your first year."
You are not selling software. You are selling the end of their anxiety.
Part 3: Build Commitment, Not a Form Fills
Your waiting list landing page has one job: to convert a visitor's interest into a concrete commitment. It must be brutally simple and obsessively focused on the promised transformation. Anything else is a distraction that will kill your conversion rate.
Forget your company's backstory, your team photos, or links to your blog. The page needs three things: a headline that restates the "After" state from your ad ("The End of Scope Creep is Coming."); a few bullet points describing the outcomes they will experience, not the features you will build; and a single, glaringly obvious email field with a button that says "Get Early Access." That's it.
Part 4: The One Metric That Predicts Success
As you run your ads, you will be tempted to optimise for a low Cost Per Signup. Resist this temptation. It is a vanity metric that will lead you astray.
Who cares if you get 10,000 signups at £1 each if only 10 of them convert into paying customers on launch day? I would rather have 500 signups at £10 each if 100 of them become high-value customers. Your job isn't to build a big list; it's to build the right list.
The only metric that matters during this phase is your Estimated Waitlist-to-Customer Conversion Rate. You track this by closely monitoring the engagement of your waiting list. Are they opening your update emails? Are they replying to your questions? Are they a perfect match for the ICP you defined in Part 1? A small, engaged list of true believers is infinitely more valuable than a massive, silent list of freebie-seekers. This is the logic that will fund your launch.
A List Of Shoppers.
Building a waitlist doesn't have to be expensive. For this eCommerce store launch, we built a community of interested shoppers before the store was even live - for $0.29 per signup. How? We used niche specific copy to build a community feel, then let them shop the actual products to buy right on the ad.
Start Manufacturing Demand
Stop thinking about your waiting list as a pre-launch chore. It is your single most important strategic asset. It's not a list of names. It's a barometer of your product-market fit, a focus group for your messaging, a pool of your first evangelists, and the engine of your launch day success.
The entire process—from identifying the nightmare to crafting the ad and measuring the right metric—is a system. It’s a system for manufacturing demand out of thin air.
This is how you launch a product that people are not just willing to try, but are desperate to buy.
If you’re ready to build a waiting list that actually builds your business, let's talk.
Book a free initial consultation at holschuh.co.uk.
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