Building LLAIKA and Validating with a Simple Waitlist

Hi Indiehackers,

I’m in the middle of building my third “startup” (or let’s be honest… third tool 😅). It’s called LLAIKA.

My first two attempts failed. But I learned a lot, and I’m still here. That persistence is probably the only reason I’m on round three.

One lesson from the earlier failures: don’t build in the dark. Validate before you launch.

So for LLAIKA, our first step was to put together a waitlist and see how people react to the main promise:

👉 “Founders: your first leads are already in your Inbox. LLAIKA finds them in minutes.”

Here’s what we did:
1. Researched tools for waitlists — WordPress (too heavy), Framer (too pricey for this), Carrd (nice but no email collection).
2. Ended up using Tally. We’ve used it for forms before, and they had ready-to-go waitlist templates.
3. Added a simple image of our mascot dog 🐕 (LLAIKA).
4. Did quick positioning:
• Who? B2B founders
• Benefit? Identify 10 leads for your startup
• Differentiator? Simple (just connect and go) + focused on business, not productivity

Our humble goal is just 10 signups before writing a single line of code.

You can see the waitlist here: https://llaika.com/

Curious — do you use waitlists for your projects? If yes, what worked best for you?