Discord as a waitlist?
I think a large majority of products out there validate by building waitlists however most of them use email.
I've done that before and it works fine however there is about a 20-40% churn rate (probably lost in the swamp of emails or forgot that they signed up to a waitlist). And if you try to leverage the community before shipping the product the engagement (CTR) will probably be less than 50%.
I wondered if someone has tried building up a waitlist without getting people's emails and directing them to a discord server straight away,
any thoughts or if you have done it share any insight
It's not a pure win or lose, E-mail is more accessible and basically the lowest common denominator of connection.
Discord is higher value touch points and chat but many people don't use it
Yes, totally agree! In my experience a lot of web3 projects use discord as a waiting list. However, a lot of these people are not active there and I can imagine that the churn rate is even higher, because discord does not have a convenient way of curating your servers.
Would be interesting if someone who tried discord would comment on the churn rate though.
I think it really depends on the type of business. For example, if you're B2B it might be a bit unrealistic to expect prospects to have a discord account, or to be using it actively. On the other hand, everybody has an email, so the barrier to joining the waiting list would be much lower
I've seen some Code Streamers on Twitch & Youtube making their community over Discord and giving them Beta access over there for their new product.
This is actually what I did with Evoke (hosting open source AI models on the cloud accessible through API for users building AI apps)
Before we launched, we built up the discord to 1000 members
Being active in the community and engaging with them allows users to remember what they signed up for + people probably check discord more often than their email.
Here's our AI discord for reference
oh, that's awesome Richard!
a big yes!
discord is so powerful in engaging with your users, keeping them updated and actually having interactive place to wait until the release!
I have used e.g. Facebook groups in the past. With our current project we are also thinking about Discord, but from my point of view you have to create an added value beyond "just waiting". Then it's a great opportunity - I'm in some Discords myself for the same reason :)
Depends on the audience. Do they already have a Discord account? If yes, then getting them in a Discord server could be huge.
But everyone has email.
What target audiences use Discord? Gamers, Crypto enthusiasts, NFT groups, and more that I don't know about.
would you say this kind of community use Discord - indie hackers, startups, etc?
I don't know. Guess you could post a Poll to find out and/or search for Discord groups related to Indie Hackers, Product Hunt, and other startup-type watering holes.