“Just an MVP” Wasn’t Enough: Why I Built Waitle
When starting a new project, one thing I’ve always needed hasn’t changed:
to reach people who are genuinely interested, early on.
Often, when the product doesn’t even exist yet — sometimes not even beyond an idea — I want to know one thing:
Is anyone actually interested in this?
To answer that, I usually had two options:
- Build everything myself (create a simple website, collect emails, write backend code, deploy, etc.)
- Or use a ready-made solution
The second option usually came with some familiar problems:
- It was unnecessarily expensive
- It was bloated with features I didn’t need
- Or the interface and flows felt old and clunky
What I really needed was simple:
A clean page, fast setup, and the ability to collect email addresses.
This is exactly the point where the idea of Waitle came from.
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First, for My Own Needs
When building Waitle, my first goal was simple:
To build a tool I would want to use myself.
Something not complicated, something I could set up in minutes, something that just got the job done.
Then I realized it wasn’t just my problem.
Other indie makers, side-project builders, small teams, and anyone trying something new were running into the same pain point.
And that’s how Waitle went from a personal need to a shareable solution.
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What is Waitle?
To put it simply:
Waitle is a tool that makes it easy to create coming-soon and waitlist pages.
It’s for:
- Indie makers
- New project builders
- Small teams
- Anyone who wants to collect email addresses from potential users early on
In short, it’s for anyone asking:
“Is anyone interested in this yet?”
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What You Can Do With Waitle Today
Right now, Waitle has a clean, deliberately simple experience:
- One template
- Four different color palettes
- A customizable page (brand name, hero section, email form, social links)
- A unique URL generated automatically
- You can set everything up in 1–3 minutes.
The goal is simple:
Get from “I have an idea” to “I’m collecting emails” as quickly as possible.
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What Makes It Different?
What sets Waitle apart from other tools isn’t more features — it’s focus.
Waitle is:
- Minimal but useful
- Fast
- Practical
- Affordable
I left out things on purpose.
Not everything needs to be in one product — Waitle doesn’t need to do everything, it just needs to do this one thing well.
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Rethinking MVPs
During this process, one thing I kept thinking about was the traditional MVP mindset.
The idea of validating something as fast as possible, with the simplest version of a product…
It sounds good in theory, but in practice, it never fully resonated with me.
Today, most of us aren’t building products for brand-new markets.
We’re building next to existing solutions — in categories where something already exists.
At this point, I came across a blog post that really put things into perspective.
I actually discovered it thanks to a share on X by Furkan:
https://x.com/benfurkankilic/status/1999745984302022709
Then I read the original piece on Linear:
“Rethinking the startup MVP: building a competitive product”
https://linear.app/now/rethinking-the-startup-mvp-building-a-competitive-product
One part really stood out to me:
“Building something valuable is no longer about validating a novel idea as fast as possible. Instead, the modern MVP exercise is about building a version of an idea that is different from and better than what exists today.”
So the question isn’t just “Does it work?”
It’s “Why should someone choose this over what already exists?”
That’s the mindset I tried to follow while building Waitle.
There were already coming-soon and waitlist tools out there, but I tried to make something that was:
- Simpler
- Faster
- More modern in UI and flow
- And more affordable
After reading that piece, it became much clearer why I wanted to position Waitle this way.
Today, an MVP isn’t just about being minimal — it has to be competitive.
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What’s Next
In the near future, I’m working on:
- A live preview feature so you can see changes while you edit
- Analytics (visits, conversions, etc.)
- Custom domain support
Beyond that, I also plan to share more about Waitle’s development process, decisions, and what I’ve learned along the way.
This article didn’t go into technical details — that’s coming in a separate, more technical post.
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Finally
If you:
- Are building a new project
- Want to collect emails from potential users early
- Need a simple, fast, modern solution
I’d love for you to try waitle.io.
We’re currently in public beta, and it’s completely free during this phase.
Your feedback will directly influence how Waitle evolves.
I’ll continue to share more about Waitle’s journey, so feel free to follow along.
Thanks for reading 🙌
🔗 Explore, upvote, and share your thoughts on Waitle:
https://www.indiehackers.com/product/waitle
🔗 Original on Medium: https://aykutonen.medium.com/just-an-mvp-wasnt-enough-why-i-built-waitle-179ae4b57950
One thing I’ve learned is that a waitlist or coming-soon page isn’t just about collecting emails, it’s about observing behavior.
That gap you describe between “just an MVP” and real interest is exactly where most founders get false confidence. Email signups alone can look validating, but they don’t always reflect intent.
What I like about tools like this is how they shorten the path from idea to signal. At VCV8, we focus less on the page itself and more on what the page attracts, where traffic comes from, how people engage, and whether interest compounds or stalls.
Competitive MVPs still need proof, and early activity patterns often tell you more than feature completeness ever will.
Totally agree. Email signups alone can create a false sense of validation if you don’t look at how that interest is formed.
For me, the waitlist is less about “collecting emails” and more about shortening the distance between an idea and real signals — where traffic comes from, how people engage, and whether momentum builds or fades.
Early behavior patterns often say much more than a polished MVP ever could.
This resonated a lot — especially the shift from “does it work?” to “why would someone choose this?”
One thing I’ve noticed validating early products is that speed to value matters more than feature count, but clarity of positioning matters more than both.
For something like Waitle, the real test might be:
Can a founder land on the page and immediately think “this is exactly for my use case” without comparing alternatives?
Curious — what surprised you most once people actually started using it vs your original assumptions?
That’s a great point. I’m actually still not fully confident about the positioning, especially when it comes to the landing page copy.
It’s very clear and intuitive for a technical, indie / solo-dev audience (people like me), but it might feel vague or under-explained for other potential users — who could actually be the most valuable ones. I’m planning some revisions there, and possibly validating them with ads and A/B tests to better understand which positioning clicks instantly.
Once people started using Waitle, two things genuinely surprised me:
• Some users published their pages with almost no content at all. That made me realize the product might need more guidance or ready-made starting points, instead of assuming everyone knows what to write.
• The bigger surprise was an entirely unexpected audience: a French tattoo artist used Waitle to collect demand before traveling to another city. That moment really challenged my assumptions about who the product is “for” and highlighted how much broader the use cases could be.
That experience helped me rethink positioning not as a narrow persona, but as a clear promise that different audiences can instantly map to their own use case.