Just sent our first waitlist newsletter - reviews please! 🙏
We recently reached over 150 people on the HackerStash waitlist and we've been having trouble finding a decent (and free) tool to send out updates. In the end we've settled on Zoho Campaigns and we've finally sent out the first email!
None of us have any experience in reaching out to waitlist peeps, so I thought it would be worth seeing what my fellow indiehackers think - and where better than the pro's in the newsletter crew? 🥰.
What do you like or dislike? What could we do better next time? What was our biggest mistake (apart from the typo 🤦♂️)?
Well done Chris! I like the feeling of anticipation, good things come to those who wait. I thought was on the longer side for an email though
Thanks Victor 😊 you're right, it was definitely too long. It took us ages to get the email sent out and I felt like I should put loads in but really I could have spread the email over 2 emails!
Nice one Chris! I happily opened it today. I thought it was really good - perhaps the only critique is going too far into the weeds on development of the app. Would be more interested to hear about the other projects and what sorts of other people are signing up.
For future updates - I came across this Trello board with some ideas a while ago if it's helpful https://trello.com/b/CjuUKh2j/pre-launch-email-templates
Nice, thanks Matt! Some good ideas on that Trello board 🙂.
Good point about the techie nature of the email, perhaps I was a bit blinkered by where we're at in the product development. I like the idea of sharing the sorts of projects that are planning to join HackerStash. We don't currently ask people this during sign up though, so it's not always clear from the URL as some are gmails etc. I wonder if we sent a quick survey asking about what sort of projects people are working on if they would answer?
Only one way to find out! But, I think if you sent an email and asked people for a short description of their project so you could potentially share it in an upcoming email list people would be pretty happy to do that. I'll volunteer Taskable to be the first project you share if that helps 🤗
True 😊 I'll add some questions to the next email and see what comes back!
Unsure about your newsletter. But I really like your website @blunicorn
haha thanks Felix - starting work on website v4 in the coming few weeks (in preparation for launch). Anything you think you'd really like to see on the website or that you didn't fully understand at the moment? We've got a pretty good list of things to change/add but always good to hear more feedback!
Just checking out your landing page now, and I'm curious about how you plan to prevent fraud in the tournaments. If someone created enough separate accounts, couldn't they control who the winners in the top 10% are? Even though this would cost them $12 per account, perhaps they could secretly control half the accounts on the site and make a profit by claiming all of the prizes.
It's something we're planning for, but it will need close attention for sure. We'll be monitoring account behaviour throughout each tournament and realistically the return on investment would be pretty low if someone tried to game the system. I think the fact it's one bank card per project helps too 🙂
Some people will 100% try and game the system as that's the world we live in. It will be pretty clear on our end (and probably to everyone else) if projects and their posts are fake.
We're going to publish the rules, guidance and ledger details soon, I'll let you know when we do of you'd like to take a look? 😊