Pre-launch: How I reached 100+ signups to waiting list in 3 days

On a mission to empower kids to learn AI so they stay caught up, I'm building an online academy with step-by-step online courses, so they create cool things while learning how to use the latest AI tools.
I wanted to share my story as it can inspire some of you.

Last Friday:

• Got the idea, shipped the landing in 3 to 4 hours: candideai.com. I shipped 50+ landing pages in the past years, I know Webflow very well, so the whole process goes pretty fast now. I include creating design materials here.
• Installed Beam Analytics & Google Search console as usual.

Week-end:

• Time with kid & family
• Rest
• This offered me some time to think through the whole thing. But action is needed.

Monday:

• Polished the landing page & everything: metadata, thumbnail, etc.
• Created a thank you page to get some virality
• Created Twitter account (actually I used an old one in the same industry, but only 12 followers)
• Ready for tomorrow's pre-launch

From Tuesday to Thursday:

• Submitted the tool to AI tools directory. Futurepedia published it a few hours later. First wave of signed up users coming in.
• I started to share on Reddit, Indiehackers & Hackernews. I got roast on Hackernews as I'm just "harvesting emails" as they say and they're not wrong (except I'm legit, but I get the idea)
• Shared some stuff on my personal Twitter account (250 followers) + Candide's account (12 followers)
• And that's it!

Results:

• 650 unique visitors
• 136 signups
• 20.9% Conversion Rate

My goal is to reach 500 sign-ups with no time limit. The Conversion Rate is motivating me. People are excited too. So I'm already working on the first courses.

Futurepedia was a no-brainer here. But it's only 27% of my total traffic. Of course, 62% of the traffic appears from "Direct" source, so there is no way to know where it comes from. Twitter is the third one with 10%.

Tool Stack:

• Webflow for the website
• Podia for the online academy