How we failed with a waitlist 🤯 (but not really)

Hey everybody 🏄‍♂️ 
I want to share our experience and few insights on engaging the community while the product development (we build Aaply). 
 Cool idea We decided to gather a waitlist of people who were potentially interested in the future product and created a landing page with an opportunity to sign up for notification. In 12 months we managed to collect 1130 emails. 👌 Not bad (we thought)! Strategy We assumed that as soon as the basic functionality was ready, we would launch early users from the waitlist into the product. After all, thousands of people seem enough to gather the first feedback. Beta launch Once the product was there, we started sending invites. We tried different hypotheses:    • We sent invites in batches of 40/50 messages.    • Mixing those who just got added to the waitlist (2 days ago) with those who did it 6 months ago.    • Tried different meanings, text, and subjects.    • Sent direct messages for personal contact.    • Sent credentials right away, directly from the platform.    • Tried different email services (Gmail and our domain).    • Wrote on behalf of the founder or the team.    • We have sent follow-ups. The conversion to the response of the first 300 invites was low: approx 20% 😰 Analytics The regular batch of 50 emails:    10 — YES.    03 — errors (email doesn’t exist or smth).    21 — did not open the email (within 48 hours).    16 — opened, but no answer or action. Benchmarks We were VERY SURPRISED when we talked to other teams and learned that a 10%-20% conversion rate from wl to signup is considered decent. If you get more than that, it is ‘amazing’ level. Conclusion For now, we have decided to suspend the mailing of invites. We are fine-tuning the landing, creating content, doing tutorials, etc, to increase final conversion. Interested to hear about your experiences with waitlists and community engagement from different channels. Hope this helpful ✌️