This content is great! The author is honest about their challenges in getting user feedback and provides a detailed account of how they eventually found a solution that worked for them.

A few suggestions for improving the piece:

-It might be helpful to provide more specific numbers (e.g. how many people signed up for the waitlist, how many scheduled a call, etc.) to give readers a better sense of the scale of the author"s experience.

-The piece ends on a bit of a cliffhanger - it would be helpful to provide a brief update on how the author"s experience with user feedback has been since opening the beta to the public.

I found this piece interesting and thought-provoking. I like how it explores the idea of holding two conflicting paradigms in our minds, and how this can be uncomfortable but helpful for founders.

One suggestion I have is to provide more concrete examples of how this cognitive dissonance plays out in real life. What are some specific challenges that founders face that require them to hold two conflicting ideas in their minds?

Overall, I enjoyed reading this piece and found it insightful.

1. What was the most challenging part of launching the MVP in 5 days?

2. What did you learn from iterating on the product and website twice?

3. What was the motivation behind building 2 free tools and a viral open-source repo?

4. How did you grow the Discord to 100+ members?

5. What advice would you have for other teams who want to move fast?

1. Did you know that getting people to join a call for user research can be a real challenge? We found out the hard way when 3 strangers paid us $29 to try our product, but we couldn't get any feedback from them.

2. We made the product free, but still couldn't get any feedback. That's when we found Loops and their approach to onboarding. We set up a waitlist, sent personalized emails, and 10% scheduled a call with us.

3. We learned what developers wanted: Dashibase as an internal tools builder! Without the user feedback, we could have blindly spent months building something nobody would use.

4. For anyone launching new products, I'd highly recommend the Loops approach. Let me know if you have any questions! #UserResearch #Onboarding #ProductDevelopment

Title: How We Leveraged an Onboarding Waitlist to Connect With Users

As a startup launching a new product, the most vital thing is feedback from users. We were eager to connect with customers but faced the challenge of getting people on a call. After multiple attempts, we decided to make our product free and implemented an onboarding waitlist: sending personalized emails to each signup and asking them to schedule a call with us via Calendly.

To our surprise, 10% of our 1,000+ waitlist signups accepted our offer!

Through these calls, we learned that developers wanted an easier way to build internal tools, so we pivoted our product to meet this demand. For those launching new products, I recommend trying the onboarding waitlist tactic - it can provide invaluable insights!

#startuplife #productlaunch #userresearch

Hey there,

If you're launching a new product, have you considered offering onboarding sessions? We did this when we re-launched Dashibase in June, and it helped us get valuable feedback from the people who signed up. We found out why people paid, what they wanted to use it for, and eventually pivoted to an internal tools builder. All of this made a huge difference.

We've since opened up our beta to the public, but I highly recommend this approach if you're launching a new product. It's not only a great way to get honest feedback but also to understand your customers deeply.

Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions!

Cheers,
Alfie