replace the email waitlist with calls

the play

Stop waiting for an email to activate people. Get every early user on a call, one to one or in small groups. Set them up on the spot and write down what they ask for. Then build that.

what happened

company	the hands-on move	result
Superhuman	every new user had to do a 30-minute 1:1 video onboarding to get in. early calls ran much longer	its product-market fit score, the share of users who’d be “very disappointed” without it, went from 22% to 58% as it focused on its keenest users and built what they asked for
Airbnb	Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia went door to door to their New York hosts and photographed the homes themselves	revenue doubled after the better photos

The 58% matters because of Sean Ellis’s benchmark: product-market fit needs at least 40% of users saying they’d be “very disappointed” without the product.

At YC they call the Stripe version of this the “Collison installation”, Paul Graham wrote. When someone agreed to try Stripe, the founders would say “Right then, give me your laptop” and set them up on the spot.

why it works

lever	what it does
the call lands	a calendar invite with a person on the other end gets attended
you see where they get stuck	half an hour watching a user beats a month of dashboards
setup on the spot	the user leaves the call already using it, with their data in
you hear the requests first-hand	the features that 25 of your first 50 ask for are the roadmap
it doesn’t have to scale yet	Superhuman went from founders doing calls to dedicated onboarding specialists later

from my calls

instead of moving to more hands off channels… you should move to more hands on channels of onboarding.

just manually identify 50 people who love using this feed.

A team lost most of its email waitlist. Their invites landed in Gmail’s “updates” tab and the codes that did get through were being resold. Their plan was more automation. I told them to go the other way:

move	detail
group onboarding calls	two or three a week. invite people in, set them up live
hand-pick the first 50	the people who actually love the feed, chosen by you
build what 25 of the 50 ask for	half your best users asking for the same thing is a signal
an hour each with the top 10	sit with your ten best users one to one

there is no way you can land emails in inbox. it’s incredibly hard these days.

cost vs payoff

	what
cost	founder hours. every user is a call
cost	slower top-of-funnel growth while you do it
payoff	users who leave the call set up and active
payoff	a roadmap written by your best users
payoff	Superhuman’s PMF score went from 22% to 58% while it built what its keenest users asked for

how to steal it

	crypto app	consumer app
the call	a group call or Telegram voice chat where you walk people through wallet setup and the first trade or deposit	a 1:1 or small group video call to set up the account and first use
who gets in	hand-picked from the waitlist, onchain history or your community	hand-picked from the waitlist by fit
what to capture	where they get stuck, what they ask for, who they’d invite	where they get stuck, what they ask for
the cadence	two or three group calls a week	same
measure	activation on the call, week-one retention, requests per user	same

Run it like this:

Kill the “we’ll email you when you’re in” step. Send a call link instead.
Pick the first 50 by hand.
Write down every request. Build what half of them ask for.
Spend an hour each with your top 10.
Hire someone to run the calls only once you know what a good call looks like.

watch-outs

watch-out	what to do
it eats founder time	cap it. group calls two or three times a week, 1:1 only for the top 10
invite codes get resold	tie the code to a call slot or a named person
building for the loudest user	count requests. build what half of the 50 ask for
no plan to stop	decide what self-serve onboarding looks like once the calls stop teaching you anything new