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@notice_period ·

waitlist page or a stripe pre-order when i have four weekends to decide Kill or Continue

I have four weekends before I have to decide whether to take three months unpaid leave to build this. So the constraint is real and short: I want the strongest signal per hour of effort, and I will not get a fifth weekend.

A waitlist page is maybe four hours including the ad copy. A pre-order with real checkout is a weekend, because I would want a refund policy, a terms page and something that does not look like a scam. Is the extra weekend worth it?

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  • @committee_kim · 4mo ago · 3 replies
    @committee_kim ·

    Pre-order, and it does not need a weekend.

    A payment link, a one-page site and a paragraph of terms is two hours. The refund policy is one sentence: "if it is not in your hands by 30 November, I refund you automatically, no email required". A real date is what makes it honest and it is also what makes it convert.

    How I would spend the four weekends:

    • Weekend 1: page up, payment link live, priced at something real - $49 for a year, not $5.
    • Weekends 2 and 3: get 300 of the right people to see it. This is the hard part and it is where a waitlist test hides the difficulty from you.
    • Weekend 4: count.

    Five payments beats five hundred emails as an input to a decision about unpaid leave. A waitlist gives you a number you will argue with yourself about for three months.

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    • @notice_period · 4mo ago
      @notice_period OP ·

      "A waitlist gives you a number you will argue with yourself about" - that is exactly what I was setting up to do, and I would have found a reason to read 200 signups as a yes.

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    • @clay_bertram · 4mo ago
      @clay_bertram ·

      Also decide the threshold before weekend 4 and write it down somewhere with a date on it. Deciding what counts as success after you see the result is how everyone talks themselves into the leave.

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  • @interval_ida · 4mo ago · 3 replies
    @interval_ida ·

    Neither. Spend two of those weekends delivering the outcome by hand for three people at $50 each.

    You cannot fake it, you find out in week one whether the thing is even useful, and you get the sentence that makes everything else easier: "three people paid me for this last month." That sentence is worth more in the leave conversation with yourself, and with a partner, than any signup count.

    It also surfaces the thing a landing page never does - how much work the manual version actually is, which is your future support burden.

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    • @committee_kim · 4mo ago
      @committee_kim ·

      That is the point, though. If you cannot find three people in a weekend, the pre-order was going to have the same problem with a nicer page in front of it. Distribution is the test either way - the instrument only changes how fast you find out.

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    • @notice_period · 4mo ago
      @notice_period OP ·

      The catch is that finding three people willing to pay $50 for a manual service is itself most of a weekend, and I would be doing it cold. Not saying no - just noticing that the cheap-sounding option has the same distribution problem as the expensive one.

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  • @psu_paula · 4mo ago
    @psu_paula ·

    If a checkout page takes you a full weekend, that is worth knowing on its own. It is a payment link and some HTML. Nothing about the four-weekend plan works if the build side is running at that rate, and the leave decision should account for it.

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  • @costbasis_carl · 4mo ago
    @costbasis_carl ·

    Practical bit since you are taking money for something unbuilt: keep the amounts small, refund fast and without argument, and be explicit that it is a pre-order rather than a subscription that has started. Card networks care about the description on the statement. This is 20 minutes of care, not a legal project, but do not skip it.

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  • @listener_lena · 4mo ago
    @listener_lena ·

    One more input for the leave decision that nobody puts in these threads: how long can you go without income, precisely, and what happens in month four. The signal test is the easy part. I have watched two people get a good signal and still have to stop at week nine.

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  • @hemline_hank · 4mo ago
    @hemline_hank ·

    Four weekends is 32 hours if you are honest about it and nothing goes wrong. Plan for 20.

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