MicroHQ launched a waitlist this week following our established “Sell First, Build Later” principles. Let’s take a closer look at their strategy. If you're willing to explore a long enough time table, you could follow a similar path. 

What is MicroHQ? Micro is an alternative CRM launching in 2025. Their language: “It's a CRM that doesn't feel like homework, an email client that knows what matters.”

The Steps:

1. Build an audience through a free product

2. Announce on multiple channels at once

3. Head turning launch content

4. Drive to landing page

5. Convert/measure interest

6. Keep the conversation going

7. Let in the most engaged early adopters

8. Release to the general public

Step 1: Build an audience through a free product.

They've had a free newsletter called Homescreen. They were able to send their new company's launch announcement through their newsletter to however many tens or thousands of subscribers. The founder Brett Goldstein also built his personal brand to 22k follower on X.

The 2020s is all about building your community first and then launching a product to that community. That’s what Brett and team are doing here.

Step 2: Announce on multiple channels at once, but drive all traffic to one spot.

Looks like all roads lead to X. 

Here’s the newsletter post: 

Step 3: Include a head turner, moving, but vague video with the launch announcement.

Their video is awesome, but doesn’t actually communicate anything about what their new product will do. It's focused on the problems and the emotions tied to the problems to get people to sign up for something new. 

This video is the most expensive part of their strategy. It’s well produced and beyond the capabilities of the average person. Potentially cost them a few thousand dollars to make. You don’t need a video this complex, but it helps. Dollar for dollar a video is generally going to get you farther than building a product.

For more affordable launch video examples, check out Marc Lou’s Shipfast launch or AirAI’s pre-launch video.

Step 4: Send people to a landing page with a waitlist sign up and not much else.

Again, the idea is to emphasize the problem and the early adopters will jump at the opportunity for anything new.  Website: https://www.micro.so/

What’s most important about this site is what’s not there. It’s a 2 page site (1 page is for careers). The main page is doesn’t have long lists of features, or demos, or pricing, or anything else. They’re betting on their social media video to do the convincing before anyone arrives at the site.

The site is built in Framer which is an affordable and easy-enough-to-use web page builder. A Carrd or UnicornPlatform page would work just fine here, too.

Step 5: Measure/convert users

Micro is using Google Analytics and Framer to measure users on the platform. There aren’t many actions to measure, but they can see if users are visiting, scrolling, clicking, and re-visiting. I would have considered adding Microsoft Clarity for some heatmapping information.

Now they can measure:

• Overall impressions on social

• Count and percentage of visitors clicking through to the site (signals effectiveness of the video and messaging)

• The count and percentage of sign ups (is this problem painful enough to sign up)

• And in a later step they get data on the top problems users are experiencing to inform feature development

Step 6: After people sign up, keep the conversations going

Send an automatic email encouraging more engagement and ideally some data collection on problems/features. It’s possible Micro hasn’t created a single feature yet and are waiting to hear the problem statements from pre-signups before building.

I did reply to the email, but haven’t gotten anything back yet. I would have liked to see another step after this. If a prospect is engaged, keep the engaged! Give me something else to sign up for or a longer survey.

Step 7: Give the most enthusiastic early adopters access to your product first.

The signups that are most engaged are best fit and will most likely hype up your product. Ideally the first version of the software will focus on solving a single problem for a single user persona. All of the previous steps in the process were designed to narrow the audience down to the best fit users.

Step 8: Launch to the general public after all the issues are hammered out through the early adopters.

They're launching some time in 2025. Could even be December 31, 2025! Lots of time to build and iterate. They can learn from their early adopters and steadily expand out the user base as budget and product capabilities allow.

Wrapping up

The best part of all of this? They didn't have to write a single line of code or make any mockups or even define a featureset. They only have an idea, an audience, and some head turning marketing collateral. That’s something any founder should be able to do.

So beautiful. 

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— Bryce

This post was created by combining existing resources, independent research, and my analysis to create a unique piece of content. I did not have first hand knowledge of any information and some things may be wrong. If I got something wrong, please let me know!