Building an email list for a hardware product that doesn't exist yet
SolveBlock's waitlist promises two emails and a chance at a free unit — nothing else. Why a tiny, honest list beats a big noisy one for a product still on the bench.
SolveBlock hasn't shipped. There's no price and no ship date. So why build an email list now?
Because the list isn't for selling yet. It's for learning — and for having somewhere to say "it's ready" when it is.
The promise is the product
The waitlist page makes one promise, and it's deliberately small:
- An email when SolveBlock is ready to buy.
- An email when there's a price.
- A chance to be selected for one of the first production units.
"Two emails and a chance. Nothing else, and nothing often." That line does more for sign-ups than any amount of urgency would. People give an email address to a hardware project when they trust it won't become a firehose.
Four questions, none rhetorical
Signing up takes about three minutes because the form asks four real questions:
- Would you actually use it — on your mat, on an ordinary practice evening?
- What would you pay for it?
- Does cubing need this at all?
- What shape and size should it be?
The page says it plainly: a "no" is worth more to us than a polite "yes". For a product with no price yet, those answers are the pricing research.
Keep the tooling boring
A waitlist doesn't need much. SolveBlock's form posts to a hosted form service and nothing is stored on the site itself. When the list grows into a real newsletter, the natural next step is a proper email tool:
- Kit (formerly ConvertKit) is built for exactly this — creators with an email list and occasional broadcasts.
- ActiveCampaign makes sense once you need email automation: tagging people by their answers and sending different follow-ups to cubers who'd pay $30 and those who'd pay $80.
The rule I learned running large lists still applies: start the list before you need it, and never send an email you wouldn't want to receive.
What the list has already done
Even small, the list changed the roadmap. Cube-type selection — a separate record for every cube in the bag — moved to the top because that's what people asked for. The four enclosure shapes went to a vote instead of an argument.
That's the real value of an early email list for hardware. Not reach. Signal.
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