The team hadn't load- or performance-tested the waitlist landing page on real mobile devices before the high-traffic launch.

“On the day we launched, we got several complaints about performance issues”

They anticipated mobile sign-ups but did not budget time to test performance on real phones ahead of launch.

“we didn't spend too much time testing the performance on real phones”

The low-friction, single-field waitlist signup form had no email confirmation step, so some sign-ups used fake addresses.

“people could still add fake email addresses”

The team optimized the form for low friction (a single input field, no confirmation step) and only had light back-end validation.

“we had some back-end validation, people could still add fake email addresses”

There was no real plan for processing the waitlist once thousands of people had signed up, including a mandatory 1:1 onboarding call for every prospect.

“we didn't have a proper plan to process the waitlist”

Requiring a manual onboarding call for every single waitlisted prospect could not scale with a 2-person team.

“We initially required every prospect to go through a mandatory onboarding call first (Superhuman style), but we quickly realized that wouldn't scale”