“Push that audience or traffic to your waitlist landing page and you collect those emails because from those emails you will get your first 100 customers — they already know that this is the pain they want to solve.”

Waitlist signups become your first 100 paying customers — onboard them first

A waitlist is not a vanity metric — it is a pre-qualified activation funnel. The people who hand over an email before the product exists already trust you and have named the pain, so onboard them first and let them carry conversion.