MaÎtre, a viral waiting list tool was recently launched and did what it promises to help others do. Go viral.
A viral waiting list creates exclusivity and desire to try the product (as long as it is solving a painful problem in the first place). The social sharing element offers incentives for those trying to move up the wait list queue whilst others see the buzz & FOMO (a fear of missing out) ensues.
We caught up with one of the creators, Manuel Frigerio, to give a bit of background as to what led to creating the viral waiting list & why startups that are looking to launch should be using it.
MaÎtre, a viral waiting list tool
First up, what is MaÎtre?
MaÎtre is a viral waiting list for your website that allows people to get ahead in the queue by signing up their friends.
Why did you decide to build MaÎtre?
I took the lead to build MaÎtre after an event organiser from my other business (EventNinja) suggested the idea for a better way to sell tickets for his event late November 2015. The viral waiting list idea was born and I discovered it would be relatively easy to implement and built the site over the Christmas holidays.
The site was live by early January! I’m currently working with my business partner from EventNinja (Anthony Francis) and George Johnston (IncuBus Ventures) to help distribute and sell the product.
How many users have you got already?
I’ve been working with Anthony and George for three weeks now and already have 8,000+ people signed up to our own viral waiting list. We've also been the featured #1 product of the day on Product Hunt with over 1,300 up votes!
We’ve been giving MaÎtre away for free to the top 200 people in our waiting list each week. Our viral waiting list is growing at around 61% week on week and we’ve accepted over 600 people to platform with about 100 MaÎtre widgets sold.
A lot of what we are doing now is getting the word out.
Where are some use cases for the MaÎtre tool?
MaÎtre is a great tool to create a viral experience for pretty much any product or service. That can be a book, kickstarter campaign or even an event. With little effort, you can get hundreds of people competing to get access to your product or service by sharing to be at the top of your queue. Coeio used the MaÎtre viral waiting list to launch their product, and saw over 3,000 people joining their waiting list in the first 7 days after implementing MaÎtre.
Other great products such as Trussle and Career Sharp have seen hundreds sign ups to their own viral waiting lists.
How important do you feel it is for companies to gain visibility on social media in 2016?
Our experience has been super positive with social media. We have sold our first 4/5 widgets to people on Twitter and seen a tremendous amount of feedback coming from it. More in general, I think every company can create business opportunities on social media as long as they tap into the right ones. For example, we decided to use Twitter because is the social media we feel more comfortable with and were most of our target users spend time on.
You're also running Eventninja, how does this fit into your long term focus?
MaÎtre is currently a standalone product with plans to been integrated with EventNinja in the near future. After all, it was an event organiser who suggested the idea. EventNinja is growing from strength to strength and we’ll be continuing with the development and promotion of the product.
MaÎtre is built to offer people a simple solution that help create an engaging and viral experience when promote their product or service. There is huge potential to market MaÎtre across a variety of verticals. Startups, Kickstarter Campaigns, Events, Books.
We have already got the interest of many marketing companies who want to partner with us.
Thanks for your time Manuel!
If you're interested in creating your own viral waiting list for the launch of your product/service, check out MaÎtre here.