How to set up a waitlist for your online course or membership (and why it matters)

If you are building an online course or membership and you are not yet ready to open the doors, a waitlist is one of the most useful things you can set up right now. Not because it is a marketing trick, but because it does something genuinely valuable: it tells you whether there is real interest in what you are building, before you have finished building it. Here is why it matters and exactly how to set one up.

Why a waitlist is worth setting up before you launch

Most practitioners build their course or membership in private, finish it, and then announce it to the world, only to discover that the world is not quite as ready as they hoped. A waitlist flips that sequence. Instead of building in the dark and launching into silence, you start gathering interest early and launch to a warm, ready audience.

A waitlist does several things at once:

• It validates your idea before you invest significant time in building it. If nobody signs up to hear more, that is important information, and it is far better to learn it now than after six months of work.
• It builds an audience of people who have already said yes to being interested. These are your warmest potential buyers; they came looking, they liked what they saw, and they asked to be kept informed.
• It gives you something to point people to before you are ready to sell. Instead of 'coming soon,' you have a concrete next step for anyone who finds you in the run-up to launch.
• It creates genuine launch momentum. Emailing a waitlist of interested people on launch day is a very different experience from announcing to a cold general audience and waiting to see what happens.

What you actually need for a waitlist

The good news is that a waitlist does not need to be complicated. At its simplest, you need three things:

• A landing page with a brief description of what you are building and an opt-in form where people can leave their name and email address.
• An email platform to collect those addresses and send the confirmation and follow-up emails.
• A simple automated email sequence, at minimum, a confirmation that they are on the list, and a launch notification when the time comes.

That is it! You do not need a fully built course, a complete sales page, and you do not need a finished product. You need enough to communicate what you are building and who it is for, and an easy way for interested people to raise their hand.

How to set up a waitlist in Kajabi

If you are on Kajabi, setting up a waitlist is straightforward, and everything stays in one place, which is one of the reasons I recommend it so consistently for practitioners building online products.

Here is the basic process:

• Create a new Landing Page in Kajabi. Choose a simple opt-in template; you do not need anything elaborate. Your page needs a clear headline that communicates what you are building, two or three sentences explaining who it is for and what it will include, and an opt-in form collecting first name and email address.
• Set up a Form in Kajabi connected to your landing page. This is where the email addresses are collected and stored. Make sure the form is connected to the right tag or segment so you can identify your waitlist contacts later.
• Create an Automation triggered by the form submission. The first email in the automation is your confirmation. A warm, simple message that thanks them for their interest, tells them what to expect, and gives them a sense of the timeline if you have one.
• Add a second automation email for launch day. When you are ready to open the doors, you will email this list first (before anyone else) with early access, a special offer, or simply the news that it is live.

The whole setup in Kajabi, if you know the platform reasonably well, takes an hour or two. If you are newer to Kajabi or want to make sure it is set up correctly and connected properly to your broader email system, a focused Kajabi session is a good use of ninety minutes.

What to say on your waitlist landing page

This is where practitioners often get stuck, not on the technical side, but on the copy. What do you say about something that does not fully exist yet?

Less than you think, and more specifically than you might expect. Your waitlist page does not need to sell the course in detail. It needs to do three things:

• Name who it is for. Be specific. 'For therapists and coaches who want to move their practice online but don't know where to start' is more compelling than 'for helping professionals.'
• Describe the outcome, not the content. What will someone be able to do, feel, or understand after completing it? That is what people are buying, the result, not the curriculum.
• Tell them what happens next. 'Leave your email and you will be the first to hear when doors open' is clear, honest, and low-commitment. It removes the barrier to signing up.

Keep it short. A waitlist page is not a sales page. Its only job is to earn the email address of someone who is interested. Everything else can wait until launch.

How to keep your waitlist warm before launch

Collecting email addresses is the beginning, not the end. The practitioners who launch most successfully to a waitlist are the ones who have stayed in touch in the weeks or months between sign-up and launch.

That does not mean emailing constantly. It means:

• Sending occasional behind-the-scenes updates - a peek at what you are building, a question you are wrestling with, something you have learned in the process.
• Sharing relevant content - a blog post, a reflection, something useful that relates to the topic of your course or membership.
• Asking the occasional question. What are they most hoping to get from this? What is their biggest challenge right now? The answers will improve your course and make your launch email far more targeted.

By the time you open the doors, a well-nurtured waitlist does not feel like a cold audience. It feels like a group of people who have been waiting, because they have.

If you want help setting this up

Whether you are on Kajabi already or just getting started, setting up your first waitlist is a great use of a focused working session. We can build the landing page, set up the automation, and make sure everything is connected and ready in a single ninety-minute session. You can find out more about Kajabi support here.

And if you are still at the stage of working out what your online offer should be before you start building a waitlist for it, that is exactly the conversation to have in a mentoring session. The offer clarity needs to come first, the waitlist page follows naturally from that.

Ready to build your waitlist?

Let's set it up properly, landing page, automation, and launch email ready to go, in a single focused Kajabi session.

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