📚 Case Study on Desté: How to Use a Waitlist with an iPhone App

At GetWaitlist.com, one of our customers is Desté. Desté is producing an app for the iPhone, featuring a unique deck of 45 cards, designed to aid individuals in their journey of self-discovery and personal growth. They've had great success building a pre-launch waitlist for iOS, so this article is featuring their successful pre-launch Waitlist, and what worked for them.

Desté encourages users to connect with their inner voice and explore their own depths, providing guidance and insight during moments of decision-making or when seeking meaning. The cards serve as a medium for users to listen to their instincts and trust that the right answers will emerge. The Desté experience extends beyond physical cards to a digital platform with the Desté Cards & Journal app available on the iOS App Store. This app acts as a comprehensive companion in the quest for self-discovery, incorporating daily journaling prompts, a unique deck of Desté Cards for introspection, and a meditation timer complete with bespoke music. Each element of the app is crafted to support users in capturing their innermost thoughts, uncovering patterns in their behavior, achieving self-awareness and improving their mental wellness.

Desté has a great landing page that's well-designed and tells you all about their product, vision, and journey. At the bottom, you'll notice that there's a link to their iOS App in the app store. This is different from most Waitlist Landing Pages , where the call-to-action is usually a button or form to sign up for the pre-launch waitlist. Desté asks you to download the app instead.

I went and downloaded the iPhone app. When I open it, this is the first screen. It's a normal experience (well designed interface!) and I'm being asked to sign up. I click the button. It allows signup via Apple, so I just used that to make an account (linked to my iCloud) without having to think about a password or my email address.

After I sign up, the app tells me I'm on the Waitlist:

This Waitlisting approach is very clever! When you sign up, you don't get access to Deste immediately, but you're on the Waitlist. Up until this point, I thought I would have immediate access, which is a great way to draw in potential customers. Now I'm on a pre-launch waitlist instead. This is smart, because having a Waitlist builds anticipation among potential users and ensures that the app is not overwhelmed by a sudden influx of early users. And I've already installed the iPhone app, so I'm hooked. There's a ton of social proof: almost 6,000 users on the waitlist, the app says. I'm on the Waitlist, I expect a launch soon, I'm not going to delete the app. This is totally different from if the landing page asked me to get on a Waitlist, and then at some future point in time I'm getting an email (that I may or may not read) that I'm finally off the Waitlist and should download the app now. Desté's iOS approach is much smarter and is sure to result in much higher conversions than a regular landing page waitlisting approach.

Finally, I clicked "Turn on Notifications". It's the only call-to-action (CTA) on the page, so naturally that's what I'm going to press. Again, this is really smart: by having the user enable notifications, that's the best way for Desté to access the user. An in-app notification that hits the home screen is much better than an email notification or an SMS notification. Open rates and conversion are going to be much higher, and it's also a more pleasant, better experience for the end user. And if the user doesn't click the notification -- well, they provided their email earlier in the Signup step, so Desté can still follow up with them over email, send marketing newsletter campaigns, etc. This is the one of the best pre-launch waitlist campaigns that we've seen. This waitlisting strategy is the best way for Desté or anyone else to launch their iPhone app.

In general, releasing an early version of an app to the iOS or OSX app store, and then gating access inside the app with a waitlist is really clever, because it means that the user has already overcome the main friction to onboard onto the app. At this point, they're invested in getting access, which is exactly what you want for effective word-of-mouth and referral marketing. This is how you build an effective viral loop.

From a technical perspective, Desté's decision to utilize getwaitlist.com for their waitlist management underscores the simplicity and effectiveness of integrating our waitlisting system into a native iOS App aimed at the iPhone. We assume that Desté's iOS app is written in React Native, which writes pretty much like regular React, and integrating a Waitlist in React is super easy. We've made it such that integrating a Waitlist into a Website Builder like Webflow, or your own React Website, or your own React Native iOS App, is all straight-forward, just a few lines of code to copy.

Importantly, while writing an iPhone app can be challenging -- iOS has many quirks -- keep in mind that the app that we saw here looked great and was very simple. It's only two screens and a popup, with some nice visuals and music. Making a simple "landing page" iPhone app doesn't require too much code, and then copy-pasting in the Waitlist and Signup logic is easy, too. Desté's approach here is really clever because it means they can get everyone to download the app and join the waitlist, without spending a crazy amount of time and effort building the whole iPhone app.

To conclude -- this is how you build a Waitlist and integrate it with your iOS app. Desté has run a very successful pre-launch waitlisting campaign: the nearly 6,000 sign-ups to the waitlist indicate a strong market interest and validate the app's concept and the team's approach to growth and marketing. The team at Desté should've seen enough validation from this that it's worthwhile to fully invest in building out the app, and they're in a great position to launch their iPhone app, thanks to this effective pre-launch waitlist marketing camapign. When they decide to launch their smartphone app, they're well-positioned for a good rollout and marketing release: the Waitlist means that they can manage user expectations, slowly take folks off the waitlist, send them the iOS notification, email them to get their thoughts, never overwhelm the system by onboarding too many signups at once, all while building a larger waitlist that shows interest in Desté's product from the broader community.