Waitlist as an Alternative to ConvertKit

ConvertKit is a leading online email marketing and newsletter service. It enables creators to onboard an audience of readers, to send email campaigns to those mailing lists, and then to monetize the audience by taking paid subscriptions on newsletters, or selling ancillary services like ebooks and coaching. So, ConvertKit is a general-purpose solution for a particular type of content-creator entrepreneur that makes revenue as a consequence of that content drawing a large audience.

ConvertKit is a popular solution with hundreds of thousands of users. However, it is not a waitlisting solution and it doesn't really have anything to do with pre-launch viral referral marketing. You can use ConvertKit to put together a pre-launch newsletter of course, but you can do the same with GetWaitlist.com. Our Waitlist solution is focused specifically on signing up users pre-launch and creating viral refer-a-friend campaigns, and we have built in an email marketing solution for that purpose. Users of getwaitlist.com can create Waitlists and send custom-templated emails to their users when they sign up, refer other users, or when they are offboarded from the Waitlist. Perhaps most importantly, you can send totally custom "newsletter blasts" to all your signed-up users at any point in time. This is like ConvertKit's core email newsletter or mass email service. You can segment the audience of the blast according to who's verified or not, or who's still on the Waitlist or has been offboarded from the Waitlist.

Using the Waitlist email newsletter blast feature means that you can, for example, send a custom reminder to everyone on your Waitlist that your product is launching in a week, and they need to take some action before then, like retweeting your Product Hunt announcement. Or you can send an email campaign to everyone who has been offboarded from the Waitlist and ask them for feedback. Or you can send a reminder email to everyone who hasn't verified their email yet! Our email blast feature is simple and can go out to even tens or hundreds of thousands of recipients, no problem.

The main advantage of Waitlist over ConvertKit in this context is simply that Waitlist is cheap, supporting unlimited custom email blasts on the Pro tier for only $250/month. On the other hand, ConvertKit is expensive, where even a mailing list of only 50,000 users already runs you $319/month. If you have more than that, you can easily spend thousands of dollars every month. While ConvertKit offers a good email service, you don't need to spend that much money on email. Beyond that, ConvertKit is so focused on email, newsletter subscriptions, and monetizing them, that it doesn't have the same core competencies around waitlisting and referral marketing that Waitlist does. ConvertKit is not at all purposed for viral referral marketing or especially targeting the pre-launch segment. ConvertKit is a general email solution, whereas Waitlist is a highly specific pre-launch marketing solution.