I posted a lot about my health last week.
(maybe too much, sorry if you got sick of my hospital photos :D)
I posted about blood tests, sleep scores, and an AI coach that I built to make me train legs when I'd rather not.
Oh, and I built a dashboard too.
Just for me, to keep the numbers in one place.
But when I shared that dashboard on X, the replies were interesting…
Strangers were asking for the thing. Unprompted.
I hadn't mentioned a product, because honestly I hadn't thought of it as one, until people started replying under my posts asking whether they could pay for it.
So that same day I put up a waitlist page.
It's at about 50 signups right now.
Which means if I ever turn this into a product, I'm launching to 50 warm people instead of zero.
Hold on. Didn't I say waitlists aren't validation?
I did. Four weeks ago, in this exact newsletter.
That's still true. Nobody has paid me anything yet.
But back then I was talking about founders begging people to join a list, then calling the number proof.
This time, people asked me first.
The list just catches them so the interest doesn't disappear while I decide what to build.
Here are the replies in full:
Steal this.
Do something in public that you'd be doing anyway. Building, learning, fixing your health, whatever. Scratching your own itch where people can see is free market research.
Ignore likes, read replies. Likes tell you the content is good. Asks tell you a product exists. "Can I use this?" and "will you open source it?" are purchase intent.
Capitalise the same day. A link-in-bio waitlist takes 20 minutes (or 30 seconds with one prompt to Claude/GPT). Reply to every single person who asked. The interest you see today is gone in 48 hours.
Launch to the bucket. When the product ships, you email 50 people who already told you they want it. No cold start.
That's the whole playbook. It cost me nothing and I wasn't even trying to do marketing.
The health stuff might become a product, or it might not. Either way I now know instead of guessing, and knowing is the entire game.
Question for you: what's something you've built just for yourself that could maybe be a product? Reply and tell me, the best ones might end up in a future edition.
See you next Tuesday.
You've got this.
- Rob
