Inside Graphite’s Waitlist Strategy: How Controlling Access Led to Higher User Engagement

Most startups rush to onboard every potential user. But in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Graphite co-founder Tomas Reimers revealed why maintaining a waitlist – even in the face of strong demand – became their secret weapon for building a better developer tool.

The Accidental Experiment In August 2021, Graphite planned a modest experiment with 20 users for their code review platform. “We ended up with 38 users because we had 38 people write into us and be like, I absolutely need this tool,” Tomas recalls. By November, before their official waitlist launch, organic word-of-mouth had grown their user base to 68.

Then came their watershed moment. “We launched our waitlist November 17 of 2021. And what we ended up with, we were expecting 500 sign ups. We ended up with 3500,” Tomas shares. A single Hacker News post had triggered an avalanche of interest. The team was unprepared for the response: “I remember we had configured our waitlist to like, ping slack whenever we got a sign up… that evening, none of us slept.”

The Counter-Intuitive Choice With thousands of developers eager to use their product, Graphite made an unusual decision: they kept the waitlist. Their reasoning? As Tomas explains, “a user who you give the wrong first impression to is really hard to recover.” They’d seen this firsthand with early users: “We have some users who we let on a little too early and what happens is… we’ll do interviews with them, we’ll be like, ‘hey, we noticed that you don’t use this feature, it’s broken.’ They’re like, ‘yeah, it breaks in this way.’ We’re like, ‘we fixed that like twelve months ago.'”

Quality Over Quantity This experience shaped their entire approach to growth. “For us, at least at the scale that we’re at, growth is not the major concern,” Tomas notes. “Instead it’s more like education and adoption of okay, pretend someone does sign up. Do they understand our workflow? Do they understand our tool? How do they react to it?”

The strategy paid off in unexpected ways. Their engaged users became active participants in product development. “We have users who have written Chrome extensions to edit our site to be exactly what they want, and then they send us that Chrome extension,” Tomas shares. “They’re like, ‘hey, you guys did it wrong, but it’s good. I fixed it for you.'”

The Long Game Today, with approximately 2,000 weekly active users, Graphite still maintains their waitlist. For them, every new user represents a long-term investment. As Tomas puts it, “every lead exposed is one who we’re either going to capture forever or burn. And so we want to be mindful around sort of that funnel.”

This controlled growth approach aligns with their larger vision of becoming the development platform that brings big-tech capabilities to every team. Instead of rushing to scale, they’re building a foundation of deeply engaged users who help shape the product’s evolution.

For B2B founders, Graphite’s waitlist strategy offers a compelling alternative to the growth-at-all-costs mindset. Sometimes, the path to sustainable growth requires saying “not yet” to eager customers – and focusing instead on creating an experience worth waiting for.