Every time I think about how to capture interest in ImIn, I hit the same impulse: build it right. Set up Resend, create a proper API route, manage subscriber lists with automation, write handlers for unsubscribes. The works.
Then I remember: I have zero subscribers.
The Problem With Building for Scale You Don't Have
The temptation to over-engineer early is real. You see Stripe's email infrastructure, or how Mailchimp does list management, and you think I should probably have that too, just in case.
Here's what actually happens:
- You spend 2 hours setting up Resend + creating an API route
- You wire it up to your site
- Nobody signs up for two months
- You spend another 2 hours debugging email delivery you're not using
- You still have to manually manage the list anyway because the automation doesn't exist yet
That's not building smart. That's cargo-cult infrastructure.
What I'm Doing Instead
I'm using Web3Forms to capture early adopters, then manually adding them to a list.
That's it. The flow:
- User sees "Get notified when ImIn is ready" on the site
- They fill a form (Web3Forms)
- The submission lands in my inbox with their email
- I copy their email into a simple list (Google Sheet, Airtable, whatever)
- When I have news: I send one email blast manually or via a basic tool
- Repeat until this takes more than 30 minutes
The entire thing is copy-paste at scale until it hurts. And I can do it in under an hour when it does.
When to Actually Automate
You automate when:
- You have 100+ subscribers (manual list management becomes painful)
- You're sending campaigns more than once a month (manual sends add up)
- You can't wait for the next feature — your subscribers need to know now
Until then, you're trading friction for simplicity. And simplicity wins.
This is how every successful product I've studied started. Stripe manually emailed their first 100 users. Notion's founders sent personal emails to early adopters. Airbnb's founders took photos of apartments themselves.
You automate after you know what you're automating.
The Technical Side
To make this work, I'm just reusing my existing Web3Forms setup:
- Same form on the site, different topic: "ImIn early adopter list"
- In my inbox: emails come in with the topic tag
- In my list: I manually add them (Gmail label + spreadsheet, or a note in Airtable)
- When it's time to send: I use Mailchimp's free tier to send one campaign (bulk paste emails, write message, send)
Cost: $0. (except my time, which is cheap at this stage)
Infrastructure: None. (Web3Forms is already there, Mailchimp is free for small lists)
Risk: None. (If I decide to do this differently later, I just have a list of emails)
When I have 200+ subscribers and I'm sending every week, then I'll build the proper backend with Resend and automate it. At that point, it'll be worth it.
Until then: manual works. Simple wins.