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A waitlist is an audience that builds itself, but only if you treat it as one. Most teams collect signups for months and send nothing until launch day, by which point half the list has forgotten they joined. The fix is two emails and one flow: confirm the signup immediately, check in while they wait, and run a proper sequence when you open the doors. This recipe uses Clerk, whose waitlistEntry.created event fires the moment someone joins.
Before you start. You need a verified sending domain and a Clerk application with the waitlist feature enabled. If your waitlist lives elsewhere, fire a custom event from your backend instead; the rest of the recipe is identical.

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1. Connect Clerk

Follow the Clerk integration setup: paste the brand-scoped webhook URL into Clerk, enable the waitlistEntry events, and confirm a test event lands in the Manage → Recent events panel. Every Clerk event also upserts the person into your audience automatically, so your waitlist contacts accumulate in Brew without an import step.

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2. Confirm the Signup Instantly

Build a single-email automation triggered by waitlistEntry.created. This is the highest-open-rate email you will ever send this contact, so give it a job beyond “you’re on the list”: 
Create a waitlist confirmation email triggered by waitlistEntry.created.
Confirm their spot and tell them roughly when to expect access. Give them
one useful thing today: a link to the demo video or the changelog. Set
expectations for how often we'll email before launch. Short and warm.
Set it Live and every new signup gets confirmed within seconds, for as long as the waitlist runs.

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3. Keep Them Warm While They Wait

A silent waitlist decays. Add a second email to the same flow, two to three weeks after the first, sharing real progress: 
Add a second email to this flow, 3 weeks after the first. Share two
things we've shipped since they joined and one thing coming next.
No CTA beyond a reply. Build-in-public tone, no hype.
If your wait is long, send fresh progress updates as one-off Emails to the waitlist audience instead, so the content stays current rather than frozen in the flow.

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4. Launch Day: Run the Sequence

Save an audience of your waitlist contacts, then use a one-off flow rather than a single blast. The flow gives you a built-in follow-up for the people who miss the first email: 
Build a one-off launch flow I can run manually against my waitlist audience.

Email 1: we're live. Their access is ready, here's the door. One CTA to
sign in. Confident, no countdown-timer urgency.
Wait 2 days.
Filter: only contacts who did NOT open email 1.
Email 2: shorter version with a different subject line. Same CTA.
Test it with Test automation, check the contact count on the trigger node, and run it. The automation shows Sending while the run is in flight and Sent when it completes.

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5. After Launch

Two cleanup moves:
  • Retire the waitlist flow. Archive the waitlistEntry.created automation once the waitlist closes, or leave it live if you’re still gating access.
  • Hand off to onboarding. New users now arrive via user.created, so point a welcome flow at that event and let the regular lifecycle take over.

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Need help?

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