How ReBrain Built a 250+ Waitlist Through Viral Social Content
Uliana Korolova is the founder of ReBrain, a screen time limit app helping users overcome phone addiction while maintaining a healthy relationship with social media.
As a digital marketer and social media agency founder, she grew her waitlist to over 250 (and growing) subscribers and attracted 35,000 Instagram followers without directly promoting the app.
In this interview, Uliana shares how she leveraged her social media expertise to build her waitlist and create viral growth without directly promoting her product.
Join the waitlist for ReBrain →
The Origin Story
Q: Could you tell me about Rebrain and what inspired you to start it?
ReBrain is a screen time limit app that aims to assist users in overcoming their phone addiction and reducing their daily scrolling time.
I am a digital marketer and a social media agency founder, so I spend a lot of time on my phone daily. Recently I noticed that I also started to be addicted to doomscrolling on social media, like watching reels or reading threads. I could say that it’s just a part of my work, but in fact I wasted a lot of time on just watching random content instead of doing real tasks.
When I cutted use of social media, I noticed that it improved my mental health state, and I became happier and improved my attention span while doing really important tasks.
When I started searching for screen time limit apps, I noticed that most of them focused on total limitation of screen time, but in fact, to stay updated on your friend’s or community’s life and be aware of news and trends in your field of work, you still need to use social media.
My solution to this problem is to teach yourself to use it less and get yourself reminders to stop scrolling when it’s starting to be not just a quick check on DMs or a few new posts of my friends but a non-reasonable doomscrolling for hours.
Also, I really liked the idea to exchange time spent on healthy habits to redeem more time for scrolling. It gives extra motivation to complete tasks and really helps to feel the value of every minute you spend daily.
My app is almost ready for the launch, and it has all the necessary features described to help you beat doomscrolling and minimize the use of social media.
Growing the Waitlist
Q: What were your biggest challenges in building your waitlist? How did you overcome them?
I wanted to create it in the easiest and quickest way, as I am not a tech or design person, and I don’t know how to create even an easy landing page that will collect all the contacts. I also value my time and I didn’t want to watch tutorials on how to create it myself. So I just found a tool that provides an easy constructor and helps with templates to save my time. In fact, it took only 10 minutes to create my waitlist.
Q: What strategies or channels have been most effective for growing your waitlist?
I have worked with different apps promotions for more than 3 years already. I help my clients to make their apps viral through just organic promotion—using short-form content on social media like TikTok and Instagram Reels. So while working with clients, I realized the power of social media and that I would definitely be focused on this tool while promoting my app. When the launch date was closer, I decided to start warming up our Instagram account using content format about the doomscrolling problem and providing daily reminders to stop scrolling.
I didn’t mention the app in any of our videos; there were no ads except the link in the bio with our waitlist.
For the first month of posting, we got 35k followers, about 1,000,000 reached audience and almost 200 people in our waitlist.
Now I can tell that the problem of doomscrolling is really huge for the audience.
Using Waitlister
Q: How has using Waitlister helped in managing and growing your waitlist? What features have been most valuable?
I liked how easy it was to set up the waitlist page using already-made templates, but also adjusting colors, fonts, and other parts of the landing page.
I also value the functionality of statistics. I loved that the Waitlister also gives you a full description of the subscribers, including location, which is very important for analysis of the campaign.
Advice for Others
Q: What advice would you give to other creators just starting to build their waitlists?
I think that you definitely shouldn’t spend a lot of time on that stage and just choose the tool that will provide useful templates and easy-to-use functionality.
Next Steps
Q: What are your next steps for Rebrain, and how do you plan to engage with your waitlist community as you move forward?
The next step is the launch of our app in the soonest time. Then we are going to study the feedback of users and earning statistics and add improvements to our app’s functionality and business model.
We are going to work with the waitlist base and engage with them using email campaigns but also we are going to continue updating our community on Instagram using different types of content.
Build Your Own Waitlist
Ready to build your own high-impact waitlist? Waitlister provides everything you need:
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