waitlister-getting-started

Getting started with Waitlister

Waitlister is waitlist software for product launches: a hosted landing page, signups with queue positions, and a referral program where referrals move people up the list.

1. Make sure there's an API key

Every tool here needs WAITLISTER_ACCOUNT_KEY set in the environment. If a tool call fails with an authentication error, or the user has never used Waitlister here before, walk them through it:

1. Create a free account at https://waitlister.me (no credit card).
2. Go to Settings → API keys and create an account API key — it starts with wl_acct_.
3. Set it as WAITLISTER_ACCOUNT_KEY in the environment and restart the session.

Account keys work on every plan, including free, and can create waitlists on their own — the user never needs to touch the dashboard to get started.

Never ask the user to paste the key into the chat. If they do anyway, tell them to revoke it in Settings → API keys and issue a new one.

Confirm the key with get_account before doing anything else. It is read-only and answers three things in one call: whether the key is alive (an invalid or revoked key fails here, so a dead key stops looking like a malformed request), the plan, and waitlists.can_create — whether the next create_waitlist would actually succeed. Check that rather than discovering the plan's waitlist cap from an error partway through a setup.

2. Launch a waitlist in one step

create_waitlist provisions the waitlist and its landing page in a single call — prefer this over creating them separately:

• name — the product name (required).
• landing_page — pass { headline, description, button_text, collect_name, theme } to get a hosted page as a draft in the same call. headline is required, 3–120 characters.

Then publish_landing_page takes it live at waitlister.me/p/{slug}. Report the live URL back to the user, and mention that form_action_url from the create response already collects signups on any site (the domain must be whitelisted in the waitlist's settings).