We didn't expect it to happen in the first two weeks. Honestly, we'd have been happy with 200. But on day 14 of writing publicly about Vela — before we had a product to show, before we had screenshots, before we had anything other than a landing page and a set of beliefs — we crossed 1,000 waitlist signups.

Here's everything we know about how that happened and what it means.

Where they came from

We didn't run ads. We didn't post on Product Hunt. We didn't reach out to journalists. Everything came from writing — specifically, from two posts that resonated far beyond what we expected.

The post that drove the most signups wasn't the one that explained what Vela does. It was the one that explained why existing tools are broken. People don't sign up for products — they sign up for worldviews. When your framing matches how someone already secretly feels, they move fast.

What they actually want

We sent a short three-question survey to the first 500 people who joined. We asked what they're currently using, what's breaking about it, and what they're hoping Vela will do that nothing else does.

The responses clustered around three themes with striking consistency:

1. They don't want another note-taking app. They're drowning in notes that never become anything. The ask is not more capture — it's more follow-through.

2. They want something that understands context. Not just "what did you type" but "what did you mean" — and what should happen next given everything else going on.

3. They are deeply, visibly tired of switching between tools. The context-switching cost is not just time — it's cognitive. Every switch resets something in the brain that takes a while to rebuild.

"I don't need another place to put things. I need something that helps me figure out what to do with the things I already have."

What surprised us

We expected our early audience to be solo founders and indie hackers — people who manage everything themselves and have the most acute pain around fragmented workflows. And they're definitely here.

But a significant portion of signups came from people at companies of 20–50 people. Small teams where the friction lives at the seams between people — where a thought gets lost because it was captured by one person in one tool that nobody else checks. That's an angle we hadn't fully considered. It's shaping how we think about where Vela goes next.

What we're doing with this

We've moved 47 people from the waitlist into a closed testing group. They're the ones who wrote the most detailed survey responses — not necessarily the most positive, but the most specific. We want people who will tellus exactly when something is wrong, not people who are just excited to try something new.

Over the next four weeks, we'll be running daily sessions with this group. Everything we learn goes directly into the product. And we'll keep writing about it here — the good, the frustrating, and the things we get completely wrong.

If you're reading this and you haven't joined the waitlist yet — the door is still open. We'd rather build this with you than for you.