Overview

The network needed a public home and a way to collect interested engineers long before the platform itself could launch. We built a separate coming-soon site, with its own codebase, its own database and its own deploy, so the waitlist could go live without waiting on, or destabilising, the platform build.

Client

Professional network for African consulting engineers

Industry

Professional community

The challenge

• The brand needed somewhere to point people months ahead of the product being usable.
• Signups had to be an owned asset from day one, not rows locked inside a third-party form tool.
• It could not borrow the platform's release cycle; a landing page change should never wait on a platform deploy.

Approach

1. 01

   Deliberately standalone

   A separate Next.js application with no dependency on the platform's frontend or backend. It ships on its own schedule and cannot break, or be broken by, the product being built next door.

2. 02

   Own the list twice

   Every signup is written to Postgres through Drizzle and pushed to a Resend audience; the list stays queryable in a database the client owns, and is immediately ready to broadcast to.

3. 03

   Validate at the boundary

   Zod schemas validate submissions before anything reaches the database, so the earliest and least-supervised public surface is also the strictest about what it accepts.

What shipped