[sebst]

A German startup in the fintech sector (basically offering managed etf portfolios for retirement) started with a beta sign up waiting list a few months ago.

I found this very irritating and a bit out of its time as a customer, not to mention the missing desirability for most people. Even I as someone who is interested in startups and fintech felt not really like yeah, yeah sign up now.

So, I personally would not do it.

Having said that, I haven't heard of startups with reduced performance or outages because of overwhelming demand for a long time. Maybe, web dev stacks got more professional and scalable, or the time for easy sign ups out of curiosity is over?