Taking Spacelift From Waitlist to App Launch With Paid Social

Client: Spacelift

Regions: United Kingdom

Services: Paid Social, Creative Production, Email Marketing, Organic Social

Key Achievements:

Daily app installs up 6.3x in the first five weeks of paid campaigns
4,863 waitlist sign-ups from Meta in the month before launch
A waitlist of almost 13,000 people by launch day

Introduction

Spacelift is a UK app that turns a phone scan of your garden into a photorealistic design of your own space. It was co-founded by an award-winning garden designer, and it pairs that expertise with AI to give people a finished design, a project plan and the products to build it.

The app runs on a subscription model, with one-off design packs for larger projects. It launched on iOS in May 2026, timed with RHS Chelsea Flower Show, with Android following in the summer.

Challenges

Spacelift came to us in March 2026, two months before launch and before the app was in the stores. It needed a waitlist large enough to give the launch momentum, then a way to keep new users arriving once the app was live. As a new kind of product, it also needed creative that could explain what the app does within a few seconds.

Strategic Approach

From March to September 2026, we focused on:

A Referral Waitlist for Chelsea:
We built the pre-launch waitlist page with a points-based referral ladder, so every sign-up had a reason to share it. A nurture sequence and referral reminders kept the list warm until launch week.
Transformation and Credibility Creative:
Our UGC showed a tired garden becoming a finished design on screen, then leaned on the co-founder’s award-winning design record. The same footage was re-cut from waitlist messaging to download messaging for launch.
iOS First, Then Android:
We launched app install campaigns on iOS to prove the creative, then opened Android once early results held. Each week we moved the strongest ads into their own ad set and removed placements that bought clicks without installs.
Lifecycle Email and Organic Content:
In Customer.io we wrote and built the launch, welcome, onboarding and subscription emails, targeting resends by behaviour. Alongside paid, we produced a steady run of organic before-and-after content.

Performance Highlights

More Daily App Installs

0 x

Waitlist Sign-Ups From Meta

Waitlist Ad Click-Through Rate

0 %

Results cover the waitlist campaign from 15 April to 15 May 2026 and the first five weeks of app install campaigns from 4 August 2026:

A Waitlist Ready for Launch: The waitlist grew from around 140 people on its first day to almost 13,000 by launch, through the referral page, email and paid social. Our Meta campaign brought in 4,863 of those sign-ups in a single month.
Ads That Earned the Click: The waitlist ads held a 3.6% click-through rate, and around a third of the people who reached the page went on to join the list.
Six Times the Daily Installs: In the 34 days after paid campaigns launched, the app averaged 6.3 times as many installs a day as in the 64 days before, measured across both platforms in AppsFlyer.
More Organic Installs Too: On Android, where attribution is clean, organic installs rose by around 2.5 times alongside the paid activity, a sign the campaigns were lifting discovery beyond the ads themselves.
Email That Gets Opened: The welcome flow we built reached a 27.4% open rate in August, against 17.4% across all sends, and in July the unsubscribe rate fell 53% month on month.

Conclusion

Spacelift launched with an engaged waitlist, paid campaigns that multiplied its daily installs and a lifecycle email programme behind them. The creative and audience learnings from launch give the app a clear starting point for its next growing season.

This project drew on our paid social, video and motion design, email marketing, organic social and app marketing services. See more of our work.

More work like this: MyTip, My Kind of Cruise and Happier.