Squeeze Page for Buyers in Desperate/Embarrassing Niches

As I'm planning on promoting a product that is in a desperate niche, I'm assuming the following:

I'm trying to think of a "bribe" to get people to opt in to my list, but as I'm targeting people with an embarrassing problem who only really want a cure I can't think of anything of value that makes sense to offer them.

The relationship with my list isn't going to be one where I continually market to them due to the nature of the niche, so building a responsive list ultimately isn't of that much importance.


This has led me to believe that I might be better offer sending traffic to a landing page where I start telling a story but end it on a cliffhanger, at which point the reader needs to opt in to read more. This also likely means that I am pre-qualifying these readers better.

My autoresponder series then continues to tell the story while offering the solution.

I'm new to all this so am wondering if anyone else has tried the story telling method on their landing page instead of a freebie? However, I'm also concerned that without the freebie in the first place, it may be harder to get people onto my list, which in turn means that I have fewer people to market to - i.e. fewer potential customers.