Era of Invites
A few days ago, I found people were sharing a website listing the apps they pinned to their dock -- dockhunt.com. So I also added my dock to the website, thinking it is an excellent concept. But not so later, I got an interesting inquiry.
Not only Amie, people asked me if I had any invites for Texts, Tana, Artifact, and so on. But things did not work this way before -- we had an internal alpha phase, then a closed beta as a secretive survey, or an open beta, where I could simply sign up and enjoy the testing. Now an invitation comes in as a somewhat closed-but-open beta. So that leaves us with a question:
Why are all successful startup companies use invitations now?
Survivorship bias, first and foremost. We don't remember when a successful startup product does not have an invitation system, and all unsuccessful startups with an invitation system will never reach your attention. For example, did ChatGPT require an invite? Nope.
That being said, invitation systems do harness some social engineering techniques.
Association with friends. When we invite our friend to the app, that friend will likely download and try out the service, knowing that my buddy recommended the service. After all, it can't go wrong from word of mouth. Similarly, there is a network effect; if I get an invite, I am more prone to share it with my friends, thinking about who would be a good fit for this app.
Avoid operational hazards. Early startups mostly do not have a proper load-balancing system, not to mention the myriad of bugs and errors inside the system. First impressions always last. For me, it was Notion. I first tried Notion in early 2018, and my experience was extremely sluggish and frustrating. It took me two whole years to retry . It will also save the Ops team a lot of work.