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ironically - this seems to work perfectly well for startups and companies on a less obvious level. Anyone remember the Gmail invites? They were offering email -

ironically - this seems to work perfectly well for startups and companies on a less obvious level. Anyone remember the Gmail invites? They were offering email - a service that existed for a decade already (free) at this point - yet people were ready to kill for an invite! I remember a site that opened up around it called GmailSwap - where people were often offering up cold hard cash, in exchange for a Gmail invite. Today's launchrock pages are essentially a gentler version of the same thing "sign up to get exclusive first access to our beta" => "Give us your email so you can be the first to test buggy beta software and tell us how to make it better" You can extend this to a lot of different areas - schemes like Amway or Tupperware - and if I allow myself some leeway - I'd say even some religions.

martinced 14y ago
But people knew it was going to be (and still is) one of the best (if not the best) webmail ever. I couldn't wait to switch to GMail because I knew I'd still be using it today. As an example, I forgot what email spam was and everytime I hear about email spam I kept wondering: "People are still using mail clients connected to mail servers that do forward spam en masse?". And, surely enough, I'm here still using my GMail. Asked a buddy at Google to send me an invite. I don't remember that it was particularly buggy although I was one of the early adopter. I do remember it totally rocked compared to Yahoo! that said. Why so much Google hate? ("Give us your email so you be the first to test buggy beta software") That's honestly not the GMail I remember: I remember it totally rocked since the beginning.