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July 12, 2007

Get An Invite To Any Private Beta

Michael Arrington

75 comments »

One of the most frustrating things for early adopters like ourselves to deal with is the private, limited invitation beta. The startups seed a few invitations to their friends, and each new account has 3 or so invitations that can be given away. If you know the founders or one of the very early users, you can get in quickly. But if you don’t, you often have to wait a long time to see a new product.

Startups love this, of course. They’ve created scarcity around a virtual good and that creates buzz. The most successful products can count on invitations being sold on eBay - something we saw with Gmail in 2004 and more recently with Pownce.

A month or so ago we had the idea to create an email based product that linked people with early invites to beta services to people without invites. If done correctly and in an organized way, a viral effect can take root and just about everyone who wants an invite can get one quickly. We started building the product. But today we found a service that does exactly what we were thinking of building - InviteShare.

This is a fairly simple service, but it does the job perfectly. Go to the site and register. Then browse the various private betas that are being serviced - pownce, spock, myskitch, mint, etc. - some of these I haven’t even been able to get into. If you have invitations, invite the people on the top of the list and confirm that you’ve invited them by clicking on their name. If you need an invite, add your name to the list.

People who send out more invitations get priority on the lists, so there is an incentive to participate. And in a nice touch, email addresses are shown in images, making it much more difficult for spam bots to grab the names.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 12th, 2007 at 10:36 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. Madhur Kapoor’s Blog » Get Invites using InviteShare

    July 13th, 2007 at 8:21 am

  2. lukeshep.com » Blog Archive » Links for July 13, 2007

    July 13th, 2007 at 8:22 am

  3. Get Invited To Any Private Beta - lifehack.org

    July 13th, 2007 at 9:06 am

  4. InviteShare - Get Any Invites You Want

    July 14th, 2007 at 4:59 am

  5. document.write("Markus Tressl");

    July 14th, 2007 at 7:28 am

  6. glad design blog

    July 17th, 2007 at 11:22 pm

  7. Just a random blog !

    July 20th, 2007 at 3:31 am

  8. mandydale » Blog Archive » The Marketplace of Private Beta Sites on InviteShare

    July 26th, 2007 at 2:55 pm

  9. links for 2007-09-02

    October 8th, 2007 at 7:27 am

  10. Voodoo Ventures - Idea Fuel Blog

    November 1st, 2007 at 12:51 pm

  11. Private Betas are Inherently Viral » techipedia | tamar weinberg

    December 12th, 2007 at 11:31 pm

  12. 9 Techniques to Promoting Your Social Web Application « // Internet Duct Tape

    February 8th, 2008 at 6:31 am

  13. 'ILLEGAL

    April 12th, 2008 at 10:28 pm

Comments

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  1. What's Hot Today.com

    July 12th, 2007 at 10:47 pm

    Excellent way to create a little buzz early on

  2. gettit

    July 12th, 2007 at 10:50 pm

    Seems like it might defeat the purpose of limited testing if the absolute number of invites isn’t limited. Still, nice idea.

  3. Michael Arrington

    July 12th, 2007 at 10:51 pm

    gettit - yep, it definitely defeats the purpose of the beta. I love it.

  4. Andrew

    July 12th, 2007 at 10:53 pm

    could have made it a marketplace. i.e. $1 per invite

    Would you rather share your 3 beta invites just to get on top? Or to make 3 bucks?

  5. Tod Pedler

    July 12th, 2007 at 10:56 pm

    What a great service. Startups gain immense value harnessing the collective intellignce from those who will openly test and evaluate anything that’s on offer.

  6. Viet

    July 12th, 2007 at 11:03 pm

    Simple but very useful service. Will definitely give it a try.

  7. gettit

    July 12th, 2007 at 11:39 pm

    OK, but say you’re testing something and you really want a limited number of people to test it, not a bunch of people that not only want to ignore your intent, but to write about the experience– I guess I wouldn’t be a big fan as a developer.

    However, I suppose those that truly need to limit testing can truly limit it and keep their mouths shut, and those that call themselves ‘beta’ as a marketing ploy can do it this way, and everyone else can play along.

    Don’t mind me anyway, I’m just grumpy from a 14 hour induced stupor waiting for (mt) to resolve an issue. This ‘grid’ will be the death of me.

  8. Simon

    July 12th, 2007 at 11:40 pm

    wow…what a great website.

  9. Dennis Bjørn Petersen

    July 12th, 2007 at 11:43 pm

    I’ve still to see something come out of this.

    I spent an hour the other day sending out Joost and Spock invites. Only one of the 60+ has taken the time to confirm that I actually did send them an invite :-/

    I do like the initiative though. I think it’s a great idea and hopefully it will expand in no time. Now if Invite Share could get their hands on some Scrybe invites it would be great.

  10. Dennis Bjørn Petersen

    July 12th, 2007 at 11:45 pm

    “And in a nice touch, email addresses are shown in images, making it much more difficult for spam bots to grab the names.”

    It also makes it a bit more difficult to send out invitations. You have to type now instead of just copying it ;)

  11. Internet Evangelist

    July 13th, 2007 at 12:17 am

    Nice idea… but the site is throwing errors often.

  12. Jerry Gartner

    July 13th, 2007 at 12:30 am

    This looks like a decent idea. I’ve got more invites than friends at this point! (that’s not to say that I have a lot of invites :) ). I did have a heads up though for employers at http://rackit.gartnerwebdev.co.....ndcentral/ regarding GrandCentral.

  13. Andy Huang

    July 13th, 2007 at 12:32 am

    Very interesting concept! Will give it a try now and see how it works!

  14. Niraj

    July 13th, 2007 at 12:39 am

    Does anyone have any InviteShare invites? ;)

  15. Marc Savoy

    July 13th, 2007 at 12:39 am

    I was anxious to see for myself what the excitement brewing over at pownce was all about and turned to InviteShare with a what-have-i-got-to-lose-attitude that
    left me quite impressed after receiving an invitation within a few days of signing up.

    Thank you, InviteShare!

  16. Reinis

    July 13th, 2007 at 12:45 am

    Dennis, you’re right, it doesn’t give enough of an impetus to confirm the invitations, so you can just take them and run. I did confirm all of mine, though.

    I wonder what the people who god invited to, say, TorrentLeech did. It’s a pretty cool place to be invited to.

  17. luke

    July 13th, 2007 at 12:50 am

    500 error, nice :)

  18. RYK

    July 13th, 2007 at 12:56 am

    what a poorly made site…can’t find the place to list my site

  19. Dennis Bjørn Petersen

    July 13th, 2007 at 12:58 am

    I think the sudden burst in traffic surprised them ;)

    Scrybe was just added though plus a couple of other sites.

    Let’s hope the traffic will keep coming and that the invitations will flow.

    (I’ve got plenty of invites to Spock and other places if you need, Luke)

  20. McTar

    July 13th, 2007 at 1:09 am

    Nice idea
    Horrible UI
    Horrible usability
    Very unstable due to traffic?

    This can be done better.

  21. Sebastian

    July 13th, 2007 at 1:10 am

    Over here in Germany, Nicole Simon built a Google Group two weeks ago. Works just as well ;-)

  22. John

    July 13th, 2007 at 1:18 am

    it’s completely crashed, error 500 on all links :(

  23. Aidan Henry

    July 13th, 2007 at 1:27 am

    Michael,

    You forgot to mention Joost. Everyone was going nuts looking for Joost invitations. I had a couple, so I wrote a blog post entitled “Joost Invitations”. Well apparently, my blog is tailored for search engines as I received over 1,600 comments.

    Cheers,
    Aidan
    http://www.MappingTheWeb.com

  24. Michael Vu

    July 13th, 2007 at 2:24 am

    What an ingenius idea.

  25. Michael Arrington

    July 13th, 2007 at 2:28 am

    Joost invites are a dime a dozen now:

    http://www.techcrunch.com/2007.....t-invites/

  26. Andy

    July 13th, 2007 at 3:47 am

    I’m slightly concerned at the blog entry at the right-hand side of the page that suggests they’re looking into selling the site at auction. “What am I bid for page after page of genuine personal email addresses? Let’s start the bidding at £1,000…”

  27. Matt

    July 13th, 2007 at 3:57 am

    What - get a little traffic from TC and then try to cash in? Give me a break!

    ===
    How Much Are We Worth? July 13th, 2007
    We’ve listed the site on SitePoint. We’ve considered selling it, but first want a look at the figures. Below is a link to the auction listing.
    ===

  28. Amanda Mooney

    July 13th, 2007 at 6:05 am

    Thank you for letting us know about this. I wonder if all of these invite-only private beta sites can hold up to the buzz they create through initial exclusivity. Recently on the Twitter boards, I noticed a bit of a backlash against Pownce. The site is pretty cool but there was so much buzz, people expected a lot; once they got their hands on one of the coveted invites, many were disappointed because its utility didn’t seem to match the hype.

  29. dan

    July 13th, 2007 at 6:19 am

    Love it, what a great idea, and gives us the opportunity to shove off our joost and mr. wong invites that we are just not going to use in the longer run. Good stuff, thanks for pointing it out.

  30. Nathan Snipes

    July 13th, 2007 at 6:33 am

    Great Idea! I’ve signed up and added myself to the list on a couple of items.

    One thing I would like to see them add is a little “about” box for each of the items. There were a few items I hadn’t heard about and had to click through to the website only to find out I wasn’t interested.

  31. Andrew

    July 13th, 2007 at 6:39 am

    Like the idea, don’t like the implementation.
    - first error getting to site
    - then nasty black background, etc.
    - sending out an invite not as easy as it could be since can’t copy and paste email

  32. Eran

    July 13th, 2007 at 6:40 am

    On the surface it sounds like a great idea, but we must also remember the reason for private betas. Sometimes these are not just to gain users but to generate community information and/or be able to repair things on the site on a smaller scale.
    It sounds like a great tool to belong to the newest things, but at the same time, a lot of time is required to really test a site, not just a few minutes. If we start being invited to all the different betas, our comments and feedback may become irrelevant to the actual site.

    gettit: you are right, betas should be limited. That is why they are betas.

    andy: it does cause a little bit of concern, doesn’t it?

    -Eran

  33. Ken Berger

    July 13th, 2007 at 6:54 am

    Michael,

    Check this out as well, I emailed your team about it:
    BetaBarter http://betabarter.ning.com/

  34. Scott Nellé

    July 13th, 2007 at 7:24 am

    I started building a similar service back when Joost invites were rare because I wanted one. It never saw the light of day, so I’m glad to see I don’t need to invest time in finishing it.

  35. David Litsky

    July 13th, 2007 at 7:56 am

    This is an excellent idea, even through the errors that people are receiving. I read that the best way to develop a product is to let people beat the snot out of it. I am going to join later tonight.

    @Amanda - I agree with you on Pownce that the hype didn’t match the product. One benefit is that it quickly became inexclusive offering Kevin Rose and company plenty of feedback for future development.

  36. Jason Bray

    July 13th, 2007 at 8:13 am

    I advise caution using this site. I’m using Firefox 2.0 on XP and the site is very buggy. I’ve just sent 5 invitations to GrandCentral. When I went back to InviteShare to confirm that I had sent the invites, I was kicked out of the system and had to log back in. No problem except that upon logging back in and going back to the list of people waiting for GC invites, the list had completely changed and the people I had already sent invites to were no longer on the list. I tried to email InviteShare and my message will not go through. This site has a cool concept, but they just burned me.

  37. Mr. Original

    July 13th, 2007 at 8:17 am

    “I read that the best way to develop a product is to let people beat the snot out of it.”

    David: Please develop and test a product and then let us know your thoughts. Don’t regurgitate something you read.

  38. Bob Boydston

    July 13th, 2007 at 8:20 am

    Clicking on ‘my invites’ produced

    ‘a Error 500 - Internal server error

    An internal server error has occured!
    Please try again later.’

    I tried to send a bug report but it told me there was a problem saving the data.

    Also, the word ‘occured’ is ‘occurred’.

  39. Simon Foster

    July 13th, 2007 at 8:54 am

    yuh, this is a nice service. I tried contacting the site through the ‘contact us’ thing, to list our startup, but its broken. Are well, maybe they’ll contact me directly via this post :)

  40. Jeremy Toeman

    July 13th, 2007 at 8:57 am

    Just wanted to share some thoughts on this from the other side, having organized and managed numerous beta programs. One of the reasons for having limited numbers of users is to be able to get useful, manageable feedback for what you are working on. Asking 10 people (or 50 or 100 or whatever) to try out a feature and fill out a survey yields different results than 10,000.

    Further, on the viral marketing side, what if your site really isn’t ready for mass-consumption or review? What if you have a great idea, but you are still building out the features and really want a helpful group of people who are there without the intent to judge you.

    The sayings about “first impressions” are fairly true, and I know full well that I have worked on projects (and am working on some now) that would get torn apart by bloggers if viewed too early, but if I can get the right amount of feedback before opening up, I’ll do a lot better…

  41. Concrete Stain

    July 13th, 2007 at 8:58 am

    simple niche website; no business model -

    - unless you could charge a company; to host their invites.. etc…. or be featured

  42. ken rossi

    July 13th, 2007 at 9:08 am

    the web is amazing… to think … I just registered this last week

    http://www.betaexchange.com

  43. tapster

    July 13th, 2007 at 9:57 am

    oh dear, you’ve techcrunched yourself.. I get this just hitting the URL

    Error 500 - Internal server error

    An internal server error has occured!
    Please try again later.

  44. Tyrun

    July 13th, 2007 at 10:10 am

    Thanks Mike!

    I know what I’m going to be doing all day :)

    Seriously though, this thing is awesome. Too bad it’s getting techcrunch’d.

  45. website copywriter

    July 13th, 2007 at 11:10 am

    Just shows that there are ways to get around things and even party crashers can have a piece of the cake. Very cool concept, I’m signing up right now.

  46. ChucksJob

    July 13th, 2007 at 11:20 am

    If they sell this thing, I think they’ll owe Arrington some money. He’s driven most of their traffic for the past few days.

  47. Hornswaggled

    July 13th, 2007 at 11:25 am

    This would of been great to refer people to when the Joost invite craze was going on. I must have received at least a hundred or so invite requests and spent way too much time fulfilling most of them.

    On a side note I havent seen any Joost news for awhile. Maybe they are still having reliability issues.

  48. Yusuf Motiwala

    July 13th, 2007 at 11:35 am

    Nice idea! I wish site was more robust. Too many 500 Internal server errors. May be techcrunch effect that server is not able to handle the load.

  49. John Mills

    July 13th, 2007 at 11:38 am

    The site seems to have a lot of problems currently. I keep getting 500. Does anybody experience this issue?

  50. Paul

    July 13th, 2007 at 12:56 pm

    Maybe TechCrunch should relaunch as beta and offer invites ;)

  51. Larry Rubin

    July 13th, 2007 at 1:59 pm

    Time elapsed from InviteShare registration to pownce invitation: 60 seconds tops.

    Thanks. This rocks!

  52. Honda Accord Guy

    July 13th, 2007 at 2:14 pm

    site loos great. I am not too crazy about the black background.

  53. Joakim Jardenberg

    July 13th, 2007 at 3:27 pm

    They beat me to it!!!
    For a couple of months I’ve tried to find time to build a great service like this on inviteme.com (great domain, don’t you think?) - but sadly nothing is ready yet. To bad - my intention was to deliver a service that, well, delivers ,)
    Anybody with to much time on their hands - contact me.

  54. Bill Hartzer

    July 13th, 2007 at 3:34 pm

    Site concept is cool, but are they legally able to give out and share private beta invites like this?

  55. CJ

    July 13th, 2007 at 3:56 pm

    The concept is nice, but there needs to be a place to post startup websites. I will be starting beerspace.com soon and this could be a great place to share limited invites and get the word out. Also I think the site needs to be updated with a better interface.

  56. Michiel van der Blonk

    July 13th, 2007 at 8:29 pm

    I don’t understand why the email addresses would have to show up at all!! Why generate images, when you can just state the name and in the back end you link them to email addresses. Sorry, but this sucks. Of course it will be sold to spammers.

  57. Yusuf Motiwala

    July 14th, 2007 at 3:06 am

    I agree with the previous commenter. I was also concerned about email address but I use a dedicated account only for such purposes. Anyway, guess what, within 5 minutes after adding my email address, I received an invite I wanted, thats pretty cool.

  58. Benjamin

    July 14th, 2007 at 11:38 am

    Cool stuff, thanks! Will try it out immediately

  59. picbros

    July 15th, 2007 at 10:09 am

    that is great website I will use thank you

  60. Josh Chandler

    July 15th, 2007 at 3:20 pm

    Wow this is a great idea, I know I am always so jealous of those who get priority access :). It’s so unfair but this could change it!!

    Josh Chandler

  61. Vlad Zaharia

    July 16th, 2007 at 11:37 am

    As stated before, their implementation has some flaws. I sent over 40 invites, to spock and moola. Out of all of those, at least half accepted the invite. Only 6 bothered to confirm it on InviteShare.

  62. Jonathan

    July 19th, 2007 at 7:03 pm

    Seems Like Mike has bought the site for $25k.

    Site seems to be down for maintenance.

    http://blog.wired.com/business.....-revi.html

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