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.
Excellent way to create a little buzz early on
Seems like it might defeat the purpose of limited testing if the absolute number of invites isn’t limited. Still, nice idea.
Its going to help users because they need not search everywhere
gettit – yep, it definitely defeats the purpose of the beta. I love it.
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?
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.
Simple but very useful service. Will definitely give it a try.
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.
wow…what a great website.
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.
“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
Nice idea… but the site is throwing errors often.
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.g...r-grandcentral/ regarding GrandCentral.
Very interesting concept! Will give it a try now and see how it works!
Does anyone have any InviteShare invites?
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!
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.
500 error, nice
what a poorly made site…can’t find the place to list my site
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)
Nice idea
Horrible UI
Horrible usability
Very unstable due to traffic?
This can be done better.
Over here in Germany, Nicole Simon built a Google Group two weeks ago. Works just as well
it’s completely crashed, error 500 on all links
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
What an ingenius idea.
Joost invites are a dime a dozen now:
http://www.tech...-joost-invites/
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…”
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.
===
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.
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.
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.
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
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
Michael,
Check this out as well, I emailed your team about it:
BetaBarter http://betabarter.ning.com/
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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’.
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
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…
simple niche website; no business model -
– unless you could charge a company; to host their invites.. etc…. or be featured
the web is amazing… to think … I just registered this last week
http://www.betaexchange.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The site seems to have a lot of problems currently. I keep getting 500. Does anybody experience this issue?
Maybe TechCrunch should relaunch as beta and offer invites