Some have espoused the invite-only tactic as a method to generate hype, since potentially a buzzy new product might cause people to head to social media to ask their friends for invites. Others say the value of invites comes from a method of limiting audience growth so that teams can fix bugs and scale a product’s infrastructure, before going to market more fully. Yes, these are all true, but they miss the most important reason to have invites in a product with network effects. Invite mechanics work like a copy-and-paste feature—if you start with a curated network, and give them invites, that
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