Google does it… so does the pakoda vendor at Majestic. A cool strategy to attract customers. INVITE ONLY seems to be much better than FREE.

Some time back I never entered a website if it wasnt free(not like much has changed now). The first time i heard about Gmail though… the fact that it was free and I still could not have it sank in. There is a beautiful line in the movie “Dangerous Liasons”…

Why do men always go after the one that run away…

Its something like that but even more intreguing. Have you wondered why you are more inclined to enter a room that says “Dont Enter” or “Admission Restricted”. Well its something i believe hard coded into our dna… Curiosity.

A long time back my dad was telling me about how shopkeepers used this to attract customers… In Majestic(in Bangalore) there is a shop which is famous for its “Pakodas” (An indian snack made after deepfrying). The attractive thing about this shop is it makes only a fixed amount of pakodas per day. Plus it start sellin them at 6pm sharp(im not sure of the time, might have changed). The pakodas sometimes last an hour. They say ppl come here from all over the city to eat the delicacies.

The fact remains if the man had chosen to make as many pakodas as the customers wanted this demand would soon die out… By refusing to prepare more the man created “artificial scarcity” and people soon started respecting it and showing up on time or started accepting that they were too late for pakodas.

When Gmail was launched the similar scarcity was created… trust me I was on a look out for an invitation for sometime… Happy :), to say i got it a few weeks after its launch. Right now I have 100 invites and almost no takers.

Yesterday I found out that YAHOO! 360 requires invite to join in. Trust me I have known about 360 for a while now never even felt the curiosity to checkout the site. But once I heard this I suddenly wanted to join in… just like that.

Anyway atleast one of the fun things is that it helps in checking spam..