robinhood.io has done a pretty kickass job of building hype. You enter your email address and get added to the back of a queue. But if you share (and get other people to sign up) you leap-frog over the others in front of you.

Here's another one. When MeteorJs announced "Meteor Developer Accounts" they sent out an email blast saying "Claim your Meteor developer username". And people (like me) scrambled to reserve the username they wanted before it got taken. I thought that would be a pretty damn awesome way to prelaunch anything that has user profiles / usernames. (Reserve your username in advance of our product launch)

Hey, thanks for that, and sorry for the late reply! Yeah, defiantly do something that makes you wait in line, but with the option to move forward.

10x!

Thanks guys, What do you think of some kind of reward to the person who refer most people (like a drone or something cool...)?

mailbox had their signup that showed you where you were in line to get the app which was pretty cool because it ticked down every day and you could see the number of people behind you.

Gmail was pretty awesome too.

Thanks Brothe2000, sorry for the late reply. Gmail had invitations for a long time...do you remember how long?