Gmail: The Invite-Only Beta and a Bigger Inbox

Gmail launched on April 1, 2004, and people assumed it was a prank. A free email account with a full gigabyte of storage, when Hotmail handed you two megabytes? On April Fools' Day? But the offer was real, roughly five hundred times the competition, and then Google bolted on a constraint that turned a free product into something people were paying for on eBay.

This is a launch case for any founder sitting on a genuinely better product, wondering whether to throw the doors open or hold them shut. It sharpens the decision about access, timing, and how scarcity interacts with a real quality gap. Why a free account became a status object, and when this play backfires instead of compounding, is what the app unpacks.