Would you like to learn the secret to launch like Facebook did back in 2008?

I am just finishing up listening to Oversubscribed: How to Get People Lining Up to Do Business with You which I strongly recommend for anyone that gets paid for their expertise like I do.

It talks about the benefits of having a line outside of the club of people waiting to get in to use your product.

How Does This Apply To Server Infrastructure: The most amazing demonstration of this in practice that I can remember was Facebook’s initial launch, rolling out one school at a time until they hit a critical mass. This was for 2 reasons:

First the aforementioned business reason which created a sense of scarcity causing people to line up to get in(virtually speaking).

Second because this was long before the days of AWS. Sure, now with a few keystrokes I can quadruple the amount of commute power or disk space my infrastructure has to play with. But back then they were still renting dedicated servers, virtualization was in its infancy, and “Serverless” was not a thing.

By throttling how many users they allowed to sign up they solved 2 problems. Contrast this with Friendster which, while more established, suffered from constant outages due to these same limitations.

Question: How are you using scarcity to your advantage?