If you've signed up for alerts, you'll see a "Share Sparkfare & get early access" link below the signup bar. It's easy to assume that's marketing shorthand for "you'll be listed first" or some cosmetic reorder. It isn't — it's a genuinely earlier send time.
Your share link is a plain URL with your own id attached. When someone signs up for the first time through that link — never on a resubmit, only a genuinely new signup — both of you get flagged for early access. It's a one-time flag, not a counter: referring more friends after the first doesn't do anything further for you.
Early-access users get the daily digest from a genuinely separate, earlier scheduled job — a full hour before the regular run reaches everyone else. It's not the same email reordered or resent; it's an actually earlier delivery, and if you're already marked as sent for the day from the early run, the later general run simply skips you rather than sending twice.
A referral reward that isn't real doesn't earn trust — same reasoning behind writing about a "Building history" state instead of hiding it, or naming a partner as pending instead of implying it's live. If we're going to say "early access," it needs to be a real hour, not a phrase.