So you’ve been saving for weeks, and you finally have enough cash stashed away to pick up a OnePlus One on launch day. But it won’t be that easy.

To get your hands on the new smartphone in the beginning, you’re going to need an invite. Once you have one, “you can be 100% sure” that you’ll be able to place an order and have it shipped within a few days — but how exactly do you get one?

One way to get an invite is to win a OnePlus contest. These are expected to take place later this month closer to the handset’s launch, but OnePlus hasn’t confirmed any dates yet. Another way to obtain one is through the OnePlus forum, but again, the company hasn’t said how or when they’ll be made available yet.

Once you have an invite and you’ve purchased your device, you’ll then be able to invite friends and family into the program. OnePlus says the invites will be available in limited quantities initially, but they’ll be easier to obtain as the weeks go by.

It all sounds very complicated, doesn’t it? But OnePlus feels the invite system is better way to tackle early demand and avoid pre-orders, which don’t always go smoothly. “In contrast to staying up in the middle of the night trying to buy one along with 20,000 other people,” the company says, “you can be 100% sure that you’ll actually be able to buy it, and it ships within a few days.”

We had a feeling the One would be difficult to get hold of initially — after all, OnePlus is a startup company that probably cannot churn out devices as quickly as rivals like Apple and Samsung. But only time will tell whether an invite system will help.

• SourceOnePlus