Laravel 5.3 Send Notification to Users without an account
<p>With the Laravel 5.3 Notification feature, I see that the notifications are sent to users like this:</p>

<pre><code>$user-&gt;notify(new InvoicePaid($invoice));
</code></pre>

<p>Where I believe <code>$user</code> is the notifiable entity. What if I want to send notifications to users who doesn't have an account yet? In my app, users send invitation to their friends to join. I am trying to use Laravel's Notification to send the invite code to users who don't have an account yet. </p>

<p>When users invite someone, their data is stored in Invite Model like this:</p>

<pre><code>class Invite extends Model
  {
    protected $table = 'invites';
    protected $fillable = array('name', 'email', 'invite_code', 'expires_at', 'invited_by');
    protected $dates = ['expires_at'];
   }
</code></pre>

<p>I thought I can use notify to send notifications to the Invite model like this:</p>

<pre><code>$invite = Invite::find($inviteId);
$invite-&gt;notify(new InvitationNotification(ucfirst($invite-&gt;name), $invite-&gt;invite_code, $invite-&gt;expires_at));  
</code></pre>

<p>But the above doesnt work. I get the error: </p>

<pre><code>Call to undefined method Illuminate\Database\Query\Builder::notify()
</code></pre>

<p><strong>So my question is:</strong></p>

<ol>
<li><p>Am I able to send Notification only to User Model?</p></li>
<li><p>Is there a way to send Notifications to new users who doesnt have
an account yet?</p></li>
<li><p>Is my only choice is to use Laravel's Mailable class instead of Notification in these cases?</p></li>
</ol>