I remember first reading about Clubhouse on a Women in Product Facebook group in November. Enter: googling the app, getting confused with the other Clubhouse (poor guys need to up their SEO game now), then bringing it up to my boyfriend on a drive in LA who coincidentally had just received a text message on his phone inviting him to the illusive app. After a game of begging/teasing about choosing me as his one invite (you only got 1 at the time), I was in.
Fast-forward almost three months and it’s a totally different ball-game with a critical mass of my personal network on-board. As many non-VC-billionaire people on Clubhouse have attested (if you’re Andreesen Horowitz you can go ahead and drop $100m), if they could have invested in it from the start they would. And these people still are investing in other ways such as via the tools powering Clubhouse — Agora and AWS.
What’s the fuss?
- Ingenious roll-out strategy. Limiting invites to both increase the exclusivity allure and ensure new invites are chosen wisely from trusted phone# contacts.
- Emphasis on communities of color to lead the initial network effects (although there are ramifications here —building on a tainted legacy of BIPOC innovations being accredited elsewhere…something that was brought to my attention in a CH chat).
- Innovation of the audio space — free-styling, networking, holding CEOs accountable, practicing a foreign language, songwriting, debating ethics, monetizing your artistic craft via NFTs, or hosting your company’s meetings…
- Focus. It’s the anti TikTok: moving away from flashy, addictive imagery, shortening our attention spans, into conversational content motivated by words and ideas. Although, I’m simultaneously aware of the education innovation on TikTok and the value of distilling complex ideas into bite-sized chunks.
- Ephemerality. There are no screenshots or shares, only pinging someone into the room so they can get the same context that you have. Ideas are generated and can be acted upon in other forums — going to a website, visiting the twitter link on their profile, joining a Discord server etc. Generally people are free to express whatever it is that is on their minds, although eloquence and clarity of speech are encouraged.
- Opt-in culture. Moving up the spectrum of engagement you can: passively listen to a public room > raise your hand to jump up to the stage > host a private room > host a social room > host a public room. There’s not a wrong way to use CH, and each of these modes can fit your mood and energy at the time. I love that I can throw it on while filing taxes or thoughtfully lock-in to a scheduled CH meeting.
- Democratization and decentralization. CH norms and guidelines are organically enforced by the community. Anyone from anywhere can join or create public rooms and interface with previously inaccessible people, although you do need an invite and iphone (for now). An African American Data Scientist who delivers an incredible pitch for her “grammarly for lesson plans” can actually have a follow-up convo with a VC without traveling across the country for a meeting [true story]. There’s a reason the crypto communities have flocked in droves.
Before you think I’ve drank too much Koolaid, there are definitely limitations and situations to be aware of, that will continue to proliferate as the app evolves beyond beta:
- Clubhouse is not immune to the vices of human nature and is already putting women and people of color in harm’s way.
- Algorithms are not unbiased 3rd parties. As the service grows, something must be used to cut through the noise to service relevant rooms.
- Lack of record keeping. Like many of the aforementioned virtues, they are one side of the coin. Ephemerality leads to games of telephone, newbies hijacking the convo without prior context, and folks jumping in and out without getting the full picture.
- Clubhouse is only as democratic and decentralized as the nations and institutions who govern [censor] its use.
At the end of the day we’re looking at a beautiful synthesis of technologies — Podcasting meets YouTube lectures meets Houseparty. And like any sufficiently advanced technology, it’s currently indistinguishable from magic. This is the FM Radio of our time, multiplied.
