Find Me in the Club
Why Clubhouse is the next big thing, what it teaches us about great products and growth strategies, and what it means for the future.
By now, you may have gotten an invitation to Clubhouse, the next hot social content platform from Silicon Valley. Mike Shinoda is on it, Elon Musk is on it, even Paris Hilton is on it. The basic gist is it's a platform for audio-only meeting rooms that anyone can drop-in on and participate in a conversation. At any given moment, a Clubhouse user can drop in on chats on mindfulness and spirituality, Elon’s views on cryptocurrencies and meme stocks, or a local chat room about how to handle the historic cold weather here in Austin, TX. What is simple in concept often makes the best products, and Clubhouse seems exceedingly simple on the surface. But the execution and growth of a product like Clubhouse is rarely as simple as the product ends up feeling to users. Clubhouse is a masterclass in product development and growth whose momentum I don’t see slowing down. And as with most high-growth social tech products, in 10 years we may see the knife of its contributions to society cut both ways.
What makes Clubhouse such an engaging product is its near-constant stream of incentives to engage with the platform and its content. This starts right at the beginning of your experience with the app, its invite-based nomination system. Users can’t just sign up for Clubhouse, they need to be invited by someone already in Clubhouse. When a user accepts an invitation, their profile is then forever emblazoned with a link to the profile of the user that invited them, giving them bragging rights and social proof that they know the person who brought them into Clubhouse. When you zoom out, what seems like a pretty simple nomination system is actually a massive system of social accreditation key to the health of the network of Clubhouse. Think of every user on Clubhouse as a “node” on a massive, interconnected network of people. Each “node” has a certain set of topics they are interested in and they are assumed to be qualified to talk about these topics because they were invited by someone else who also shares their expertise and interest. When you hop into a chat with me on music, you know I have some interesting takes because I was nominated by my musician friend. This means from the first minute of using Clubhouse, you are empowered to start talking in groups, and you are surrounded by other people who are similarly qualified and empowered. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been invited. This also meant the founders of Clubhouse had curatorial control of the platform from the beginning before letting it snowball to take on a life of its own, ensuring from day one there was always a conversation worth engaging with. It’s a true Clubhouse, with tons of incentive to check out what others or talking about or join the conversation yourself.
You’ve tapped around your first couple Clubhouse chats and you’ve maybe even jumped in the conversation yourself. What incentivizes you to keep talking and keep participating? That’s where their push notification system comes in. Not only do notifications get sent out when someone you follow starts a chat, but they also get sent out when they join the audience of a chat. As a listener, you get to see the people you follow and the diverse amount of interests they have and the conversations they sit in on. But if you’re a speaker or content creator, that’s where the power of the notification system really comes alive. Because of how notifications are sent out, if I start a chat with a friend, I not only pull my audience in to hear me speak, I also immediately pull my friend’s audience in as well. I can even pluck people out of the audience to speak with us, then expanding the conversation to their audience as well. Creators can also stylize their profile screens to their heart’s content with snappy bios and emojis to give users an at-a-glance view of whatever they’d like to be known to have expertise in. The power notifications on Clubhouse has to build social networks, amplify messages, and promote individuals is immense. Creators would be wise to start establishing themselves on the platform early.
So if Clubhouse continues to grow and engage at the pace it is currently on, what does that mean for the social media landscape moving forward? Clubhouse fits into a larger trend of media democratization that started first with Twitter and Facebook. It gives users the power to spread their own message and share their own stories in conversation with others. In a utopian society, perhaps free and completely open public discourse is ideal, but as we’ve seen on Facebook and Twitter, a global society used to having its stories packaged up and distributed for them by mass media may not be ready for such power on the whole. Clubhouse has already been cynically criticized for giving the tech billionaires who funded it and participate in it an “out” from participating in traditional media. Instead of calling a press conference and having his story filtered through the perspective and biases of reporters, Elon Musk can just hop on Clubhouse and talk directly to his audience, in the same way former President Donald Trump circumvented the White House press corps during his presidency by just using Twitter. One may consider the circumvention of the biases of traditional media a good thing for discourse, and I tend to agree with this sentiment, but only if the audience Elon Musk is speaking to can think critically enough to discern for themselves fact from fiction, or hype from reality. If the past four years have taught us anything, maybe Twitter and Facebook threw us collectively into the deep end with this issue, and we have proved not to be able to swim with the power to judge fact from fiction, or hype from reality in messaging we received online. Though we saw the Arab Spring fueled by the power of democratized media, we also saw conspiracy theories like QAnon lead to violence and insurrection at the US Capitol Building. I see Clubhouse as the audio-only, podcast-inspired extension of the Facebook and Twitter freedom of information doctrine. And if we agree that the democratization of media, fueled by tech, is where we want to go as a society, then we still have a long way to go to be ready for it.
Clubhouse is not without its flaws, it’s still in its early days. In particular, they have got to figure out a better way to get people onboarded and into their first chat other than the confusing and intimidating default “Welcome” room. But the product growth engine is there, the incentives for engagement are there, and the people are there. Up is the only direction for Clubhouse to continue to go. It truly is an amazing place right now to drop in on interesting chats and connect with amazing people and creators. My only hope is that once it exits its current early adopter phase, and it attempts to appeal to increasingly larger markets, that society is ready to think critically about the information they get from dropping in and having the opportunity to be in the club.
