Clubhouse: The Exclusive Online Party Everyone is Invited to Soon
It’s like walking through the school hallways and hearing about the upcoming Friday night party everyone is raving about. You’ve recently heard quite a bit about this seemingly exclusive event , but the chances are high that you haven’t been invited yet.
This is the case with new up and coming app that seems to be all the buzz: Clubhouse. The platform has based their products early identity on exclusivity. But, Clubhouse is the Project X-esque party we will all soon be invited to, and won’t ever want to leave.
The Party Details: What is Clubhouse?
Clubhouse is an audio-based social media app which describes itself as
You could call it a platform that supports free live podcasts with anyone or any room you can find on the app.
According to the Guardian, when you join the app you are immediately met with a wide range of discussions rooms labelled by select topics of interests such as tech, books, business or health and many more. Much like the Chinese video-sharing app, TikTok, the more information you give to the app about your interests, the more conversation rooms it is able to cater to you and recommend for you to join. This algorithm has allowed TikTok to be incredibly successful and will most likely make most of Clubhouse’ success as well.
The app currently has upwards of 3 million users as of February 2021.
The Menu/Drink List: How do you use Clubhouse?
Clubhouse enables its users to talk, meet and share ideas throughout the app. It lets you create and join the feature of a “room” in which users can chat with others in a conference call. The platform doesn’t allow the sharing of pictures, videos or even text. Just a profile photo, and a voice.
Clubhouse encourages its users to explore a multitude of different conversations. Users enter each room as an audience member and if you want to talk you “raise your hand” and then the rooms speakers can choose to invite you up as a speaker as well. Rooms can hold up to 5000 users at a time.
The app has three different designated roles within each Clubhouse room. Moderators, Speakers and Listeners.
Moderators are the head speaker of the room who has the special power to add or remove speakers. They are often used to guide the conversation and theme of the room.
Speakers are invited by moderator to speak in Clubhouse rooms and are invited by the moderators. They have the ability to share the stage with other speakers.
Listeners are the users who are usually browsing through different rooms and enter the conversations muted where they can discover new people, listen in on speakers and moderators, and can leave whenever and browse other rooms at the same time.
The Party Throwers: Who made it?
According to the Irish Times, Clubhouse was founded and created by entrepreneur Paul Davidson and former Google engineer Rohan Seth.
CNBC reports that Paul Davidson and Rohan Seth founded the app in the midst of the first COVID-19 lockdown last Spring. The app was originally a very small community in the early days of the pandemic mainly consisting of venture capitalists communicating and networking with one another while a large majority of the globe was at home in quarantine.
By May it was already valued at around $100 million despite only having 1,500 users at the time.
Party Address: How do you get an invite to Clubhouse?
But as the Guardian reflects on the intriguing platform, it is “much like a real-life country or yacht club, you have to be invited to join by an existing member. Real world elitism, but make it virtual.” At this point of their early rise, you cannot become a Clubhouse user without an invite. Each existing user gets to give out only 2 invites to more potential users. Clubhouse is currently only available for iPhone users on iOS. The app has yet to expand to the Android market.
It is so sought after, that when you Google “Clubhouse invite,” there are a multitude of Etsy links selling a Clubhouse invitation from $15-$50 just to be a regular user on the app.
The Delay of Invitation: Why can’t the general public access it?
Clubhouse recognizes there are more Android than iPhone users in the world and the app plans to expand to the general public soon, but just not yet.
According to Mashable.com, the company still wants to “build their community slowly and develop features that will help it support large numbers of people.”
the app’s site reads.
The List: Who is using Clubhouse?
Despite only being a year-old “unicorn startup,” Clubhouse already has a $1 billion valuation. It has many of Silicon Valley’s poster boys such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg hosting and speaking in Clubhouse calls in recent weeks, fuelling internet interest for the growing platform. According to Mashable, if you browse around the app long enough, you may come across a room where someone of the likes of Oprah, Kevin Hart, Drake, Chris Rock or Ashton Kutcher may be speaking.
Refinery29 remarked that networking is the primary reason for Clubhouse’s rising popularity as people are “jumping at the chance to make personal and professional connections they may not otherwise have access to.”
Clubhouse rooms are often hosted by experts, celebrities, venture capitalists, journalists, and so on as they host semblances of ‘live masterclasses’ in an attempt to create a more authentic reach with their audiences and more potential demographics.
The night has just begun: What does the bright future hold for Clubhouse?
It is stressed throughout their branding, website and app that the medium encourages authenticity, with the phrase “Be Authentic” consistently written everywhere. It will be interesting to see how Clubhouse capitalizes on its organic product, as the platform essentially forces its users to be authentic with their intended lack of fancy imaging/video features, sound effects, or editing as everything happens in live time as if it were a conversation conducted between two friends, co-workers, or business partners.
Perhaps this is what not only the business world, but also what most communication-oriented industries such as entertainment and education need to continue organic interactions and remain afloat amidst the now year-long COVID-19 pandemic. Clubhouse aims to replicate real world interactions of networking and getting to know people and concepts in a time of the pandemic when that is either very difficult or unenjoyable.
It is no secret that the company must be weary of potential matters that they may face on such a interaction-oriented platform. Bullying, discrimination, hate speech and invasion of privacy are all issues Clubhouse will inevitably have to face after they have finally refined their features for the eventual global roll out.
Until then, people like you and I who have yet to be invited to this raging, exclusive and captivating party, will have to sit back and wait until the gates are opened and everyone comes running in.
One thing is for sure, it may be difficult to get into this party, but it looks like it’ll be just as difficult to leave.
