The magic of ClubHouse
What is ClubHouse (CH)? Why is it so popular and addictive? What is the WOW moment of CH?
What is ClubHouse🏠? In a nutshell, CH is an invite-only, audio-only chat app (at least for now).
An introduction from the App Store can give you a better understanding —
ClubHouse is a space for casual, drop-in audio conversations with friends and other interesting people around the world. Go online anytime to chat with the people you follow, or hop in as a listener and hear what others are talking about.
You may ask, is CH groundbreaking? Probably not the first time we see this kind of app on the market.
YY Voice (NASDAQ: YY) launched an audio-based social platform back in the 2000s. I was a user of YY Voice at that time. If this model is nothing new, then why is CH so popular and addictive⁉️
Let me start with my WOW moment on CH.
The WOW moment — You have no idea who you will meet in a room.
Recently, I have been working on accessibility. I am eager to learn more from experienced accessibility UX designers. Since I don’t know any experts in my inner circle, I ask myself — why not try CH? As a result, I randomly start a room, ad hoc, with a friend I just met on social media who’s also interested in this topic.
Then, the magic happened 🔥.
For the first hour, it was just two of us, talking and talking. Suddenly, 10+ people showed up in the room. The number of listeners quickly went to 50+ in the next 30 min. By the end of the second hour, there are 150+ people in the room, chatting about UX A11y design practice in the US and China.
The most exciting part is that this random room ended up attracting the most experienced A11y designer, advocates, researcher, volunteers from big tech, start-ups, NGOs, from both US and China.
I even met Bingying, who’s the UX lead on Android accessibility and also the person who first introduced me to accessibility design. I was able to ask her questions directly, “face-to-face”, which I have never dreamed about.
The discussion last 4 full hours⏰. My phone battery died twice.
😮 What a WOW moment of CH!
However, this is not the only reason that people are doing CH hours and hours, day and night. I want to show you how CH gets users hooked from the lens of behavior change design.
How CH gets user hooked?
Many people, including me, have extremely long screen time on CH. I spent 4 hours on CH yesterday. Why is CH so addictive?
We have been longing to get back to normal social life 🦠
Covid has kept us from physical social life for more than a year. With CH, people get a virtual version of the social life they used to have. How? The term “clubhouse” is the perfect analogy of its mechanism. On CH, you meet new friends and learn about new stuff through interacting with/following your friends just like what you would do in real life.
For example, Mike and I are good friends. One day, I know that Mike is going to an improv workshop in Seattle and I decide to go with him. In that workshop, I not only learn improv but also met Sarah, who’s the teacher of the workshop. This is exactly what happens on CH, virtually. This perfect replica of the physical social life successfully attracts users who are sick of social isolation across the globe.
Extrinsic & intrinsic motivation
Both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation play important roles in this wave.
The extrinsic motivation comes from the scarcity of invites. CH is still invite-only for now. A CH invite can get to $125.00 on eBay. The scarcity of access excites more people to join as well as brings vanity value and social assets to the current CH users.
On the intrinsic side, CH offers unique opportunities to talk directly to elites. CEOs, investors, KOLs, experts in different industries are all on CH. Moreover, CH ables everyone to have an equal voice on any topic, discover new things, and make new friends, just like how you socialize in real-life, face-to-face, but with better reachability to elites.
Low barrier to participate
The core action is to join/start a room. It’s uber easy for any user. Any new users will have a long list of curated feed of rooms based on user’s social network and interests. In a traditional virtual workshop or conference, the amount of commitment, prep work upfront could be a lot. In CH, you just drop in, zero commitment or prep work. If you don’t like it or have to drop, just “Leave quietly”.
The unknown a.k.a variable reward
I first learned the concept of variable reward from Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. In brief, variable reward means an ongoing degree of novelty in rewards.
The novelty of rewards manifests in the availability of rooms (room is NOT searchable by keywords), different people you can meet, various topics you can find, new stuff you can learn on CH, which creates unlimited desires for users to keep looking for those rewards on CH at midnight.
Every time you join a room, you might be able to talk to a CEO or an expert in the given industry. Thanks to the magical algorithm behind the feed, you never know what’s next. Interestingly, the feed maintains a very delicate but just right balance of unknown. All the rooms on your feed are not completely random. There is a good blend of recommendations based on your social network and interests. You won’t see rooms on the same topic taking up your whole feed due to the traditional recommendation algorithm. There is always a comfortable, trustworthy and small stretch to the realm of the unknown. Since the unknown can be intimidating, this small stretch is elegantly based on your social network. You might also notice that I use “trustworthy” to describe the stretch. Every room in your feed always presents a preview of the participant. CH presents familiar names (either your follower or following) next to the topics you did not select in onboarding, which acts as the “word of the month” phenomenon. It offers a sense of trust and familiarity that holds users’ hands to the unknown.
CH’s design to discover the unknown is freaking brilliant.
Forming the positive loop
In the past couple of months, CH is growing substantially but in a purely organic way. How does CH achieve this enviable growth? The answer is the follower/following feature. Each time users get some rewards out from listening to a room, they would naturally want to follow the quality speakers and the organizers (usually moderators) in the room so that they can join related events in the future. Follow someone on CH is very easy. It is this easy user input that gets users to invest in the app even more. And those follows will surface more quality events for their followers down the road, which forms a positive loop.
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with CH. All my analysis and assumptions of CH’s design rationales and algorithm are original and based on my personal experience on CH.
