Member-only story
Clubhouse Is Dead — and here’s why
Was the invite-only audio-first app with two million users ever really anything but a flash in the pan?
If you haven’t heard of Clubhouse, don’t be disheartened that an app has lived and died before you heard of it. It was meant to be the ‘Next Big Thing’ — and it was, for a select group of people for a short time.
Clubhouse is an audio-first app, where users join “rooms” and have discussions. In big rooms, there are “speakers” and people who have joined the room just to listen. Some Clubhouse users took on the MC role, getting very versed in something called “resetting the room” — regurgitating the same intro to the discussion every time a group of new people joined.
The idea is solid — experts could “speak” on topics to captive audiences (whose only interaction was to “raise a hand” to be given permission to ask a question). People could be “invited” onto the stage to speak, and users developed their own ‘Clubhouse etiquette’, which included muting and unmuting your microphone to denote applause, muting yourself while others were speaking, and not interrupting speakers. However, as with most things; the ever-expanding userbase ruined it.
Being invited to “join a room” became a dreaded notification. Joining a room, especially once you got to know those in your niche, became a time-suck. Joining a room meant you may be invited to speak, and that brought with it pressure not to leave too quickly. For me at least, Clubhouse became more work than play. The most valuable rooms were around content creation, where experts in my field would share their wisdom, but spending hours listening in kept me from actually creating anything.
Clubhouse made many mistakes during the initial meteoric rise of the app, the most egregious of which (in my opinion) was the referral strategy they opted for in an attempt to create an “exclusive” feel to the app and create FOMO around not being a part of it. As someone “lucky” enough to get an invite right when the app began to take off, it was yet another app I felt a pressure to be active on — but this one took hours from my day.
Adopting an “exclusive” strategy was very effective in getting a lot of takeup from, for example, massive YouTube creators, who felt safe on the app. That in itself proved a massive draw…
