I just skimmed this - but I didn't see any reference to the fact that clubhouse basically failed. I think you can absolutely learn a lot from failure, but doing so does require you to realize that failure has happened. The vibe I get from this is more "how to recreate the success I experienced at clubhouse" which doesn't seem quite as valuable to me.
Clubhouse is in a rare position - they exploded, were definitely in hyper growth, and then disintegrated. Clubhouse seemed like it hit an effect where the network stopped being a positive. When they were small and used by elite people, they were super popular and exclusive. When everyone got in there it was basically clubs for... I don't even know how to name the people, but not really that valuable. Basically like a nightclub - cool if it's exclusive and lame if everyone can go in. I'd much rather read an insider's take on this unique perspective.
Yup that's kinda how I saw it: when it went from being a exclusive clubhouse party to an open warehouse party, I became much less interested.
For a while, it was a place where I could interact with an invite-only subset of humans with real names on the internet. I really loved that aspect of it. As it opened up, I saw people using fewer real names, fewer links to real name social media accounts, just felt less exclusive and more just like Twitter. At that point, I think Twitter Spaces started taking off.
The question I ask is how to build an online space that is exclusive, without the draw to make it for the masses?
I think the biggest problem I had with clubhouse was everyone treated it as a place to grow their brand and personal network via some weird combination of bragging about what they’re doing and soapboxing.
The sheer number of introductions I had to sit and listen to any time I joined one…it was absolutely baffling. We’re talking sometimes 15 minutes of just sitting there as every person introduced themselves, every project they are working on, their experience, their favorite shows, their workout routine, etc.
The one time I actually found a conversation about gear talk (film/video) it was just a couple of folks who were new to the industry all trying to power network with each other. It was weird. Podcast ones were just people treating it like their podcast.
I'm curious if when someone joined Clubhouse had a huge effect on their experience. I don't remember too much of this when I joined in Dec 2020, but maybe it was already there and I was just in different rooms.
Ah ok, then maybe we were just in different rooms, I think even at that point it was less of a clubhouse and starting to become more of a bar with multiple rooms, DJs, outside areas, conference room, etc :-D
haha, fair point, maybe warehouse wasn't the best example. I think maybe it's not about whether one is cool or not but what one expects. I would go to a clubhouse to have an exclusive conversation with 10-20 people about a specific topic, I probalby wouldn't want to have that same conversation with 10-20 people I met in a huge warehouse party. I might like to dance amongst the masses and thrive in the anonymity, but would have a different feel.
ah, I may have flubbed the analogy, maybe what I meant was more from dinner party to massive dance party but still wanting to have a dinner party conversation.
> The question I ask is how to build an online space that is exclusive, without the draw to make it for the masses?
Google+ kind of accomplished this with Circles; a way to create invite-only communities within the larger platform. A few of the social media sites have bolted on something similar, but none have really designed around it like Google+ did.
Yeah, I wonder if how Google+ did it, still attaches the overall brand with the masses. Aka, Google+ wanted everyone to use Google+, just subsegment within it. Almost as if everyone lives in the same house but there are millions of rooms.
I'm curious about the brand that says, "Nope, we're an online platform just for 10,000 people" or "who make this much money" or "who are in these communities."
I wonder what examples already exist, if any, that tie the whole brand to a specific online exclusivity.
Maybe, I think they are still rooms in a much larger house (Reddit) vs being an exclusive house in itself. Also, I don't know much about subreddit membership, are some private and invite only?
Well find a price people are willing to pay for it. You probably reach a point where you need to pay all this elite but the listeners cant be milked any more and you need more people to maintain the pyramid.
That s why no one can do it: if you want to speak to Warren Buffet you ll be more successful having something that interests him to say, and no amount of trying to cheat reality can hide for long that asymetry: there was nothing in it for the VIP but milking you.
I remember being in rooms where celebrities from one subculture were talking with celebrities of another culture. Maybe not so different than why some people would attend the TED conference or Davos.
I'm not saying I should necessarily be in the room lol. Just that maybe there is a way to limit it where there is a level of assumed parity among participants. For example, maybe Warren Buffett would like to talk with the guy behind moneyball from The Oakland A's about the influence of statistics on sports. I think yes it could dilute too much, I just don't think it necessarily has to.
Wasn't Clubhouse's biggest failure that they were offered $4 billion for a 4 month old company and said "no"? Or would it have never made it out of due diligence? It seemed to dissolve within what I think a DD period would still be happening, but not for a reason (business trends) I would assume would be directly allowable to cancel.
I'd appreciate it if people with more experience than me weighed in on if the acquisition could have been aborted, if it could technically have been aborted but probably would have gone through, or if it would have gone through cause a contract is a contract.
I think the founders negotiated a secondary in series A - took a couple million off the table. I imagine a16z likely had some clause in the paperwork that prevented them from accepting an acquisition offer this early (I'm speculating).
Why would a16z want to block an acquisition offer that early?
Or rather, I could see how a VC might want to ensure that the offer is a sufficent ROI, either by preapproving a minimum or requiring signoff. But why wouldn't a16z want to take their huge returns? Did their partners see a better ROI anytime soon?
I'm not affiliated with a16z in any way, so I can't speak for their thoughts, but I do know that it isn't uncommon for VCs to have an "IPO or nothing" point of view. They invested in Clubhouse at a $4billion post-money valuation with what I imagine was/is a belief that it could be a $40billion exit in the future.
A four month old company worth 4B would feel like an invincible rocket ship. Hard to be rational in that case. I’m sure they told themselves the story of Facebook turning down the 1B acquisition way back and saw themselves with the better story
If you’re offered $4 billion, they could’ve negotiated that to their advantage and reduced or eliminated DD for a cool 2-3 billion or a very respectable $1 billion.
Now the last private valuation will probably be impossible to hit.
It was definitely neat for awhile. I heard some great panels and conversations and learned some things that you'll never be able to find on Google - like did you know Tony Hawk learned to program on a TI-99/4A? Only way you'd know is if you were there when he said it in a forum with no record!
But I never found any groups I could participate in. There were vast deserts of interests - either because search was bad, or people simply weren't discussing those topics. I'd try to create my own rooms, but no one would ever join.
I mean, that's the thing, I heard a lot of PR about people interacting with celebrities, VCs etc. And people saying the _format_ was great as it attracted all these people. But the reality was the novelty attracted these people, and a VC that spends all day chatting with randomers won't be managing their investments very well so they would need to dial back, and the celebs who were enjoying the novelty were going to realise that any venue to interact with fans is capable of consuming "all their time", and want to go back to putting it back in its time limited box, so that aspect of the appeal was never going to last.
Then for the randoms talking to randoms type groups, voice chat is a big increase in commitment over Reddit/HN/whatever. You could argue that encourages better contributions, but it also discourages frequent contributions, which in turn helped the "fizzling out" effect
Synchronous audio is way worse on time then async text. You can't simply divert Twitter time if you want to take any value (be it relevant for business or entertainment or ...) out of it.
Yep! I had the same position back when Clubhouse was just getting super popular and was being called inevitable.
My comment then - "I am a strong sell on ClubHouse at a $2b valuation. Just like Medium and Quora, once the masses are allowed on, the noise will get too high and the signal will get lost."
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26144326).
Yeah, I agree that Clubhouse quickly went from "interesting" to "irrelevant" and to what now can only be described as "spammy", but I'm not sure this person sees Clubhouse as a failure, even though we might do from the outside.
One of the points from the article is the following:
> Lesson #4 — Beware of complexity creep
> Anticipate this, then build in early checkpoints. Define success and failure before a launch. Build a solid process and track the right metrics to help make objective, decisive decisions — and don’t forget to create a framework to sunset things!
And since the author is writing the blogpost from the perspective of "Here is how you can build something as successful as Clubhouse" instead of "Here is how you can avoid what we failed to avoid", I'm guessing whatever their definition of success/failure is, they seem to have hit it.
Worth keeping in mind if you actually want to build something that turned out like Clubhouse at all, if you're reading this article.
What was the fraud that was occuring with this social capital and how was the social capital of later participants used to pay social capital to earlier participants?
Wouldn't they suffer from Zoom fatigue as well?
I still remember how everyone was.
"hey zoom cool! We can do online meetings...and it works."
But then quickly it became a drag.
I recall being in a Clubhouse session with Paris Hilton and another with Anthony Scaramucci and thought "wow, there are some interesting people on this platform"
Yet, being on a call regularly would likely reduce this initial novelty factor real quick.
> I recall being in a Clubhouse session with Paris Hilton and another with Anthony Scaramucci and thought "wow, there are some interesting people on this platform"
Funny, that would give me the exact opposite response.
Seems like the Clubhouse boosting party is beyond over. No justification into why VCs think that it is worth $4B. [0] I don't see a path for survival for this hype product and it turns out that nothing of value was lost as soon as its ideas were easily copied to death.
Nothing new was brought to the table that could not be copied. This is why the Clubhouse had nothing interesting inside it and my mind remains unchanged on this since [0].
IMO, Clubhouse was a good idea for the zeitgeist (lockdowns) and had a lot of novelty value, but ultimately wasn't what people really wanted. What they really wanted was Twitter Spaces because that's the actual public town square and that's where "knowledgeable" speakers can have opportunistic discussions, pop in and have their say then leave.
Clubhouse should have tried to sell itself to Twitter as soon as possible, though I'm not sure it could have worked out regardless. It's just too easy to copy the idea, and they're unlucky because of that.
The difference is Twitter Spaces are lead by bigger influencers? What’s the point of being live for that? Or how is that much different than a podcast that has Q&A?
If something is lead by the main person/people, then it won’t be a natural sort of discussion right?
I don’t know how to get to Twitter Spaces, but did use Clubhouse a bit.
> If something is lead by the main person/people, then it won’t be a natural sort of discussion right?
That form may be perfect for the subject - the genius of Twitter Spaces is its flexibility: it can be indistinguishable from a podcast (with 1 person speaking), or a town hall where anyone/everyone can get to speak, and anything in between. I've been in some amazingly great/funny/informative Spaces - and it hinged on the quality of moderation.
FWIW, "a podcast with a Q&A" is valuable: it can draw out amazing insights from listeners in realtime - unlike regular podcasts that get discussed on Twitter after the fact, and without canonical answers.
Except you can’t copy community. But you can kill it or cultivate it. The value of the best online communities won’t be the software but the people. Like HN.
> In recent months I craved more time to explore new ideas again as a founder, and decided to leave Clubhouse while staying on as an advisor.
Just at an FYI to the author, this is a bad idea. Once you have left a startup, your opinions are going to be valued much less by everybody still there because, well, you quit. Your incentives are now not aligned fully, you aren’t part of the mission anymore, and this was because you decided you didn’t want to be.
And from your perspective, you quit. Don’t waste your time on them anymore, fully focus on your next project.
It isn’t about giving advice. The advisor role is simply about saving face on both sides. Neither the company nor the founder want to admit they lost faith in the other party.
That's a great explanation. I've seen the "[Person] will stay on as an advisor for the next N months." so many times when execs or leaders at companies decide to leave. It's a kind of "[Person] has decided to spend more time with their family" statement.
Again, it’s a waste of time. The company nor the former employee should be wasting their time with saving face.
The startup has actual important things to do and the former employee has new projects to start. When a founder leaves it isn’t even that big a deal, nobody cares about a former employee.
In a lot of situations, no additional time is spent (and thus wasted). This happens with advisors in the general case too: they become an advisor and never meet again.
Probably because founders tend to have strong influence over a company and tend to have their share of personal fans and supporters among the userbase. So they try to avoid alienating them by pretending that they still get along.
Like when Carl Pei left OnePlus, we all knew it would go to shit once Oppo took over but they kept up the pretense for a while to protect the brand before they started undermining it.
For the 'advisor' there's probably a financial arrangement to this to keep them quiet and from shoveling up dirt in the media. It's hard to just give someone money like that so again a fake role comes in handy.
Clubhouse was broken right from the beginning. The alleged value was in the cringe-inducing attempt to emulate an exclusive, elitist social club, but to sell that to the masses with a startup-style model, which was contradictory in and of itself. Startup companies function by scaling up and that's literally the only thing your secret society cannot do.
Overall though good riddance because that entire idea is antithetical to what digital tech can do. I remember that Elon talk where people 'did not fit in a room', and they broadcasted it to other instances. Literally like an overflowing conference room in a virtual space that has no need for these limitations if you weren't trying to desperately sell access.
I see a lot of these retrospectives from companies that (to a certain degree) failed to live up to their hype. I don’t want to invalidate the sort of lessons you can only learn by living through these hyper scaling phases, but I sometimes wonder if some of the lessons folks learned are potentially why things went wrong?
I think he missed the number 1 lesson: when you finally do get traction, don't wait an eternity in order to let people in.
I think they have clubhouse for android now, but without it essentially 1/2 the population was at best left out, but at worse (and very realistically) made to feel they weren't a wealthy enough consumer for the product. He essentially told 1/2 of the globe that they weren't a good enough customer, most of them just shrugged, said ok, and then never looked back at the product.
Maybe the real lesson is Clubhouse worked about as well as the idea would let it. It will never scale to billions of users because you’ll never get that many people interested in the idea of eavesdropping in live voice chats.
>It will never scale to billions of users because you’ll never get that many people interested in the idea of eavesdropping in live voice chats.
Billions on one topic? I agree. Millions on one topic? Sure that is possible. Just look at talk radio ,which is still alive. Many shows had listeners in the millions and still do,
Except talk radio evolved in a distinctly asynchronous direction - "talk radio" is now just "podcasts".
Clubhouse's format was about synchronous audio - you have to be there at the moment something is said to hear it. They can add a recording feature to it, but then it's just a poor man's podcast platform.
> Many shows had listeners in the millions and still do
Citation needed? Actual radio listenership has plunged through the floor. Podcasts certainly command that kind of audience size regularly - but again, async, which is a key distinction from the Clubhouse format.
More generally media has evolved from synchronous to asynchronous, and everywhere where they've competed the market has chosen in favor of async media. Broadcast TV is (mostly) dead in favor of on-demand streaming, talk radio is (mostly) dead in favor of podcasts.
The merits of async are huge in terms of audience size - there's a reason the format itself has pivoted towards podcasts. It feels like Clubhouse's synchronicity is both its greatest asset (i.e., novelty, candidness, spontaneity) and worst liability (i.e., intrinsic limit to audience availability) - and honestly it seems pretty obvious at this point what the net viability of the idea was, given that constraint.
Isn't that podcasts? There are certainly some more topic oriented podcasts, but the more popular ones are basically two famous people chatting on random subjects: eg Joe Rogan
There was a spontaneity to Clubhouse that podcasts don't have. I'd get an alert that some neat-o celebrity was talking right now, and I could just tap on it and I'd be tuned in right away.
AM radio listenership in the US is measured in tens of millions a week, and falling. Maybe that can be a business? But I don't see how it could ever be even Twitter-scale.
If you think that the demand for talk radio is going away, then I'm not really sure what market you're in. So sure, maybe broadcast radio audiences are losing listeners, but the content itself is not. The audience may be moving to other platforms. I did specify AM, but I should have put that in quotes as we are probably all familiar with the type of programming on "AM" radio.
My lesson from Clubhouse is that if you want to make social media app then you either need to be lucky or able to enlist tons of celebrities. MySpace, Twitter and Clubhouse are all examples of how they skyrocketed as celebrities pulled in and how then fell to ground as they left the scene. In early hype, it was obvious that founders were able to leverage their connections to celebrities very effectively.
From an outsider's perspective (I never got into Clubhouse), it really seemed like its success was getting the right people on the platform (like you mentioned), plus the fact that the pandemic put a temporary stop on in-person meetups and talks. I'm sure this was partially due to the hard work of the people at Clubhouse, but to me it seems also like being in the right place at the right time.
What I don't get about articles like this, is that the growth is just taken for granted as if it's easily replicated. It's all about hard-fought learnings about product/ops/GTM, and none of that is relevant if you don't come up with an initially compelling product. How can you nurture growth if there is no growth in the first place? Maybe I'm a dumbass who just doesn't "get it," but it seems to me like a premature victory lap to celebrate these learnings before proving that they are fundamental to repeatable success.
i'd change the keyword 'celebrities' to 'top of the social pyramid'. You want to start the social group at the top of the social pyramid of the respective social circle. Create a social clique, which everyone would be jumping off the ground to join. Facebook was started at Ivy League, which allowed it to spread like wildfire in colleges. Similarly Clubhouse was started in Silicon Valley with top VCs and Founders.
Of course, each social app goes through various inflection points and arguably celebrities is towards the peak end of it. Celebrities usually catch on once it's already going mainstream or has a mainstream appeal. For example, Twitter had already created strong base of engaged users before celebrities caught on.
The app I'm writing now, marries a fairly basic social graph to a location-based database.
When we began, Clubhouse was the new "hotness," and I was getting a great deal of pressure to mimic it.
I resisted, as it did not actually work with the model we had established for the app. I also had a rather pessimistic outlook on its chances. It did not make me popular.
Were there 23 lessons, or none? Seems like the author couldn't focus on what they "learned," which likely suggests the post is simply a way to increase their profile after what is largely considered a failure.
This article would have been way more valuable if distilled into a poignant lesson or insight about why Clubhouse failed.
And when the people who want to monetize the community take over, curation tools are deliberately hobbled, and the community changes accordingly - always, IMO, for the worse.
We co-incidentally launched "Mentza" - a social audio platform in India with 20-minute timed live audio conversations early last year.
The community is close-knit and we've had some success at getting the "sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name" vibe going for our power users.
Most of our content & culture is averse to casual chit-chat and more focused on peer to peer learning about something that's mutually of interest, or enjoying some local poetry & music. We've been fairly editorial from the start with a focus on meaningful conversations which will always be a core proposition.
We raised about $300K in seed in September and we have been humming along since, with monetization coming next month.
I'm obviously biased but I think our format is simpler - it's 20 minutes, you set the context, say your piece and talk to upto 5 others and unlimited listeners who can chime in from the live chat. If you want, you can extend for another 5 minutes to wrap up. All the conversations and chat transcripts are publicly available and recorded, so you don't really miss out if you join late or can't make it.
The Clubhouse story is great because it's like a lens into the future for similar apps in terms of the challenges that one can expect - curation, spam, lewd content, crypto nonsense, harassment, etc.
I'm curious which was the biggest factor in the decline of Clubhouse: "everyone's now invited" effect (especially globally); "pandemic boost now over + clubhouse fatigue"; or Twitter Spaces creating something just as good but on top of an existing social network.
I joined in August 2020 and it was already declining at. that point; really hit the inflection point into the ground in late Q3/early Q4 2020.
I wonder whether the developers/owners of that thing even realize that its very only attraction was the boutique aura of being an iphone exclusive. they should have. maybe it's not something you admit out loud, but they had to realize it at some level
That's a very interesting observation: Clubhouse's valuation had already peaked before they finally decided to let a tsunami of Android users on in 5/2021; the 3/2021 Davison quote below pretty much says as much in coded language, that it wasn't a priority and tries to blame it on discovery/UX/engineering. In any case by then, they had walked away from Twitter's $4bn offer, and Twitter was bringing up Spaces rapidly. Also, by then the world was planning for post-Covid reentry. So, from then on the valuation was going south, and the elite userbase was inevitably going to leave. (Anyone got some numbers on Customer Lifetime Value, by segment? What happens to your valuation when the 10% of users with highest CLV leaves? How much lower is the CLV of non-US-based Android users?)
I find the OP's "25 Lessons Learned" is kind of a smokescreen that covers all earthly eventualities other than meteors and solar flares, and I can't see which of the 25 are the primary excuse for not deploying Android and scaling up the platform engineering in 5/2021 when they urgently needed to. Should have just sold out to Twitter unless they had a rock-solid plan to execute that in 2021. Consider that $4b would have been 13% of TWTR's valuation today. (How much of Twitter's bid would have been cash?)
See their trail of statements [1]: [1/2021 said “soon, but no definite timeline”. Instead, most of [Clubhouse's] statements about Android have been vague mentions of the importance of supporting the Android user base and making its app more accessible to a wider audience.... co-founder Davison explained the company’s approach to scaling to a larger market — like one where Android users participate — as an effort that requires a slower pace, when it comes to opening up access to more users. He noted that when Clubhouse grows, the discovery experience inside the app can be negatively impacted as a result. Users today are seeing more foreign language groups in their feeds, for instance, and are having a harder time finding friends and some of the best content, he said. [blaming the lack of selectivity on engineering and UX isn't credible]
Seems like a lot of shit happened if you read between the lines. IMO the lessons would have been more impactful with insights into what really happened. For instance: "#1 Earn the right to build the next thing" --> A.K.A we built the wrong thing. What did you build and why didn't it work?
Still, overall great lessons. In the end, it seems like Clubhouse is more of a feature that can be added to an existing product rather than a full product by itself. That doesn't necessarily make it a failure but much harder to turn into a long-term company. Reminds me a bit of Dropbox in that sense.
Excellent list imo. Even though Clubhouse was a mortar shot up and down those are really good recent insights. Anyone know who 'Anu' is and what he was doing at clubhouse?
Clubhouse is in a rare position - they exploded, were definitely in hyper growth, and then disintegrated. Clubhouse seemed like it hit an effect where the network stopped being a positive. When they were small and used by elite people, they were super popular and exclusive. When everyone got in there it was basically clubs for... I don't even know how to name the people, but not really that valuable. Basically like a nightclub - cool if it's exclusive and lame if everyone can go in. I'd much rather read an insider's take on this unique perspective.