This whole format is a dead end. Clubhouse user growth and engagement is stalled out (and likely in decline). Not that Facebook minds. The millions spent cloning Clubhouse are a rounding error on their financial statements.
Strong agree. I'm still a little bewildered about how Clubhouse got so much hype in the first place considering the actual product obviously sucks.
With that said, I think Clubhouse could be in a way better position if they'd used their head start to actually work on making the product not awful.
I have listened to 1-2 conversations where I've thought hey this has some value, but every time I open up and scroll through it it looks like early 2000's email spam except with emojis. Super low value topics like hustle harder or marketing nonsense.
With social apps the algorithm is everything. I mean just look at Tik Tok. I feel like Clubhouse could have tried harder to make a magical experience where you opened it up and an interesting conversation was tossed your way. Oh well.
With respect to content, I think the core problem for Clubhouse is its live-centric model. This limits both the total volume of content available to be recommended, but also the data upon which an recommender can be trained.
This, of course, is a paradoxical problem for Clubhouse as live audio was its central innovation and distinguishing feature.
Probably doesn't help that Clubhouse was iOS-only for a long time. People in the local dev community would now and then suggest a Clubhouse night, but we have to shot it down everytime as it would eliminate a sufficient portion of members. End up using Discord, but definitely would have jumped on the ship, had they not cashing in on exclusivity for so long.
Invites do not appear to be the growth bottleneck. With the Android app having been released in mid-May, installs will shoot back up for a time, but it sure looks like the actual TAM for Clubhouse is quite a bit smaller than its investors thought (given its crazy valuation).
Clubhouse is the app version of "this meeting could have been an email", but replace "meeting" with "live audio" and "email" with "podcast". This app/format is and always was the perfect trap for the VC/product manager class.
Indeed it is a dead end. It is a mere 'feature request' to many of the existing popular apps out there rather than a separate full blown app.
The pandemic was Clubhouse's selling point and it has been copied to death by its competitors. Now that it is nearly over, there really isn't any point in going back or waiting for an invite when everyone else has the same feature on the old platforms.
I guess Phase 3 is when we start to see ByteDance creating their own Clubhouse clone and other smaller companies will be selling an SDK for others to rapidly create their own Clubhouse rooms.
At the end of this experiment, it will result in Clubhouse shutting down and giving back the money they raised from the VCs. Isn't that right Secret Inc.?
Interesting that you like it, personally I couldn't seem to find the "good" content. There are always a huge number of chats going on and it feels impossible to figure out which ones are the interesting ones. Also, after following a few people the number of notifications was so high I had to turn them off. But without notifications how can you know what is going on?
With that said, I think Clubhouse could be in a way better position if they'd used their head start to actually work on making the product not awful.
I have listened to 1-2 conversations where I've thought hey this has some value, but every time I open up and scroll through it it looks like early 2000's email spam except with emojis. Super low value topics like hustle harder or marketing nonsense.
With social apps the algorithm is everything. I mean just look at Tik Tok. I feel like Clubhouse could have tried harder to make a magical experience where you opened it up and an interesting conversation was tossed your way. Oh well.