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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
> 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.
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,
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
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.
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?
[+] [-] ALittleLight|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jimkleiber|3 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] HWR_14|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nsxwolf|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] friggeri|3 years ago|reply
Source: I was an early Clubhouse employee and left a few months ago.
[+] [-] cm2012|3 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] capableweb|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] faangiq|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsemrau|3 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] rvz|3 years ago|reply
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].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25883362
[+] [-] paulcole|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peter422|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jnwatson|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Barrin92|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] digb|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] somenewaccount1|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kingofheroes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nsxwolf|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] last_responder|3 years ago|reply
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,
[+] [-] zactato|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsemrau|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dylan604|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sytelus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] billllll|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kuldeep_kap|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|3 years ago|reply
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.
Glad I did.
[+] [-] alttab|3 years ago|reply
This article would have been way more valuable if distilled into a poignant lesson or insight about why Clubhouse failed.
[+] [-] sirspacey|3 years ago|reply
community building requires curation tools
Clubhouse added many features to encourage growth & adoption, but not one easy UX for curation
When I would visit the apps there was no quick and easy way to “mute” the algorithm where content was being surfaced that I didn’t want
Consequently my notifications were useless & I turned them off
So the magic of “this real person I want to hear from is in a room right now!” disappeared
It seems an obvious lesson to learn given the other comments here?
OP, very curious to hear your take on this.
[+] [-] fareesh|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rdl|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] throwaway0x7E6|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smcin|3 years ago|reply
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]
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/22/clubhouse-says-its-android...
[+] [-] snarkypixel|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ilrwbwrkhv|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffbee|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olivermarks|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexklarjr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] solardev|3 years ago|reply