How can Clubhouse grow (again)?
Or how can Clubhouse be saved? Or how can Clubhouse become the talk of the town once more.
(Estimated reading time: 7 minutes, 36 seconds)
We all know the Clubhouse story. We all know that it is not going that well. And Shaan Puri’s thread will forever live in infamy.
Shaan has mentioned that the impressions for this tweet were in the millions. He even got offers for a book deal and made an appearance on CNBC1. That shows you how big of a spotlight Clubhouse enjoyed just a few months back - and how rapidly the news cycle hype cycle moves.
The Issues
Besides Shaan, Noah Smith2 also wrote back in May about Clubhouse’s problems. The 2 main ones are:
1. Time to value is high:
The key thing about Clubhouse is that it takes a tremendous amount of time...Now, that in and of itself isn’t prohibitive — I spend that much time on Twitter (sad to say). But Clubhouse is very hard to consume in small, bite-sized chunks.... With Clubhouse, if I wander by a random room, it takes me at least five minutes just to understand what people are talking about, and at least ten to get any kind of useful point. Audio doesn’t scroll.
Shaan put it in product terms
I think the biggest [problem] is that is what I call the 7 seconds problem so when you open any app whether it's Instagram, Facebook, Tik-Tok, Candycrush you have about 7 seconds to give the user something really entertaining give them a little dopamine hit where they get hooked into the app and the problem with Clubhouse is that because it's live you open up the app and you're trying to find something that you like.
2. It's live audio:
Live-only discussions are often cited as a reason Clubhouse drew in so many people so fast. They created FOMO — Elon Musk is in there talking to Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev right now, and if you aren’t on the app you’ll never be able to know exactly what went down! But while that FOMO might create a powerful reason to get the app, it doesn’t give you a reason to use the app day in and day out.
and again Shaan,
Let's say I go on the app and I'm interested in Silicon Valley, great there's a bunch of content for me right now because that's who's on the app but let's say you know you're the average person, most people don't care about Silicon Valley they care about I don't know Kim Kardashian's butt or the Eagles and Packers game and you know they want to go get content they are interested in. So what Clubhouse has to do is find something that is really interesting for you which you might have different interest in it than the next person and it has to be happening right now live. That doesn't make the problem two times harder it makes it like 200 times harder than every other social network.
Now, from May much changed e.g. Clubhouse introduced the “replay” allowing users to listen to the audio pieces asynchronously but I don’t think that this helped its numbers. There are perhaps more issues to be looked at, e.g. how the app grew in the pandemic only to deflate afterward but I would agree that the above 2, which could be just different sides of the same problem, are the most important ones.3
Solve for X
Apparent -yet bound to fail- paths
The 1st one is to record the live audio which Clubhouse already does. This makes the app a podcast library on steroids and kills the community vibe. A 2nd one is to add text, making something like the comments section on YouTube. But that’s added value, not the core product. So, what could possibly work?
Do it like radios
Back in my early college days, some friends and I listened to sports radio. There were specific shows of radio producers that we would listen to and occasionally we would call (like once or twice a year). The cult part of it was what drew us first and foremost and the sports part came in second. And we are talking about daily 2-hour shows. That’s a lot of time.
There were also the show regulars, people that would call 2-3 times/ week. The radio producer knew them by name, as did we, and they would talk on every day’s subject. And these power users had this privilege, they would call and sometimes would even get their call prioritized. Finally, they would sometimes visit the studio and take part in the show. If this is not a “1000 true fans” example, I don’t know what is.
Communities
What I described is how radio talk shows work across subject areas, cultures, and geographies. These radio shows were more than just a show, they were an audio community of people that gave a loose appointment every night (or day) for 1 or 2 hours and got together. And if this works offline, it has to work online right? So what did these communities have that Clubhouse (or its competitors) does not?
Consistency
In radio, there is a schedule for every show. Clubhouse’s format of random rooms gives spontaneity but spontaneity can’t create a habit. People need a day and time to form a habit and they have to know that their room and the expected participants (or at least some of them) will be there.Common format
Again, when in a service like this, if the app wants to nudge users to navigate across different rooms, users should have a good idea of what they should be expecting when hopping off to the next room. There isn't a common format and that gives permission to creators to explore diverse ideas but at the same time, it confuses the listeners.Professionals running the show
The notion of literally everyone running their own show aka democratizing access to distribution is really cool. What this concept discounts though in a novel medium such as a social audio app is that there is no consistency and common formatting. And who brings these things? Professionals. See, radio and TV despite eventually opening up to the world (again, democratization) have first passed the evolutionary stage of being first restricted to professionals, production companies, and networks that made a living out of the medium. This did not happen with social audio apps leaving individual creators in the awkward spot to invent the wheel, to not have an initial template, from which they could detour at some point.4 So, what these apps have to do is create incentives for professionals to join and do consistent and scheduled shows. This would work as a template for creators thinking to go down this path.
Introducing Clubhouse Shows
Podcast hosts now run their show on Clubhouse live, and afterward, edit and enrich the recording so it can live on the podcast platforms forever. Their superfans can participate (or listen live) during the Clubhouse (recording) session.
For this to run efficiently, it would take more than one person, the individual creator, at least up until the point where the jobs of the “production” are well-understood and automation tools can streamline them. So, looking at it from a different lens, Clubhouse is -or could be- an audio streaming service, and will have to become a production company. And contrary to what everyone initially thought Clubhouse could be much more Netflix, than Facebook.
How to Monetize?
Well, ads. It works. Imagine a Clubhouse space, where a brand comes in, real-time and it places an ad. This is far cooler than podcast sponsorships. Think of Burger King dropping in at a Clubhouse room (or think of their 1.9M followers on Twitter seeing the Twitter Space that Burger King has joined). Also, subscriptions on a “show” level could work too but this is a tougher nut to crack.
To recap
Clubhouse (and all of its competitors, dead or alive) are great initiatives and I really think that they can succeed. Audio networks have a future. And it will take time and lots of trial and error to discover how this works but it is going to happen and it’s going to be great.
Tweet of the week
There is an environment somehow not consistent with the Christmas spirit. People are fighting about web3, left, right, and center. But it’s only natural because:
a) nobody wants to repeat past mistakes. The tech world is under much and growing scrutiny in the past few years. And do not think that negative press, overall hostility as well as the decline of trust in SV and startups haven’t made an impact. So there’s a lot of blame going around.
b) everyone has their own version of utopia and is not willing to discount that.
What this shows however is that web3 is the hottest thing happening right now.
So, you’ve made it to the end. As always, if you have any points regarding this piece or Clubhouse in general, I’d be happy to hear so drop a comment or email. Till next time, take care and share the love.
Footnotes
Creators, synthesizers and consumers
In an essay by Bradley Horowitz, (discovered through Andrew Chen’s book, “The Cold Start Problem”) he describes users of social applications as levels on a pyramid:
The levels in the pyramid represent phases of value creation. As an example take Yahoo! Groups.
1% of the user population might start a group (or a thread within a group)
10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress
100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups (lurkers)
In our sports radio example, the producer is the 1%, the regulars are on the 10% and my friends and I were in the 100%. This is schematic but it serves to show the power-law that governs this type of apps. For a social content machine to exist, all 3 must exist. It’s not clear to me who the 1%-10% categories are on the Clubhouse model. The goal was for individual creators to play the 1% part and engaged fans to play the 10% part but for some reason, this hasn’t worked out that well.
The recently emerged Silicon Valley thesis on the creator economy, that everybody’s a journalist, and so on, played a small part in this, but not sure.