What happened to Clubhouse & what could it try from a growth perspective?
Clubhouse became this huge thing for voice-based social media last year. I remember at times working and just listening to people talking, leaving and joining some rooms, I even accumulated around 100 followers. Over the coming, I'd say weeks I was kind of hooked, but eventually, my interest in it suddenly died down, & I uninstalled it.
While I think my story is similar to those who also used it, my attempt is just to think of what they could do to gain their top spot & reinvigorate their audience.
I hypothesize Clubhouse derived a majority of its traffic from core users who by habit listen on a daily basis, & referral traffic from word of mouth. I think the biggest thing Clubhouse missed was an engagement loop to bring non-core users back. Clubhouse did a very poor job of utilizing email, push notifications, and other social media platforms to re-engage users.
Clubhouse has a few rough edges, but they couldn’t have grown to 6 million monthly unique users if they didn’t have a solid product/market fit & weren’t delivering a ton of value to users already. So, I don’t think adding new features would be the answer.
What could they do?
- Push notifications for trending rooms where timeliness matters (ex: Celebrity talks, Pre-NFL matches etc). Often users complain that they discover a house too late after it already has thousands of talkers & listeners and they feel any comment they make at that point would just get lost in the crowd. Even the attempt at raising your hand would also go unnoticed. To some users, this was a very frustrating pain point.
A point of experimentation would have been to limit house members to a certain number for certain users.
- Clubhouse had about 6MM registered accounts as of Feb 2021. In order to make the engagement loop work Clubhouse would need more SEO traffic and remove prompts for unauth users on the mobile applications.
Ghost listeners would be something to think about. People may be able to listen while talking rights is only to signed-up users.
- Re-engagement emails for non-daily active users that give them a digest of the top 10 rooms of the previous day or the previous week. These should be curated according to who the individual follows, assuming.
Would new features drive growth?
I think one mistake people often make is thinking that new features can help spur growth. They think more features == more user value == more growth. Whether you’re a tiny startup just getting off the ground or a mature product used by hundreds of millions of people, I think new features rarely lead to a significant change in the growth trajectory. I believe this is because for a new feature to drive more growth it can’t just add incrementally more value; it has to create a step-change in the amount of value that the average user gets from the product.
If anyone wants some Growth advice, feel free to drop me a line.
I lost interest in clubhouse when they treated android users like second class citizens.
They took way longer than normal to bring it to android users, and when they finally did, the hype was already cooling off!
it depends on how you see it, Clubhouse started off as a talkshow exclusive to C-Level execs in their private beta and US focused. Since it is US focused, there are more iOS devices than Android among tech users. They had seen some traction during the beta and when they did a public launch they had to stick to iOS. The more they add platforms it becomes slower to add/update features.
Aside from the platform's features and value, Android users are beyond pissed of being left out of new stuff by default. So yet another iOS-first or iOS only app likely didn't sit too well with us.
If they're "beyond pissed of being left out of new stuff by default", then why don't they invest in an iPhone?
This is apparently what Google does: visit any Google office and you'll see more iPhones and Macs than Androids and Chromebooks 😀
exactly!
See my comment 😅
Developers still view Android users through the filters of clichés such as cheapos.
It's not on developers but the numbers. There has to be more reliable and accurate, up to date resources but;
https://cybercrew.uk/software/app-store-vs-play-store/
Not to mention, android users more likely to "root" their devices for piracy usage and it's slightly easier to do. Also the bigger app marketplace with more competition makes it undesirable for developers. Price tags are rat race to bottom.
Limiting to iOS would also let them beta test their app and infrastructure. I still think the same about being iOS exclusive was their biggest marketing stunt. Android users made it such a big deal while it was just another voice-chat application. Within a few weeks competitors popped up in the play store. But the android users didn't stop complaining, turned it into "twitter spaces vs clubhouse". IMHO, this exclusivity is what they needed to exploit and leverage.
I knew some app devs who limited their v1 releases to only Canada for this reason. They could work out bugs in a market that's small but very similar to America.
Then when everything is good, they roll out to all English-speaking countries and then everywhere. They said Australia is good for this, too.
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Also iOS dev experience is quite a bit nicer.
Android is a nightmarish JVM setup and even if you use a nice language like Clojure, it doesn't give you much because Google's APIs assume a very 20 years ago programming style.
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You're right and I'm trying to do my part. Sometimes I beg the developers of free ad-supported apps to provide a paid version or a free one with an in-app purchase to remove the ads.
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Maybe the developers think they can make more from the recurring revenue of ads instead of one-off payments. But if so app subscriptions are another option, provided there's enough value.
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what is clubhouse?
I love that you asked this ;)
As a speaker, it's definitely a great concept. Getting up on stage and basically "auditioning" your expertise in front of new people, in real time. That's very cool.
As a listener, it was hard to find real value. All too often, the feed was dominated by low common denominator topics and conversation. Like listening to a mediocre podcast at 1x speed. Not sticky at all. Definitely some interesting stuff in the smaller, more niche rooms though.
then it was two times bad, because if the speaker doesn't get the listeners to actually listen...
"Everybody wants to talk, nobody wants to listen". For my own platform (reason.fm) I did a lot of research, interviews and observations. Clubhouse was the podcast killer so as a podcast hosting platform we needed to analyse everything. But it quickly became clear it was dying as quick as it started. The only legacy of clubhouse is Twitter spaces
Hype can do more harm than good sometimes. What they had was a decent idea that wasn't properly executed imo, but a genius marketing strategy - top to bottom, starting with influential people and slowly opening up to everyday folks. I think in the current form it was never going to work - the format is too noisy, requires too much time, and is inconvenient. Then there're all the gurus. What they should've done, and again that's just my uneducated opinion, is to make the shows less frequent but higher in quality. Think like live sports, live talk shows or conferences - those are well-prepped events that aren't randomly streamed every day at random times. Listeners can then also dedicate time to it every week. An app like that I would still be using today
To be honest I strongly disagree with how they have failed to create an engagement loop. I truly agree on they couldn't create a great engagement loop thus a low retention rate.
But in the case of low retention rate; push notifications, etc are rarely the case. Most of the time it's just a product that has no hook.
In this case, in my empirical research, I saw that every cohort of my friend groups lost interest in Clubhouse within 2 weeks.
And the reason behind that is everything was real-time. There is a slightly high chance of not finding some interesting conversation when you're online because there was no way to record conversations.
So it's almost impossible to create a habit of opening a Clubhouse when you can't find something interesting to listen to 8 out of 10 times.
Low retention is usually the death of social products!
I'm not saying Clubhouse is dead because twitter has resurrected from a similar situation back then.
That’s really interesting. I remember the hype around Clubhouse and I didn’t get hooked in anyway. The product was clean but it wasn’t for me. They likely grew too fast and as you point out the team didn’t catch up.
On a side note, really interested in having growth advices!
Hi, it sure is interesting. Remember twitter put up an offer to purchase them for 4 bn, and they declined but in turn, took 4bn VC money.
Would you have sold?
My email is [email protected]
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While I may not share your sentiments, I do think that voice apps still have the potential to become billion-dollar unicorns. We can look at Twitter Spaces, they're a huge thing.
I think Clubhouse failed to keep users in a loop, perhaps it stemmed from the management team's belief that Product Market Fit is a constant, whereas you have to constantly evolve to maintain it.. ... and more