[HN Gopher] What I Learned at Clubhouse
___________________________________________________________________
What I Learned at Clubhouse
Author : gmays
Score : 87 points
Date : 2022-07-25 18:29 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (anu.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (anu.substack.com)
| alttab wrote:
| 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.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Not brevity, it seems.
| digb wrote:
| 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?
| throwaway0x7E6 wrote:
| 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
| sytelus wrote:
| 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.
| kuldeep_kap wrote:
| 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.
| billllll wrote:
| 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.
| fareesh wrote:
| 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.
| alexklarjr wrote:
| And nothing of value was lost
| sirspacey wrote:
| The lesson missing is;
|
| 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.
| leviathant wrote:
| >community building requires curation tools
|
| 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.
| peter422 wrote:
| > 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.
| jnwatson wrote:
| 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.
| allenu wrote:
| 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.
| peter422 wrote:
| 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.
| jhchen wrote:
| 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.
| peter422 wrote:
| And what benefit is the company getting from saying a
| person that is not going to contribute to the company in
| any way is an "advisor"?
|
| I guess the company should just do that with every former
| employee? I mean, why not.
|
| This is the behavior of a person and company playing
| startup and not actually trying to build a strong
| company.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| 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.
| jsemrau wrote:
| Live streamed opinion panels are a popular thing on Youtube and
| can work really well if the topic works and the people know how
| to work the format.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Isn't that basically what call-in talk shows on AM radio are
| all about?
| nsxwolf wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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.
| last_responder wrote:
| >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,
| potatolicious wrote:
| 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.
| zactato wrote:
| 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
| nsxwolf wrote:
| 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.
| olivermarks wrote:
| 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?
| pavlov wrote:
| It's in the article:
|
| "...an early employee and Head of Community"
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| From the article: "...as an early employee and Head of
| Community..."
| mynegation wrote:
| She was a Head of Community at Clubhouse. Twitter @anuatluru
| olivermarks wrote:
| thanks! I missed that sentence somehow.
| donclark wrote:
| Could it be... https://www.linkedin.com/in/anuatluru/
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| I think the real lesson here is effectiveness is more important
| than efficiency. The author made all the right decisions on the
| wrong thing.
| rdl wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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.
|
| Glad I did.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| 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.
| faangiq wrote:
| Basically a social capital Ponzi scheme.
| leobg wrote:
| Well put.
| cinntaile wrote:
| 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?
| shredprez wrote:
| Look out, you're about to unlock forbidden knowledge
| about the nature of venture capital!
| nsxwolf wrote:
| 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.
| Swizec wrote:
| > Only way you'd know is if you were there when he said it in
| a forum with no record
|
| And now here we are.
|
| Knowledge is memetic. The good shit spreads.
| macintux wrote:
| Some of it, sure, but good luck capturing that knowledge
| in, say, Wikipedia. [Citation needed]
| Macha wrote:
| 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
| __derek__ wrote:
| > a VC that spends all day chatting with randomers won't be
| managing their investments very well so they would need to
| dial back
|
| I got the impression that the VCs using Clubhouse were just
| diverting some of their Twitter time.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| 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.
| paulcole wrote:
| Also important to note that their hypergrowth was a direct
| result of the pandemic.
| minimaxir wrote:
| When successful entrepreneurs say "timing is everything",
| Clubhouse is an example of that.
|
| Its success was essentially luck, with VCs attempting to
| extrapolate its success to other entrepreneurial endeavors
| annoyingly.
| jsemrau wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > 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.
| jsemrau wrote:
| We all have different interest I suppose ;-)
| capableweb wrote:
| 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.
| rvz wrote:
| 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].
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25883362
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _why VCs think that it is worth $4B_
|
| One VC: Andreessen Horowitz. Who are now knee-deep in the
| crypto rug-pull scam.
| __derek__ wrote:
| Maybe it's complementary to their portfolio: how many
| people have bought tokens after hearing about the projects
| on Clubhouse (or its clones)?
| prohobo wrote:
| 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.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| 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.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| 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.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| 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?
| cmckn wrote:
| > 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.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| 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.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| But Google+ failed, so I don't know if they did accomplish
| this, to be honest.
| antihero wrote:
| Not sure if the metaphor works because warehouse parties are
| way cooler than elitist parties in all fairness.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I assume they mean an unadvertised warehouse party, where
| you only know about it by being part of a group.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| 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.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| 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.
|
| When did you join?
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I got my invite January of 2021 (just pulled up the app
| for the first time in easily a year and was still logged
| in).
| jimkleiber wrote:
| 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
| HWR_14 wrote:
| 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.
| tonetheman wrote:
| This exactly this. If someone offers you 4B for almost
| anything you always say yes.
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| 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.
| definitelyhuman wrote:
| 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
| cm2012 wrote:
| 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).
| friggeri wrote:
| Candidly, a lot of the reasons why Clubhouse failed is because
| it did not follow any of those lessons.
|
| Source: I was an early Clubhouse employee and left a few months
| ago.
| neonate wrote:
| Could you say more? which lessons specifically, and how/why?
| Barrin92 wrote:
| 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.
| somenewaccount1 wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2022-07-25 23:01 UTC)