The curious case of Clubhouse.
I still remember the early days of Clubhouse. I was begging my connections to let me join. I knew people who drained their phone batteries just being on Clubhouse all day. Some even fell asleep on their phones, being in a Clubhouse room.
But then it faded. I haven’t seen a service that rose and then faded away as quickly as Clubhouse did.
So what happened? From articles and conversations I had, I could gather these:
- Product wasn’t ready for its moment: at the beginning CH was live only, w/o async mode or recorded shows (they added the features later). You had to be there in real time, that was the only mode of using the app. That might have worked during the pandemic, but not after the lockdown.
- This led to user burnouts. What didn’t help either was that sessions were uncapped and often went for hours.
- Content discovery was poor: Big names like Marc Andreessen could draw a crowd, but for others, there was no ranking system or other context/signals, making it hard to see if a talk by an unknown speaker was worth the time.
So all in all, CH began to feel like a platform where some strangers rambled about random topics, where you had to sit through the entire thing just to figure out if it was valuable.
That’s just the theory, but there was definitely something there. What really happened to Clubhouse? What did you love or hate about Clubhouse? What do you miss the most?