Mar 20, 2021 5 min read

Hosting a Clubhouse room

I have been using Clubhouse since February 2021, when the interest seemed to peak here in Europe. One month ago the app passed the 10 million downloads, and it's still only available to iOS: everyone and their mother was either in a Clubhouse room or looking for an invitation to join.

Now that the Clubhouse novelty is wearing off, it's interesting to understand where it's going to land and what its place in the social media landscape is going to be.

Every single platform is offering audio-only conversations where you can talk with other people in a virtual room (Twitter launched Spaces, and it's already available to Android users; Facebook is working on adding Clubhouse-y features, just like Discord, and Slack, and Telegram, and plenty more). All of them can offer built-in distribution for creators - something that Clubhouse currently can't -, and a simpler way to build an audience.

Think about it for a second: right now, the only way to promote your nice little Clubhouse room is to post the link somewhere else - on Twitter or LinkedIn, mainly - otherwise it's hard for people to find you. And when you're in a live room with listeners coming and going, acquiring a volatile audience is tricky.

These issues, per se, don't mean that Clubhouse will not thrive. In principle, Twitch had the same challenge: it's usually harder to build an audience around content that exists only live. As we know, Twitch has still managed to grow like a rocket ship, and it's now alive and well.

(Though Twitch allows recordings, now. And Twitch creators notoriously end up building an audience through YouTube, anyway).

Another interesting aspect is that, while building an audio drop-in feature is definitely possible when you are Slack, the way you are going to implement live social audio chats into your offering is going to be different than what Clubhouse is doing. How this will play out and who is going to win remains to be seen.

My issue with Clubhouse

Personally, I reckon the discovery phase is where I experience the highest friction, and it's a big deal: it's difficult to find valuable content that I'm interested in, starting right when I open the app. Part of this is going to be solved when more creators join the platform and more valuable rooms will appear outside the San Francisco timezone. However, the ephemeral nature of a Clubhouse room makes it hard for listeners to always find something valuable right now. It's a tough nut to crack.

There's another issue I am personally having with Clubhouse. The amount of hustle porn and self-promotion is off the charts, at least in the eco-chamber I chose for myself. Hustlers of all stripes are eager to sell their consultancy services or their upcoming ebook on how-to-become-a-millionaire-in-five-easy-steps.

(Disclaimer: your mileage may vary, depending on your timezone and interests).

Self-promoting Clubhouse rooms are quickly becoming the norm. — "The winners club"

Did you notice how many listeners there were in the "Breakfast with winners" room in the image above? Two Hundred Sixty Nine people, on an early Thursday morning. There are multiple ways to make sense of this: the bullish part in me believes this is good, as it simply confirms that there's an audience for pretty much anything. On the other hand, what kind of value am I going to get out of such conversations? If I casually open Clubhouse and most of the available rooms are mock millionaires talking about "ideas, income, opportunities" (like, WTF?), I am immediately closing it. If this happens enough times, I will simply stop opening the app.

That seems to be happening right now with a lot of people: they are leaving and they don't seem to be coming back.

I am a fairly happy user. I still prefer podcasts and audiobooks - where the density of the conveyed information is inevitably higher - but I happen to find good Clubhouse rooms at least a couple of times every week. The fact that it's live makes a conversation more enjoyable, more casual, compared to hyper-polished and calibrated YouTube videos, and contributions from the audience make it more interactive and less hierarchical than a Twitter thread or an Instagram live.

Now, the more I use it, the more it becomes clear that the real value of Clubhouse is in being an active participant - talking, and not just listening. While this is of course true for other social media platforms with similar mechanics (again Twitter and LinkedIn come to mind), it is easier to build a following on a new platform:

So...
11yrs on Twitter: 80K followers
8 months on Clubhouse: 132K

Something special is happening here https://t.co/VVe4nUso3A
— Josh Constine - SignalFire (@JoshConstine) December 23, 2020

Now, while I have never managed to become an active contributor of a social media platform, I know how much value there is in doing it: connecting with smart people, sharing ideas, finding a tribe - the most natural question should be "why not?".

This is where my friend Alberto Venditti comes in.

Alberto is creative and entrepreneurial, and also happens to be a good friend of mine. He is active on social media and curious about Clubhouse. So we decided to give it a go and talk about what we both like: startups and entrepreneurship.

We will host a Clubhouse room today at 7pm London (11am PDT, 2pm EDT, 8pm Stockholm time): link here. We will chat about side hustles: why they're great, and why you should have one. Everyone welcome👇

We don't know how it will go and whether there will be a second. We don't know if Clubhouse is the right format for us, for all the above reasons. We can only promise it will be short and crisp, and we will do our best to stuff as much valuable info as we can.

If you have an iPhone and 20-30 minutes to spare, come and say hi.