Clubhouse is a great way to access celebrities but a terrible listening experience. They got all the growth factors right, but none of the retention and compounding factors.
Andrew Chen, Ryan Hoover, Michael Grinich and Sahil Lavingia think it could be a $100b company — and they have insider knowledge of metrics. I don't think Clubhouse is a zero - it has genuinely created a new category - it's just not very valuable. I'm taking the other side of that bet (but of course wish them well).
Context:
- Opening Clip is from My First Million - Shaan Puri
- Clubhouse has 2m users, valued at $1 billion. It has zero revenue.
- "clubhouse is the linkedin newsfeed with audio" - aniacopian
- If you'd like a Clubhouse invite anyway, DM me your phone number (yeah I don't know why they need it either. it's an unnecessary SIM swap attack vector).
What they have done well:
- Invite only (Hey)
- New Following Currency (Twitter - See Eugene Wei's Status as a Service)
- Semi-public, Ephemeral (Snapchat)
- Audio-only (Discord, vs Zoom)
- Live -> notifications (Twitch)
- One click (easy to join, easy to start)
- a16z involvement
- Stealing the most valuable users from Twitter but not subset of Twitter
Usecases:
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Interviews
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Talk Shows
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Webinars
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Live Reactions
Why they won't get to $100b:
- Poor listening experience - Audio quality, Editing, Speaker coordination, No conversation context
- No audience feedback or questions - Discord and Zoom are supersets here
- No discovery mechanism - have to already know speaker or be famous off-platform. No chance of recommendations apart from follow graph
- Content doesn't compound - ephemerality is unfriendly to content creators, and live-ness causes gaps in content time.
- (I give them a free pass on the cyberbullying and doxxing issues, that's always hard and they've only grown regardless)
Some of these are solvable given time, but the arc of consumer platforms bends toward async, bitesize, recommendation/direct subscription based.