With that said, I think Clubhouse could be in a way better position if they'd used their head start to actually work on making the product not awful.
I have listened to 1-2 conversations where I've thought hey this has some value, but every time I open up and scroll through it it looks like early 2000's email spam except with emojis. Super low value topics like hustle harder or marketing nonsense.
With social apps the algorithm is everything. I mean just look at Tik Tok. I feel like Clubhouse could have tried harder to make a magical experience where you opened it up and an interesting conversation was tossed your way. Oh well.
This, of course, is a paradoxical problem for Clubhouse as live audio was its central innovation and distinguishing feature.
Mind you, at this point I am not even going to try because there are likely too many established players.
They still have the one-shot option of opening up to anyone and getting a huge bump of use and users, maybe right before another round or IPO.
Feb - 9.6 million
Mar - 2.7 million
Apr - 922 thousand
Invites do not appear to be the growth bottleneck. With the Android app having been released in mid-May, installs will shoot back up for a time, but it sure looks like the actual TAM for Clubhouse is quite a bit smaller than its investors thought (given its crazy valuation).
Clubhouse is the app version of "this meeting could have been an email", but replace "meeting" with "live audio" and "email" with "podcast". This app/format is and always was the perfect trap for the VC/product manager class.
The pandemic was Clubhouse's selling point and it has been copied to death by its competitors. Now that it is nearly over, there really isn't any point in going back or waiting for an invite when everyone else has the same feature on the old platforms.
I guess Phase 3 is when we start to see ByteDance creating their own Clubhouse clone and other smaller companies will be selling an SDK for others to rapidly create their own Clubhouse rooms.
At the end of this experiment, it will result in Clubhouse shutting down and giving back the money they raised from the VCs. Isn't that right Secret Inc.?
I’m still amused by how they had their own online game show because of the success of HQ Trivia.
But to cheer you up, FB is putting lots of efforts (rumor goes 10000 folks) working on AR/VR. That's quite a lot innovation :)
Only a select few reach escape velocity. Snapchat, TikTok.
How do you survive without being trampled by the giants?
"Good, I am so tired of hearing from these young folks coming in and saying "well, the way we did it at Facebook was XYZ" and "Facebook does it right by doing it like this" and "FB this and that"
"these kids think they know the best way to do everything because they did something one way, one-time at facebook - and it was their first job, they have no wisdom."
---
The company; Twitter.
Podcast Directory in iTunes Music Store is from... 2005
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2005/06/28Apple-Takes-Podcast...
The way how they messed up their video offering is a damned shame.
Plus... why would i want to put my stuff into Facebook's stratospheric walled garden, where if I need to pull it back out later on, its almost impossible???
Or, in my wife's case, actually impossible.
She's tried repeatedly for almost a year to download "her" data from Facebook. All she gets is a 4GB zip file that when uncompressed has a bunch of mostly empty folders and a 3.5GB "facebook_754893.zip.enc" file. By the filename, I guess it's an encrypted zip file, but nothing will open it. Searching the interwebs shows lots of people with the same problem, but no solutions.
If she was in the EU, she'd raise a stink. But being American, she's S.O.L.
Genuinely asking the reason people value downloading their fb data so much.
Yeah…that’ll work well.
The only ones active on there are the VCs themselves spamming the notifications. Now we have Facebook launching their own Clubhouse-like service, it looks like there is no way out for Clubhouse to compete against the clones is there?
This is wdb, and I finished talking.
