While the world is caught up in its daily routine, there is one startup which is silently taking over Silicon Valley by storm. Named as Clubhouse, the startup has nothing to do with parties but is instead the next big thing in social networking technology. Clubhouse is slowly growing in leaps and bounds and is attracting a slew of some big names in technology onto their platform. Since the last couple of weeks, Twitter is abuzz with this new player in town and how amazing its user interface and experience is, and the most unique but important thing is Clubhouse provides direct access to the who’s who of the startup world.
So what is Clubhouse and why is it being hailed as the next big player in the social networking scene? Read along to find out more about this incredible app.
What is Clubhouse?
Clubhouse is a new type of social networking platform which is an audio only platform. This means every conversation takes place through audio where users speak to let their thoughts known. Users can create and host rooms where speakers will talk about a particular topic. Depending on the topic being discussed in a room, a user can join the room as a participant and take part in the conversation. Clubhouse believes audio is a special medium and users need not worry about being judged because there are no cameras.
How to use clubhouse
Clubhouse is currently only in its beta phase and the app is not open to the public at large. The app is also available only to iOS users at the moment. The only way to join the community as a user is through an invitation from an existing user. This is one of the reasons why Clubhouse is such a rage at the moment. The team behind Clubhouse say they do not want to scale up very rapidly because they feel it is important to take things slowly. Therefore the invite only/iOS only is the current offering in beta, but experts and pundits believe it is a genius marketing strategy to get people to talk about the app.
Upon registering, users can choose a variety of interesting topics based on which rooms are displayed. A user can then join one of these rooms and take part in the discussion.
Clubhouse currently has a user base of 600,000 users and it is still in its beta mode. Getting an invite to Clubhouse is a badge of honour at the moment. Indian Twitter feeds exploded in early January 2021, when AngelList founder Naval Ravikant and Entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan hosted a room called Startup Bharat, where they spoke about the Indian startup scene on Clubhouse. Since then Indians have been scrambling to acquire the highly sought after Clubhouse invite.
Evan Williams, Reddit co founder Alexis Ohanian, former Y Combinator President Sam Altman, AngelList co founder Naval Ravikant, Ashton Kuthcer, Oprah Winfrey, Drake, Kevin Hart and many others are some of the influential personalities who are on Clubhouse.
Kevin Harrington, a host on Shark Tank hosted a room in Clubhouse where he listened to pitches from entrepreneurs. The room had more than 3000 participants and some of the pitches even received funding by the end of the session. This fast paced and the in-the-moment nature of the app is why Clubhouse is such a rage.
As Clubhouse slowly expands and finally makes itself available for everyone, it would be interesting to see how it will position itself among the likes of Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. But right now, in its nascent stages, Clubhouse is the place to be and a place of deep learning.