Clubhouse is to podcasts what Twitter is to blogging or TikTok is to Youtubers. You take the friction out of creating and add an instant community, no need to worry about paying bills. The cons – you don’t own the content and it’s hard to monetise.
Eze Vidra
Last week, Clubhouse became the most downloaded app on German iOS, reported Sifted. The buzzy app, that only launched in April 2020 as the pandemic was hitting the US, reached Unicorn status last week with fresh $100M round led by A16Z and has gone from an invite-only insiders chat for Silicon Valley founders and VCs to early adopters everywhere in Europe.
Anecdotally, when I first installed the app I struggled to find colleagues from Israel or the UK, but that’s now changing rapidly. Last week, I was happy to host the inaugural “Israeli startup ecosystem” session on Clubhouse with my friends Uri Levanon and Omer Kalderon after being part of several other ‘Rooms’ and ‘Clubs’.
So what makes Clubhouse great, and what leaves a lot to be desired?
The Good:
- It’s addictive. In our session we met about 50 people, got to hear many of them introduce themselves and want to make it a regular thing now (
- Introvert friendly – much of social media is designed for extroverts. Instagram, Snap, TikTok… introverts are practically excluded. The audio only experience in Clubhouse is good for multitasking (eg. while you walk) and makes it feel less intrusive than video, especially with the state of my haircut and beard in lockdown.
- People love to talk – unlike newsletters, blogs or tweets, Clubhouse is more about conversation rather than broadcasting.
The Bad:
- Audio Spam – user etiquette is still not clear and some people misuse the platform to push their services when they get the mic, regardless of the topic of the conversation.
- It’s ephemeral – at the moment Clubhouse doesn’t enable recordings, and that great discussion that happened last night is gone forever…
- iPhone only – sure, the app is less than a year old and many apps choose to start with iOS, but for a company that reached a billion dollar valuation before generating revenue, you’d expect there to be an Android app or web version at this stage.
The Ugly:
- Hard to stop abuse/harmful content – we had the equivalent of a Zoombombing when I user came in to the Israeli startup session and started cursing everyone. My Arabic isn’t that good, but trust me, I understood that. We reported said user.
- Discovery is still pretty poor – hard to know what’s going on and if you (G’d forbid) enable notifications, they are incessant and not relevant.
- It may be breaking protection regulations in Europe – Access to the address book, recordings of conversations and vague formulations: the Hamburg data protection agency warns of the new Clubhouse audio app.
If you’d like to join our next session (tonight 19:30 UK time) on Israeli “Chutzpah” go to https://www.joinclubhouse.com/event/VxV0JgDm or sign up to get notified on future events by leaving your email here.
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
