Clubhouse and the Live Internet
Everyone I know is on Clubhouse this month. Or desperately looking for an invite to Clubhouse. Or explaining to their parents what Clubhouse is. (“It’s like a podcast, but you can’t pause it, and anyone can interrupt.”)
I spent a good chunk of last year working on live online classes, so I have some opinions on why this particular app caught fire right now - and on what will happen next.
The Internet went async, and then a pandemic happened
For about fifteen years, the story of the web was asynchronous. Email instead of calls. Feeds instead of conversations. Recorded video instead of TV schedules. Podcasts instead of radio. Asynchronous is efficient: everyone consumes on their own time, at 1.5x speed, and nobody has to coordinate anything.
Then 2020 locked everyone at home, and it turned out efficient isn’t what people were missing. People were missing being in the same room at the same time. Not the content - the presence. The slightly awkward pause before someone speaks. The feeling that something is happening now and you’re part of it.
Clubhouse sells exactly that. It’s not good content (most rooms are, let’s be honest, not good content). It’s company.
The tech is the easy part
From an engineering perspective, a live audio room is not rocket science anymore. You can wire up WebRTC yourself, or you can pay one of several providers per minute and have a working prototype in a weekend. Twitter, Facebook, Discord, Telegram, LinkedIn - all of them can (and I’m guessing will) ship the same feature within months.
Which tells you something important: the product is not the audio. The product is the room. Who’s in it, who’s on stage, who invited whom, and whether there’s a reason to show up at 9pm on a Tuesday. That’s a community problem, and community problems don’t get solved with a better codec.
When we were building live classes, the hardest part was never the video. It was getting the teacher and the students to be in the same place at the same time - and to want to come back next week. Scheduling, reminders, follow-ups, a sense that you’d miss something if you didn’t show. Unglamorous product work. That’s the moat, if there is one.
Live is a commitment
The thing nobody tells you about live products: they are expensive for the user. Not in money - in attention. A recorded video asks for nothing; you can watch it whenever. A live room asks you to show up, now, and stay. That’s a big ask, and the novelty of the ask is part of what makes it feel special right now.
When people go back to offices and bars and dinner parties, a lot of that hunger will be fed elsewhere. I’d bet a lot of the current Clubhouse audience evaporates. What remains will be the rooms that were worth scheduling around: the recurring show with a great host, the niche professional community, the weekly class.
What I’d take away from this, as a builder
- Synchronous is a feature, not a bug - but only when the moment matters. Live sports, live classes, live Q&A with someone you’d never otherwise get to ask a question. Not live meetings that should have been an email.
- Make showing up easy. Calendar invites, reminders, one-click join. Every bit of friction between “this is happening now” and “I’m in” loses you people.
- Record everything anyway. Live for the people who came, async for everyone else. The two aren’t enemies.
- Don’t build on the hype curve. If your startup is “Clubhouse for X”, your competitor is every big platform that adds a “go live” button next quarter.
The Internet is the new town square, and a square is only fun when there are people in it at the same time. Clubhouse found that out first. It just won’t be the last.
Content is cheap. Presence is scarce.