Eric Siu spent 40 hours a week on Clubhouse, made $65,000 in sales, and grew to 31,000 followers. But he argues the platform won't survive: engagement is dropping, competitors like Spotify and Twitter Spaces are copying it, and incumbents always win. He now uses it 3-4 hours weekly.
Today, we're gonna talk about why Clubhouse is not the next big thing. So I wanna preface this with saying that in January and February, I was spending up to about 40 hours a week on Clubhouse. So I was very much all in on it. And I was telling all the people like, this is the next big thing. And my podcast co-host Neil was actually going in a different direction. And he was saying, I don't think so. This is not gonna be the next big thing because it requires so much time. You know, you have to be engaging. I think there's arguments for both sides. We're seeing the engagement in the app fall and we're seeing a lot of headwinds. And what I mean by that is Spotify is coming out with a competitor. Mark Cuban invested in or created— he's a co-founder of an app called Fireside, which is very similar. Facebook's coming out with a competitor. Twitter has Twitter Spaces already openly testing it. LinkedIn is coming out with a competitor as well. Slack looks like they're coming out with a competitor too. So I think I just named 6 already. These other platforms have an established user base already. So let's say Clubhouse right now has, you know, you know, 10, 15, 20 million users, it's still not, it's still nothing compared to these other platforms which have billions of users. You know, the argument I actually made my first probably week or two coming into Clubhouse, I actually went into a chat and I said, hey, I think one of the issues here is that let's say a Google or a Facebook wants to come in and copy, they can totally do that. And then I know a ton of people disagreed with me at the moment, obviously because they're spending time in the app. So, you know, they want to be able to defend their position that they're spending there. But, you know, I was trying to be a little more objective. I was just saying, hey, look, if Facebook or Google decides to copy, they can just totally slow down the growth of Clubhouse, right? Let's just look at Instagram Stories, or sorry, Snap Stories. I even forgot like who copied them, right? Once Instagram copied Stories, everyone started copying Stories. There's YouTube, LinkedIn Stories now, it's just kind of everywhere, right? That's not to say that Snap's not successful 'cause they're still worth about $100 billion as of this recording. But you know, they did get slowed down a little bit and they had to kind of innovate, right? Facebook and these other platforms, they're notorious for copying. Drop-in audio, what I said was that the feature here to stay. I think the format's here to stay. I think it's engaging. I think the ability to say, hey, I'm going to hop into a chat, you know, in my pajamas, not have to get ready or anything like that. It's cool. And I've certainly met a lot of, a lot of interesting people inside of Clubhouse. I did, you know, for my book, you know, pull it up over here. It's a little self-promotion for Leveling Up right here. I did about $65,000 in sales on Clubhouse just from doing a room, but it's because I built up the trust capital for the first 1 month, 2 months of using Clubhouse. And a bunch of people came in and, um, you know, we got about, uh, 4,500 sales from that or so, you know, would I have met certain people? Definitely not. Right. I've even hung out with some, some Clubhouse people in real life. So I think the touchpoints are great. I think like anything, you know, in moderation, right? Like 40 hours is probably not sustainable per week. But, um, you know, my habits started falling apart, but I've really brought it down to maybe about, you know, 3 to 4 hours a week right now. And I might do like a room or 2 rooms or so. And that's basically it. I think that's a lot healthier than 40 hours, right? I think, you know, in the beginning a lot of marketers were jumping in and I really just wanted to explore, you know, I grew my following to about 31,000 or so, but what started happening was I started to find the same people doing the same rooms, saying the same things. If I'm trying to, you know, gain as much leverage as possible, maybe if I want to still connect with amazing people, maybe I'm only doing, you know, again, you know, 2, 3, 4 hours a week and that's it. Right. And that's a lot healthier because You know, when I look at my other social apps, and I'd argue this is still a lot too much time, look at Instagram, my screen time is about 7 to 8 hours a week or so, right? I think there's that engagement is dropping off, that's one piece of it. The time to value, so the time to actually receive value when you hop into like a Twitter or a Facebook, you get the dopamine hits immediately, right? Or when you listen to a podcast episode, right, you start to, you know, get the takeaways, or at least you know what you're getting into, right? A lot of times when you're joining a room, you see a title, but they might be talking about something else. And it takes you, could be, you know, 15, 20, 30 minutes or so to even get into the meat of, or the flow of the conversation. And so the time to value is difficult. There's a lot of headwinds. You have a lot of competitors kind of, you know, jumping into space that could definitely slow down the growth. So do I want Clubhouse to fail? No. But when I look at engagement metrics, when I look at all the things they have going against them, I think it's going to be, it's going to be tough, tough sledding. And I hope I'm wrong. You know, Sean Peery actually did a post on Twitter, which got about 7 million impressions or so, talking about why he thinks Clubhouse will fail. Um, you can check that one out, but I just, I just want to kind of outline kind of what I think is going on right now. And I think, you know, I made some videos on why, you know, Clubhouse is good, but this one is where I think Clubhouse might not actually be the next big thing. And I think it's going to have some struggles, right? So let me know what you think in the comments, if you agree or disagree with me, and don't forget to subscribe and like this video and then check out the next video over here, somewhere over here, and we'll catch you later.
