Eric Siu used Clubhouse for 40 hours a week, then dropped to 4. He explains why: Twitter Spaces and Facebook are copying it, Android is delayed, and the app has no clear way to make money. His 31k followers there matter less than his 55k on YouTube.
So I'm gonna talk about how Clubhouse will fail. I had started to use Clubhouse quite a bit and a lot of marketers were flocking into the app. You know, people were just kind of testing the waters, seeing how it would go. I got addicted pretty quickly. You know, we're getting ready to celebrate New Year's and I just have Clubhouse on the whole time. I'd be sitting there idle trying to, you know, grow my following. Some people would spend a lot of time. We're talking, you know, 8, 10, 12 hours a day. They grow their accounts to, you know, 6 figures in following. Course creators and coaches, these would be the ones spending the most amount of time 'cause they had the most to gain 'cause they can get people to follow them on the DMs and then they'd sign them up into their coaching program. Most of my time I spend on trying to find other deals to buy other businesses, invest in other businesses. I was spending the first 2 months of 2021, I would go up to about 30 to 40 hours a week on Clubhouse. It started to get really unhealthy. All of my good habits were kind of falling apart. Um, you know, my reading habits at night, instead of reading, I would just spend time on Clubhouse instead of sleeping at, you know, 10:00 PM or 10:30 PM. I'd be sleeping at sometimes, you know, 12:00 AM or even 12:30 at times. And then when I wake up in the morning, the first thing I would do is I'd log into Clubhouse and I'd have to engage immediately because people would kind of call on you and then you have to talk, right? I grew my following. Right now I'm about 31,000 or so. So it's a modest following, but it's not nearly as big as some of these other people. I think there's a chance that Clubhouse might fail because now when I look at my time spent in that, it dropped from at a high point, 40 hours, now I'm about 4 hours. So if you look at the drop at the end of the day, dropping 36 hours like that, that's pretty significant. I mean, now I'm at 10% of what I it was before. People would talk about how Clubhouse had the highest retention, things like that. What I'm finding is I'm not seeing a lot of the people that I started the app with. They're not hanging out as much anymore. So this is anecdotal, obviously, but the other problem here is you have Twitter Spaces is really hot on their heels right now. And then you have Facebook, which is building a competitor. And I saw some of the mockups about a week ago and it looks very similar to Clubhouse, right? Leave it to these big social networks to copy. Andrew Wilkinson made a really good point on Twitter. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how good your feature is because anybody that has the users can just copy what you have. They'll crush you. That's not to say that copying will kill a company completely because when Instagram copied the Snapchat stories, or now called Snap, when they copied the stories, everyone started copying stories. LinkedIn now has stories, right? Facebook has stories. WhatsApp has stories. Instagram has stories. YouTube has stories as well. The thing is this: Snap is not dead. Snap is still a $100 billion company. If you look at their their their stock price, that's what they're worth right now. Clubhouse can get slowed down pretty significantly because right now they're having trouble launching their Android app. They're a little slow on execution. They're still invite only. Their team is is still. Fairly small. They've raised a ton of money. Like they need to hire to catch up while Facebook and Twitter, and I'm sure these other organizations, they will build this feature out. I think it's going to be good for Clubhouse to just focus on this feature. I think that will kind of separate or set them apart, but it doesn't mean that Twitter or Facebook won't slow them down, especially if you have a Twitter following of a couple hundred thousand people. For example, on YouTube, if you add this in, um, I might be spending more time on YouTube now because my YouTube following, it's decent. You know, it's, it's 55,000 as of this recording. It's a rocky time right now for Clubhouse. So if they don't, they can't execute quickly enough and they get out, out executed, that's a risk. The other risk is people don't spend as much time as they used to, which is kind of what's happening to me right now. If they can't keep up and if they can't find a way to kind of incentivize people to continue to come back into the app, to log into the app, it's gonna be tough sledding, right? I think there's a prioritization issue right now too where they're thinking about monetization and all that. Like, my question now is, should you be thinking about monetization at this stage in your app? Because it's still very early days right now and you don't have a huge user base. It's— granted, it's growing quickly, I think it might be, you know, 10 or 13 million as of this, this recording right now. But, um, it still pales in comparison to, you know, the 500 million or so users for Twitter and then the billions of users on Instagram, WhatsApp, or Facebook, right? So a lot of work to be done. I think, um, you know, that's how Clubhouse might potentially fail. Take that with a grain of salt. This is just one person sharing anecdotally. I don't have the same behavior I had before where I just kind of leave my iPad idle and then try to farm followers that way. I'm just focused on higher leverage activities, right? Like, like I should be focused on. I should be focused on growing my business. I should be focused on hiring people. I should be focused on doing deals. I should be focused more on creating content like this that scales out really well, right? I should be focused on, on all these different things that I used to focus on. Um, but I got sidetracked, I would say, by, by Clubhouse. So do I want them to fail? Absolutely not. I mean, especially considering all that time that I sunk into the app, I hope it blossoms into, you know, something really amazing long-term. But I do think again, it's precarious times right now. So let me know what you think in the comments. Uh, and don't forget to subscribe to this channel and hit the like button again, and we'll see you later. Bye.
