Clubhouse; "This is Me And I'm Done Speaking", Before And After The 5th Of March

What if you could have the opportunity to be in the audience next to Oprah, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, or your favorite celebrity, Chris Rock, Kevin Hart, Ashton Kutcher, and even have a 1 to 1 audio discussion with each of them.

Have you ever spoken on a webinar with 1,200 people without promoting it, or have you ever created a webinar and had 500 people in your very first one without doing any marketing?

These are two of many reasons why Clubhouse has become the latest thing to be on.

You can just put your hand up and the moderators of the Room (Audio interactive webinar) will put you on stage and you can speak in front of all their audience.

Or you can create your own Room and have 500 people in your first one run.

Clubhouse has been around since March 2020, when it was launched by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Paul Davidson and Rohan Seth. In May 2020, it had just 1500 users and was worth $100M.

It is a social networking app based on audio-chat.

Users can listen in to conversations, interviews, and discussions between interesting people on various topics – it is just like tuning in to a live podcast where you can discuss too, and with an added layer of exclusivity.

It burst into the mainstream when Elon Musk hosted an audio-chat on Clubhouse with Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev. The event maxed out the app conversation room limits and was live-streamed to YouTube. It helped propel Clubhouse to the top of the startup charts and sparked a scramble for invitations. As of the end of February 2021, ClubHouse had over 6 million active users according to Vajresh Balaji, and more than 10 million downloads. It becomes evident that the last four months were extremely successful for ClubHouse.

How can you get invited to Clubhouse?

At the moment Clubhouse is in Beta version, you need to be invited and it only works on an iPhone, they are planning to make it public in the near future.

If you are not in Clubhouse, you should look for someone to invite you in, every user has 2 invitations, but if you run many rooms and you are popular you receive more invitations to use.

Another way to get invited is to download the app and create your username, then contact someone that is in Clubhouse and ask them to search for you, let you in and your contact will not be using any of their invitations, because letting people in does not count as an invitation.

Do not worry, as soon as you get started in Clubhouse you can attend a Welcome Q&A for Newbies Room and ask any questions you may have.

Let's talk about the Clubhouse Lingo

- Room: Audio webinar that can last for 1 to 24 hours, where you can have discussions with your audience by inviting them to the stage.

Any user can create their own rooms (events). You can create as many Rooms as you want, of course, not at the same time. When you create a room outside of any club, just your followers will be invited. If you have a club, you can create a room under that club and then all of the club's members will also be invited. With the appropriate permissions, you can make a room under a club that you are a member of and then your followers will be notified, along with the members of that club.

- Stage: The top part of the room where the moderators and speakers are.

- Audience: The ones just listening, if you are in the audience and want to speak all you need to do is put your hand up

- Moderator: The users that are in charge of the room, they can invite people to the stage and move them back, close the room or choose who moderates. Being a moderator is not as easy as it looks, there is a culture or unspoken rules on how you should be and manage your audience.

- Listener: The one in the audience just listening to the discussion, the unspoken rules say that everyone in the room should be invited to the stage to speak, either to give their opinion, ask a question or be part of a discussion, but it is required to put your hand up so the moderator can invite you to stage. Only people in the stage area can speak.

- Hallway: The hallway is Clubhouse’s name for their main feed. This is where you can find active and ongoing chatrooms. If you’ve joined any Clubhouse clubs or followed any scheduled rooms, you can find most of them in the hallway.

You can go around the app while listening to a room, as you can see in the picture above I am in an event ( at the very bottom of the screen it has been minimised and I am visiting the Hallway to see what other events are happening at that moment.

- Club: In your club, you can collect members and followers and create rooms under that club, in that way when you create the room it will notify the followers and members of the club and you can build a large membership and follow.

- "This is Mili and I'm done speaking": Something people say to avoid others interrupting while they are speaking. You're supposed to wait until they say this, before asking questions or giving your opinion.

What happened to Clubhouse on the 5th of March?

If you were in Clubhouse before the 5th of March when they released an important update, you would have seen a huge change in the app, I am not sure for better or worse.

I started on the 25th of February, too late, unfortunately, but I had the chance to see what happened.

Before the 5th of March, not everyone could have a club, you needed to have hosted at least 3 rooms and with a decent audience to apply for one. This made clubs very exclusive but something even more important, because there weren't many clubs and not many rooms running, a great number of rooms running had more than 1000 people in their audience, therefore if you were new and started a room, your room will get rapidly hundreds of people, of course, if your topic of discussion was interesting.

This would have happened as well because we could all see all the events, imagine 6 million people potentially could go to the hallway, choose the option in the calendar, "All events" and if yours was happening that day, all 6 million potentially could see your event happening.

This was one of the biggest attractions to everyone. We all now hosting an event online and acquiring thousands in the audience takes a lot of marketing or a very big database, but Clubhouse was simple, no matter who you were.

And it was not just about having hundreds or thousands in your event but having thousands or even hundreds of thousands in your followers.

One of the Clubhouse cultures is to follow moderators and the audience in the room you are so whether you were a moderator or just a listener, you could grow your following pretty fast by just attending many rooms, putting your hand up, and giving your opinion on stage, you didn't even need to host rooms or create clubs to gain thousands of followers.

After the 5th of March, everyone can create 2 clubs that cause certain changes like; you can no longer see all events in the hallway because scrolling through all of them will not be something viable anymore due to the vast amount of events created now per hour, therefore you can now only see the events created by the people or clubs you follow, your interests and your own events. Before you could see all the events and sometimes find some out of your interest but interesting enough for you to attend.

Another thing caused by this change is that now your event will only be seen by people that follow you, follows your club, or has the same interests. Limiting the exposure but more important the number of people now attending events.

They have gone from thousands to hundreds and the ones that used to have hundreds to dozens.

I am waiting to see how this new change affects people in the long term and I hope it will be a positive change.

Why are people so obsessed with Clubhouse?

There are several reasons that the Clubhouse app has gained so much traction. It teaches and inspires users. It lets people meet in the context of mutual interests, and helps them share those interests with their friends in real-time. At any one moment, you might find a room with people talking about political issues, scaling a startup, Bitcoin or cannabis, to name just a few topics. The platform facilitates human connection, which struck a relevant note during lockdowns worldwide.

But most social media platforms help you engage and connect with others. That’s what they’re made for. 

So, what sets Clubhouse apart?

- Rooms conversations are not recorded.

- There isn't any way to contact anyone privately inside the platform, users contact each other using Twitter or Instagram DMs. And as you must be wondering, it does increase your followers on Twitter and Instagram.

- Nobody wants to miss out on the app everyone is talking about at the moment so everyone wants to be on it.

- Events last 1 - 24 hours as mentioned before because users don't want to miss out on the conversations and some of the room moderators work in shifts to keep the room open and sometimes they will even offer the listeners or people on stage to become moderators to keep the conversation going and in most cases, the audience keeps growing and growing.

- Instead of feeling like you are connected with family friends or people that share your interests, it actually feels like a social club where you can connect with anyone and everyone depending on what do you feel like that day or at that moment.

From discussing property investment or stocks to having a drink or listening to people exchanging jokes and funny experiences in their life.

- Public speaking endless opportunities,  one of the biggest fears, and in Clubhouse you can speak in any room of any topic at any time. If you are planing to run webinars in the near future but you feel nervous about it, just go to one of the rooms, put your hand up and you can speak in front of hundreds and thousands. I totally recommend it! It will help you with your confidence, and you can practice as much as you want.

- Ask questions live and discuss topics of your interest with the richest, the famous, successful entrepreneurs, and the experts in your industry, not by chat as on Twitter but like in a phone call with them. 

- Emojis are in Clubhouse more important than anywhere else because people can search just by emojis. If you are searching for people interested in the education industry, all you need to put in the search is the 3 books icon and everyone in the education industry will appear if they added it in their bio. If you are looking for podcasts you can search with the 2 different types of microphone emojis, the handheld microphone is normally for speakers and the larger studio type microphone is for podcasters.

The importance of emojis makes it  fundamental to set a Bio using as many emojis possible that show what you do and what your interests are, to make it easier for people to find you in the search

And finally, I will end this article with a thought.

Let's keep in mind that Clubhouse is only for iPhone users at the moment, so if just allowing existing users to create 2 clubs have cause such changes how would it be when it is open to everyone? Right now they only have 6 million users, so how would you find clubs when there are 10 million or more creating events? And when it gets to 100s of millions?

I am looking forward to see how Clubhouse will escalate, I am sure that was thought through but many things will need to change, to keep the great experience they offer while growing fast their number of users.

Mili Ponce

Former Computer Engineer, Entrepreneur, Keynote Speaker on Digital Marketing and Entrepreneurship, Social Media Strategist, eCommerce Business Mentor, Trainer, Writer, Blogger, Mother, Daughter, Dreamer.

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