Context Setting – What is Clubhouse?
The Clubhouse app is an ingenious app created by co-founders Paul Davison and Rohan Seth. It is a free mobile app that provides a space for people all over the globe to connect and share similar interests. Unlike today’s typical social media apps, this is a powerful app that allows people to grow their business by informing people in various communities of the products, services, and value they can offer.
In earlier times, to join Clubhouse, one must be invited by someone within his or her network. Invitations are limited, and those who are invited can drop in and out of ‘clubhouse rooms’ using only their voice to build relationships with other members. One may participate as an audience member or as a moderator. However, since July 2021, Clubhouse no longer requires an invite. New users will be gradually added to the waitlist, which served as a technical fix for the app’s beta. There are around 10 million new users on the waitlist, and they will gradually be added to the app over time.
How Clubhouse Is Creating Unprecedented Opportunities?
The Clubhouse has quickly become one of the top social media networks on the planet. The audio-based network started as a niche app for Silicon Valley insiders, but has quickly evolved into a mainstream platform. So, how big is Clubhouse? And how did it get to this point?
Constantly growing number of users
When Clubhouse first came on the scene last spring, it only had 1,500 users. Since then, it has soared in popularity, with Elon Musk, Oprah Winfrey and Mark Zuckerberg making appearances. The application had 600,000 users in December 2020. Currently, the Clubhouse has 10 million users, according to a town hall meeting hosted by CEO Paul Davidson. That’s impressive considering that the platform had 2 million users in January 2021 and only 1,500 in May 2020. In other words, Clubhouse increased its user base by five times in January 2021. Furthermore, in the first half of January, the Club Domains saw a 737% spike in premium domain registrations.
Figure 1.
The application’s popularity
The Clubhouse is currently the 16th most popular app in the “Social Media Network” category of the App Store, behind Facebook, Messenger, Discord, WhatsApp, and other more established social networks. According to Fortune, Clubhouse saw 2.3 million downloads in January 2021 alone. The data also shows that 30% of all Clubhouse downloads to date have happened since January 28th.
The audio-based social network platform Clubhouse had over nine million monthly downloads in February 2021. While North and Latin America used to account for the largest share of downloads worldwide in previous months, as of February, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa took over and now hold the largest share of global downloads. As of June, the same year, the app had roughly 8 million downloads. The Clubhouse app became available to Android users for the first time in May 2021, and this might explain the new increase in downloads in June.
Figure 2.
Large Market Size
Based on Figure 3 below, it is clear that the United States had the highest number at the time, with over 3,100,000 downloads. Japan followed in second with 1,800,000 downloads. Germany has occupied third place with 720,000 downloads, followed by Brazil and Russia with 610,000 and 520,000 downloads. Malaysia, Italy, United Kingdom, South Korea and Turkey wrapped up the list, although they all had less than 500,000 downloads.
As the Apple App Store operates in 175 countries, Clubhouse is currently available in 154 countries. The app is starting to gain traction outside of North America. Clubhouse is presently the number 1 most-downloaded app in Germany, Japan, Slovakia, and Turkey. Clubhouse got over 440,000 downloads in Japan in early February 2021 alone. Clubhouse is also multiplying in China so much so that invite codes are being sold for 188 Yuan ($29). The Clubhouse has been downloaded from China’s App Store 160,000 times. However, the app doesn’t appear to be available in China as of mid-February 2021.
Figure 3.
How does Clubhouse contribute towards Business Growth?
Several marketing experts were surveyed on what they think about Clubhouse, and it found that 86.2% of marketing experts believed that Clubhouse is a promising marketing channel. In comparison, 42.9% of marketing experts say they have generated business from this platform.
Figure 4.
Building Connections with Investors
The Clubhouse online app is one of the most valuable areas from which to drive more investors to your business. The venture capitalists are one of the more significant parts of this exclusive crowding in the Clubhouse app for business. This comes with a fascinating opportunity for having startups go in front of the investors and derive more valuable business connections.
One can set up a room to talk more about your business. You can also get immediate useful feedback from the investors to help you in improving your product. In addition, the room allows you to talk about what you do and how you can help, and the solutions you could provide through your business will be very useful to drive more interested investors.
Due to the network of users that grew from a select few users in Silicon Valley, the app has a significant number of cash-rich members. There have already been several six and seven-figure investments that have been closed through conversations on Clubhouse. Sharktank has even started hosting live sessions to pitch its business ideas to some of the show’s most famous investors. In one session, Grant Cardone even agreed to a multimillion-dollar investment deal during the Clubhouse conversation.
Developing intimacy between your brand and consumers
Clubhouse allows you to personalise your brand more than ever by enabling people to listen to your thoughts and ideas about the industry you are involved in. Unlike other social media platforms where the entire internet can see anything you say, Clubhouse gives you the chance to speak with smaller groups of followers, enabling you and your business to reach a more targeted audience.
This allows you to develop a stronger business relationship with your fans and also enables you to create a genuine and more authentic relationship with them. It gives you the chance to hear feedback directly from people who have engaged with your business, and it gives your customers a chance to feel like they have contributed something to the industry as well. You can instantly have other entrepreneurs come in if they are finding your idea very useful. Also, it is a great platform to seek solutions if you are having a business problem. Simply start a conversation and see what solutions your members and followers are recommending. It is simply going to build up a foundation for your business. Needless to say, Clubhouse is a great platform for personal branding too.
Learning from others
It’s tempting to find the most active and direct ways to grow your business. However, there are also opportunities for you to sit back and listen to other business owners and thought leaders to learn from them. You can find out how they succeeded or overcame problems that you might also be facing currently.
What makes learning on Clubhouse better than, say, learning from podcasts or YouTube videos is that you can search for and tune into conversations that directly relate to you. You also can shape the conversation by asking questions so that the advice given is even more relevant to your business.
If you can start the right conversations, you can effectively use the platform as a free online course focused on your niche topic, taught by some of the world’s best minds within your industry. Inevitably, there will also be many fake experts, so it’s up to you to conduct your due diligence to find the right speakers.
Brand partnerships
Networking already makes up a significant part of what goes on within the app. You can easily find rooms that focus on topics related to your business. Once in the room, you can connect with people and discuss how you can work together.
A good tip is to follow business owners, celebrities, and thought leaders you know you would like to collaborate with. The app will then notify you when these people are hosting, moderating, or speaking in a room. Then, it’s up to you to participate in the conversation to get noticed and start a dialogue with the people you would like to work with. If you can’t talk directly about collaboration on the app, you can try approaching them off the platform to discuss collaboration opportunities further.
If you host your rooms regularly, you could be the one who gets noticed and will soon find people reaching out to you for collaboration opportunities. Either way, you’re going to have to participate in relevant conversations to get your name and your business known on the app.
In summary, Clubhouse application works as a social media ecosystem that involves a unique twist of involving business ideas and prospects. It lets you reach out significantly to the customers and takes you forefront to the investors, which helps you get more resources and explore more spheres in the business, which works as an essential step to growing and strengthening your business.
Conclusion
Clubhouse has emerged as a viral and trending application in the business industry; not only is it an excellent app for networking. Clubhouse app is a blessing for those who crave information and connection with those who share similar goals in business and life. The most exciting part about Clubhouse is the amount of free information given out by celebrities, former executives, entrepreneurs, six and seven-figure business owners, investors, and more. The Clubhouse is not just an app for global networking, but it’s also an experience in itself and a great way to showcase your personality and meet like-minded people. Whether Clubhouse goes mainstream or fades away remains to be seen. But right now, Clubhouse is overtaking TikTok as “the next big social network”. So, it will be interesting to see what the future holds for Clubhouse.
