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Inside Clubhouse, the elite audio social network for A-listers and investors

Kevin Hart - AFP
Kevin Hart - AFP

The hottest new social media app of 2020 is not based on a technological breakthrough or new device. It has no sharing, news feed or video calls, or any of the complexities of Facebook and Twitter.

In a world in which new apps strive to go viral, it has fewer than 2,000 users and almost nobody can sign up. It is nowhere to be found on Apple and Google’s app stores, and must be manually installed on phones.

Instead of a slick, futuristic logo, its icon is a decades-old picture of the actor Bill Murray – and all that users can do on it is talk, as if on an old-fashioned phone call.

And yet Clubhouse – the app in question – has its users hooked in a way that no new social service has for years. In the space of a month, it has become one of Silicon Valley’s buzziest new products (attracting celebrity users such as rapper Will I Am, actor Ashton Kutcher and pop mogul Scooter Braun) and raising investment from one of tech’s top venture capital firms at a $100m (£81m) valuation.

“I’ve used it for 12 hours this week,” says Sheel Monhot, a fintech investor in San Francisco, as he checks his iPhone’s usage statistics. “People join, not knowing anything and then all of a sudden, it’s several hours a day.”

The best way to describe Clubhouse is as a collection of group phone calls that people can dip in and out of at any time. Users follow one another, as with social networks such as Instagram, but there is no central feed or substantial profile page. Instead, users can join “rooms”, forums where people can freely listen in or chat. One investor referred to it as “real-time Twitter”.

Clubhouse may have a tiny number of users, but alongside famous Hollywood names, they include some of tech’s top investors – for example, Ben Horowitz of the venture capital institution Andreessen Horowitz, which led the $12m investment in the company in May. Founded by two engineers in San Francisco, Paul Davison and Rohan Seth, its star-studded user base mirrors how apps such as Twitter operated in their early days – as a direct connection to high-profile figures.

Unlike Twitter, however, the app has severely restricted who is allowed in. It is still in “beta”, so prospective users must apply through an online form, or even better, be referred (this reporter dropped a couple of names, but his application is, at best, still pending). But this has only increased the mystique around the app. Facebook, too, was originally closed to anybody without an Ivy League email address. Joining Gmail in its early days required a “golden ticket” invitation.

App's that promised much and flopped
App's that promised much and flopped

Users say Clubhouse’s appeal lies in being a stripped-back, low pressure environment – in contrast to Twitter, where the wrong move is etched in history. Rooms are not scheduled and discussions have no agenda. Ryan Hoover, the head of the recommendation website Product Hunt and an early Clubhouse user, says discussions deliberately have no title, meaning no need to come up with a witty name.

“There’s some beauty to the simplicity of what they’ve designed,” he says. “Something that is seemingly simple, like a title for a room, it actually had a lot of impacts; it creates more friction. There’s a lot of benefit to having an open, loose structure and it actually better mirrors real life, like the experience of going to a house party or a conference.”

Silicon Valley is slowly coming round to the fact that millions of people spend hours a day listening to things while walking and driving, rather than watching or reading them. Days after Clubhouse’s investment, Spotify signed Joe Rogan, the world’s biggest podcaster, for an exclusive deal reported to be worth $100m – the same as Clubhouse’s valuation.

Technology intelligence - newsletter promo - EOA
Technology intelligence - newsletter promo - EOA

Hoover suggests that Clubhouse could become a hub for audio conversations in the same way that blogging services and Twitter have become for text, or Instagram has for photos. Monhot suggests that in future, people might pay a small sum to enter a virtual room and listen to a conversation, as they might pay to watch a panel or stand-up comedy in the real world.

The odds are still against Clubhouse. You could fill a graveyard with once-buzzy social apps that disappeared almost overnight once their novelty value wore off – from Yo, the app that sent nothing but the two-letter word to one’s contacts and peaked in 2014, to Peach, an online diary that faded into obscurity in roughly a month in early 2016.

Clubhouse’s challenge is likely to be maintaining its appeal as it moves from a small community to a global audience. Groucho Marx’s quip that he would refuse to join any club that would have him as a member originally applied to the start-studded Friars Club of Beverly Hills. It could be just as relevant to Hollywood’s most exclusive digital community.