3 ms·

For some reason I always read all stories about Clubhouse, and it seems like it gets written about quite a bit. I've never once thought "this is something I wan

For some reason I always read all stories about Clubhouse, and it seems like it gets written about quite a bit. I've never once thought "this is something I want to try" but I love reading about it. Feels like one of those things that has been so perfectly hyped and promoted by the right people, but when it comes down to it, there's not much there. If nothing else the marketing team sure got everything right. It kind of looks like Quibi to me, it's obvious that it's not going to be a big hit or maybe even be around in a year. (It was also obvious to me that Snapchat was going to fail, so what do I know?)

Plough_Jogger 5y ago
Possibly PR-driven: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- blakesterz 5y ago
  Exactly what I was thinking!
tootie 5y ago
It's fun to read about a wild, unexpected success. It's fun to read about a hype train that crashes and burns. I learned a while ago that I have absolutely no idea what the masses actually like. Twitter still makes no sense to me. I've never opened TikTok. So something like Clubhouse I've decided not to judge and just see what happens.
hacknat 5y ago
It was fun for a moment during the pandemic, but after I could be with people again I deleted the app. There was also a non-scalable factor to being on the inside of some of the clubs. Early clubhouse days you'd get to hear important people say things that they wouldn't say in public. By the time I left it was chalk full of grifters.
_fat_santa 5y ago
I too get Quibi vibes when reading about Clubhouse. Quibi and Clubhouse are both really interesting cases of what happens when a service tries to shortcut the normal process of growth and get there faster by just throwing money at the problem. What I mean by "normal process of growth" is if you look at some of the established tech companies like Dropbox or Facebook (just two off the top of my head), you see that they all had relatively humble beginnings and grew into the companies they are today. With Clubhouse and to a larger extent Quibi, it seemed like these companies are all attempting this corporate experiment where with millions/billions of dollars, you can theoretically shortcut the "humble beginnings" part and go straight to an org with all the trappings of a large company. So far it seems that it doesn't really work and one problem seems to be is when you go down the normal process of growth, you grow your company around your product or service and that product or service gets better over time (theoretically). The issue i see with all these companies that try to shortcut the process is that while they look to be a well established company from the org chart, their product is still infantile. And IMO unlike shortcutting the process to company growth, you can't really shortcut the process to product growth, because a big part of that process is responding to feedback from users and how the market in general is responding to your product/service, and that just can't be compressed down, no matter how much money you throw at the problem. And this is where the companies inevitably fail. Because they shortcutted the "org maturity" part and not the "product maturity" part, their massive burn on everything from legal to marketing become unsustainable given how infantile their product is, and the companies either fold or slog on once the marketing dollars have dried up until they too fold or are acquired.

Plough_Jogger 5y ago

Possibly PR-driven: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

blakesterz 5y ago
Exactly what I was thinking!

tootie 5y ago

It's fun to read about a wild, unexpected success. It's fun to read about a hype train that crashes and burns. I learned a while ago that I have absolutely no idea what the masses actually like. Twitter still makes no sense to me. I've never opened TikTok. So something like Clubhouse I've decided not to judge and just see what happens.

hacknat 5y ago

It was fun for a moment during the pandemic, but after I could be with people again I deleted the app. There was also a non-scalable factor to being on the inside of some of the clubs. Early clubhouse days you'd get to hear important people say things that they wouldn't say in public. By the time I left it was chalk full of grifters.

_fat_santa 5y ago

I too get Quibi vibes when reading about Clubhouse. Quibi and Clubhouse are both really interesting cases of what happens when a service tries to shortcut the normal process of growth and get there faster by just throwing money at the problem. What I mean by "normal process of growth" is if you look at some of the established tech companies like Dropbox or Facebook (just two off the top of my head), you see that they all had relatively humble beginnings and grew into the companies they are today. With Clubhouse and to a larger extent Quibi, it seemed like these companies are all attempting this corporate experiment where with millions/billions of dollars, you can theoretically shortcut the "humble beginnings" part and go straight to an org with all the trappings of a large company. So far it seems that it doesn't really work and one problem seems to be is when you go down the normal process of growth, you grow your company around your product or service and that product or service gets better over time (theoretically). The issue i see with all these companies that try to shortcut the process is that while they look to be a well established company from the org chart, their product is still infantile. And IMO unlike shortcutting the process to company growth, you can't really shortcut the process to product growth, because a big part of that process is responding to feedback from users and how the market in general is responding to your product/service, and that just can't be compressed down, no matter how much money you throw at the problem. And this is where the companies inevitably fail. Because they shortcutted the "org maturity" part and not the "product maturity" part, their massive burn on everything from legal to marketing become unsustainable given how infantile their product is, and the companies either fold or slog on once the marketing dollars have dried up until they too fold or are acquired.