Are you on it, have you heard of it, are you simply curious to know more? 

Clubhouse is an app that describes itself as ‘drop-in audio’ and works like a collection of global conference calls on a huge variety of topics that you can either listen-to or join-in.

To join in you ‘put your hand up’ and you get invited onto the stage. Only people on the stage can talk, everyone else stays muted. Much of the content is light and lifestyle, but there’s tons of business stuff too, great for us small business owners as it’s often aimed at start-ups and entrepreneurs.

Launched in late 2020, the app has around two million members, is still officially in ‘testing’ and is limited to invite only. Members get one invite to bring one of their friends/contacts into the community when they join, with additional invites provided periodically. 

Some of the people on there are seriously high profile. I found myself running a ‘room’ (each call is known as a room in Clubhouse) the other day at the same time as Naomi Campbell was chatting somewhere else. Not surprisingly, she had a lot more listeners than I did!

And that’s the bit I’m still trying to work out. Many of the rooms I join are enormous; packed with hundreds of eager listeners. The room owners and moderators do most of the talking and the subject titles range from authentic and interesting to the kind of mass-hysteria-marketing you last saw on a lamppost explaining how you’d be a millionaire in a week by calling this 0898 number. 

And if every time you plan and deliver a room, someone ‘big’ is on it somewhere else, what’s the chance of you getting enough of an audience to make it worth your while? That’s the bit we don’t yet really understand. But I’m monitoring it. 

So far, I’ve heard a lot of people repeating what seems like fairly standard business advice in a variety of different ways and it’s all too easy to lose too many hours each day waiting for the nuggets. But they do come along, often from a random member of the audience, who has a particular take on a subject or some experience that makes you think about things in a different way. 

When Clubhouse is good it is really good. I had a request this week to appear as a guest in a room with a decent-sized audience and saw a significant increase in my followers in the space of an hour.

That’s exciting, I think, except because it’s all so new I’m not exactly sure what that means for my business yet in terms of actual customers. The simple view is that it brings exposure; putting me and my talents in front of potential customers. The chance to build a reputation and become a trusted expert in parts of the market I would struggle to reach on other platforms.

And I like the fact that I’m in there at the beginning.

The thing that excites me most about this is that it is all very new and chaotic – a real wild west – and no one has worked out yet how to subvert Clubhouse into the thing that it will actually become. In the same way that Instagram started as an app where you could apply cheesy 1970s filters to your pictures before turning them into something completely different, you can see that the current Clubhouse is just far too busy, chaotic and repetitive to hold our attention for long.

But the idea is genius because listening to the world on social media rather than reading their messages removes all the misinterpretation, misunderstandings and anger. The subtle tones, complex diction and subtexts of the spoken word of ordinary people from Scarborough to Seattle is calming, addictive and just beautiful – even more so 11 months into a global pandemic.

The original idea is already starting to break apart though. Rooms with the big celebrities are becoming giant, noisy begging bowls for chancers looking for investment. The indexing and notifications system suggesting rooms you might like to visit is chaotic and overloaded and it’s hard to filter the value from the noise.

Right now, Clubhouse feels like going to Glastonbury only to discover that all the bands, good and bad, are playing at full volume on the same stage at the same time.

But, like Instagram, Facebook and Youtube before it, the world will find the appropriate purpose for Clubhouse and when it does, you’ll be glad you got in early.

My suggestion would be that if you get an invite, jump in and take advantage. But don’t just take it at face value, think about how you can manipulate it for your benefit. And when you do, please share your thoughts because we’re all still learning too.

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