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Founders’ Email to Clubhouse Employees

blog.clubhouse.com

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Re: Founders’ Email to Clubhouse Employees

#111

Post by fsckboy »

segasaturn wrote: post #76
nikanj wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The invite-only launch was a selling point. "It's a exclusive service, but if you score an invite, you might have a casual chat with a bunch of billionaires and SV bigwigs."

This may be surprising to people in Palo Alto but 99.9% of regular working people have nothing to say to billionaires and SV influencers, outside of maybe some profanities. There's no way a product with that as the premise would have had a future outside of its ivory tower niche.

Despite it's origins, ivory tower means, in the sense of being out of touch with common people, academia. It does not mean being out of touch because rich or nobility.

Re: Founders’ Email to Clubhouse Employees

#113

Post by choppaface »

conductr wrote: post #70
choppaface wrote: post #42

Soooo Clubhouse has raised over $100m . Is it unusually nice that such an early start-up is giving 4 months, acceleration, and more? Yea! A lot of A- and B-stage layoffs have paid far less. But with so much funding, it’s very very hard to see this move as anything other than massive C-level incompetence. Good job trying to make it look like accountability though.

Some times you hit the puck so hard the hockey stick cracks. Not sure it’s fair to call it incompetence but they’re being decent in the acknowledgment of it.

You’re thinking of being too early to the market, which is exactly what didn’t happen.

Clubhouse’s case is much closer to the explosive growth that physical country clubs and golf courses saw in late 2020 and 2021. It’s a niche product that caught serious waves. I guess some VCs like to compare high ROI with athletic excellence but hockey is actually nothing like surfing.

Re: Founders’ Email to Clubhouse Employees

#115

Post by davidbarker »

cloudking wrote: post #18

It's a shame, the idea is good, just not defensible against copy cats. I think they missed an opportunity to pivot into voice chat for websites/apps as a service. I see big value in how Discord does ambient voice chat as a feature of a server, and I think that could translate well into smaller communities that live outside Discord in websites/apps. Provide the service in an easy to use slick API/SDK, and handle all t…

Clubhouse used — and I believe still uses — Agora (https://www.agora.io/) for the audio parts. I'd love to know how much it costs them.

Re: Founders’ Email to Clubhouse Employees

#116

Post by chemmail »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #12
bkm wrote: post #2

Sad to hear. In an alternate timeline they would have accepted the $4B+ Twitter offer and had a nice exit along the way. https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/07/twitter-said-to-have-held-... The hard truth is software can't be patented and Twitter could copy the concept verbatim without paying them a penny.

Hard to believe that Twitter was willing to offer $4B for a service they managed to recreate themselves for (presumably) a tiny fraction of that cost. Makes you wonder if all the AI panic right now is going to end up going the same way.

Clubhouse is literally just software that artificially limited things to be popular by: 1. Limited users 2. Limited to iPhones. 3. Having no history or recording of conversations.

Re: Founders’ Email to Clubhouse Employees

#117

Post by patrickaljord »

satvikpendem wrote: post #102
mcsniff wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Additional counterpoint, I launched my app on both Android and iOS at the same time, didn't even own an iPhone when I released it. The with tooling available today, there is almost no technical reason not to. Most brands/apps can't afford to create some fake exclusivity.

If you use a cross platform framework, sure, but if you only have resources for one platform (or where cross platform is not suitable for whatever reason), I'd pick launching on iOS first any day of the week.

What app is not cross-platform? Even games are all using Unity now.

Re: Founders’ Email to Clubhouse Employees

#118

Post by madmanweb »

urbandw311er wrote: post #103
skinkestek wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He has to live the rest of his life as someone who sold of millions of enthusiastic users to exactly the company we paid them not to become. Well. I guess he is happy with it. What's worse is I guess most people would take that deal at some point.

What do you mean by “paid them”? I thought WhatsApp was a free service.

It had a nominal $1 per year fee, but in most of the world (like here in India, where it's now practically a utility), they never charged anything because even a trivial sum like that would have caused a ton of friction. That's why it became so popular.

Re: Founders’ Email to Clubhouse Employees

#119

Post by satvikpendem »

patrickaljord wrote: post #117
satvikpendem wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you use a cross platform framework, sure, but if you only have resources for one platform (or where cross platform is not suitable for whatever reason), I'd pick launching on iOS first any day of the week.

What app is not cross-platform? Even games are all using Unity now.

Lots of apps aren't cross platform, at least on mobile. Things 3 is a good example that's only on Apple platforms.
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