Shipping Clubhouse on Android in ten weeks • Hacker News Board

Re: Shipping Clubhouse on Android in ten weeks

#51

Post by respondo2134 » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 1:13 AM UTC

CydeWeys wrote: post #37

mynegation wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10mil, yes, but a lot of it probably went into the infra, bandwidth, and marketing (getting famous people and influencers into the rooms)

Also, $10M is really very little money to build an entire big business that everyone knows about out if. Large companies will spend more than that on a single advertising campaign without blinking.

Interesting comment, but can you share some first-hand experience where a company spent $10M on a single ad compaign? It is a shit-load of money; anyone saying otherwise has never been remotelly close to anything near 10 million.

Re: Shipping Clubhouse on Android in ten weeks

#52

Post by northerdome » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 1:18 AM UTC

A native app from the ground up in 10 weeks is impressive.

Now I want to know how Superhuman has gotten away with not having an Android app for so long, and what on earth they could be doing given they say they have been "working on it" for years and over $100 million in VC funding.

Re: Shipping Clubhouse on Android in ten weeks

#53

Post by missedthecue » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 1:26 AM UTC

respondo2134 wrote: post #51

CydeWeys wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, $10M is really very little money to build an entire big business that everyone knows about out if. Large companies will spend more than that on a single advertising campaign without blinking.

Interesting comment, but can you share some first-hand experience where a company spent $10M on a single ad compaign? It is a shit-load of money; anyone saying otherwise has never been remotelly close to anything near 10 million.

Citi Bank’s 'Live Richly' marketing campaign famously cost more than $1 billion dollars before it was terminated.

Amazon spends almost a billion a month on marketing. Procter & Gamble is almost the same. L'oreal is around $850 million a month in marketing spend. I'm sure some of their campaigns run into the tens of millions easily. In fact, I think it would be pretty difficult to spend a billion dollars on marketing every thirty days without at least one individual campaign spending more than $10 million.

Re: Shipping Clubhouse on Android in ten weeks

#54

Post by spbaar » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 1:27 AM UTC

Eye opening. I would have bet a million bucks they had the Android app in their back pocket but were holding off on launch until they perfected quality control or recommendation engine. There must have been some reason they're not telling

Re: Shipping Clubhouse on Android in ten weeks

#55

Post by npv789 » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 1:44 AM UTC

meh, missed momentum

Re: Shipping Clubhouse on Android in ten weeks

#56

Post by askafriend » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 1:48 AM UTC

markdown wrote: post #36

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #16

Don't get hung up on the "Clubhouse" part of the headline. This is a good, albeit somewhat sparse, article about building an Android app on a rushed timeframe. It's amazing to see how quickly a production-grade app can be produced by a team that arrives with the knowledge and experience for connecting the right frameworks and apps together. However, my experience matches the author's in that the hardest work often is…

> I don't think the lack of Android app is what caused their popularity to decline over time. They obviously made the right choice by launching what they could (an iOS app) as quickly as possible to seize the moment. Even though the popularity has declined, they now have a large war chest to figure out where to go next. On the contrary, it was a beyond stupid to launch only on iPhone. I'm not sure if it was elitism o…

This is wrong.

If you’re building an early stage consumer startup in the US, you should launch first on iOS period. Use that starting point to iterate rapidly to figure out product-market fit and then launch Android.

There is a reason you see the best consumer companies take this route and it’s not because they’re poor at arithmetic.

Re: Shipping Clubhouse on Android in ten weeks

#57

Post by colordrops » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 2:09 AM UTC

tomComb wrote: post #29

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #16

Don't get hung up on the "Clubhouse" part of the headline. This is a good, albeit somewhat sparse, article about building an Android app on a rushed timeframe. It's amazing to see how quickly a production-grade app can be produced by a team that arrives with the knowledge and experience for connecting the right frameworks and apps together. However, my experience matches the author's in that the hardest work often is…

Given how long it took them to begin the process of creating an Android app one has to wonder whether they were after some sort of exclusivity.

Clubhouse already feels irrelevant.

Re: Shipping Clubhouse on Android in ten weeks

#58

Post by bloodyplonker22 » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 2:49 AM UTC

I had a VC friend who switched to an iPhone, from Android, because of FOMO on Clubhouse. Now, after he realized that Clubhouse has naturally degenerated into a bunch of random people spouting off, with only a few rare pockets of quality content, he won't admit he switched to iPhone because of Clubhouse.

Re: Shipping Clubhouse on Android in ten weeks

#59

Post by markdown » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 3:27 AM UTC

gleenn wrote: post #39

markdown wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think the lack of Android app is what caused their popularity to decline over time. They obviously made the right choice by launching what they could (an iOS app) as quickly as possible to seize the moment. Even though the popularity has declined, they now have a large war chest to figure out where to go next. On the contrary, it was a beyond stupid to launch only on iPhone. I'm not sure if it was elitism o…

As a former consultant at a company that built many mobile apps, I think that was the norm. Picking either platform and trying to get some traction both focuses your dollars and developer talent on one decent thing that you can iterate ~2x as quickly on (while the app and business are very small) until you figure what you actually want to build. I think this actually applies to many things. I've seen people pick Andr…

I agree that that makes sense for most types of apps. Clubhouse isn't one of those cases.

In my country, influencers who had iPhones picked it up, and then promptly dropped it because most of their followers couldn't come to the party.

Re: Shipping Clubhouse on Android in ten weeks

#60

Post by markdown » Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 3:28 AM UTC

askafriend wrote: post #56

markdown wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think the lack of Android app is what caused their popularity to decline over time. They obviously made the right choice by launching what they could (an iOS app) as quickly as possible to seize the moment. Even though the popularity has declined, they now have a large war chest to figure out where to go next. On the contrary, it was a beyond stupid to launch only on iPhone. I'm not sure if it was elitism o…

This is wrong. If you’re building an early stage consumer startup in the US, you should launch first on iOS period. Use that starting point to iterate rapidly to figure out product-market fit and then launch Android. There is a reason you see the best consumer companies take this route and it’s not because they’re poor at arithmetic.

For 99.99% of cases I would agree with you. An app like Clubhouse isn't one of them.