What can we learn from Clubhouse on building early traction.
Clubhouse is a voice & audio first social networking platform — that lets users drop into voice chat rooms spontaneously and join ongoing audio conversations.
Interestingly, Bloomberg has called it the next wave in social networking platforms because it already has 2 million weekly active users — without even being publicly launched !
Clubhouse is an upstart in the making & is a live playbook of how to drive early organic growth.
In a series of essays we will explore the growth strategies used by Clubhouse (& some other high growth start ups) to decode this playbook and understand how to:
Part 1 — Build an early audience of influential users
Part 2 — Create powerful local network effects
Part 3 — Organize users into super engaged seed communities
Part 4 — Drive content distribution for early traction
This article covers Part 1 — How to build an early audience of influential users.
Let’s begin by probing in to Clubhouse’s growth engine.
Growth engine of Clubhouse:
Clubhouse is unique in the sense that — it provides a simultaneous experience of an unscripted podcast and a livestream , depending on whether the user is on mute or not.
Even more remarkable is— the composition of its users. These users are usually influencers across domains like startups, tech, politics, music & OTT platforms etc.
In short, when Clubhouse launched, it was centered around individuals, most of whom already have a pre-built audience & are popular in their space.
A round up of some of the influential accounts on Clubhouse shows that — just 10 users hold an audience of 2.5 million on Twitter itself!
This individual centric model is visible in the most basic feature of Clubhouse — the “chatroom”. The chatrooms draw audience not on the basis of topics but by the cult of personalities who are speaking in them.
These speakers drive conversations not only inside Clubhouse but also on Twitter — which in turn has created a massive demand build up.
This is what drives growth at Clubhouse.
User flow inside Clubhouse:
User flow inside Clubhouse looks like this -
Once you sign up using the invite link —you’ll enter the Clubhouse hallway, the main home feed which displays a list of active ‘chatrooms’. Each chatroom shows the speakers & moderators that are leading the conversation.
As a user, you can either create a new room or join an existing one.
If you create a new room, then you can choose from one of the three options —
- Open room — which is open for anyone to join in
- Social room — which is open for people you follow
- Closed room — which is open only for people who you choose
On the other hand, if you choose to join a room, then you’ll join on mute. In case you continue on mute, then it will be equivalent to an unscripted podcast experience. You can also unmute, to join in as a speaker — at this point, it becomes similar to an interactive live stream experience.
The product has been designed to let users consume as well produce audio content on the fly, while keeping it social.
Given that Clubhouse is a consumer social product, the question is — how did it build early traction ?
Decoding the growth playbook of Clubhouse:
There are four building blocks to Clubhouse’s early growth -
- Picking the right channel to showcase social proof
- Recruiting early adopters with pre-built audience
- Hand-crafting First time User Experience (FTUX) for these early adopters
- Incentivizing word of mouth distribution
Building Block 1: Picking the right channel to build social proof
The early adopters of Clubhouse are influential personalities & thought leaders in startup, tech, media & politics . While most of these users have a follower base of more than 3000–4000 on Twitter, some have more than 500k followers.
When these early adopters tweet their own experience & re-tweet the experience of other users , it creates a massive social footprint on Twitter — thus amplifying the fan base for Clubhouse.
In other words, Clubhouse identified early on that — Twitter is clearly the channel that works for them.
In other words, the first problem that founders need to solve is — create powerful social proof on the right channel.
Powerful social proof comes from influential users driving positive conversations around your product with their own audience base.
This happens because of — Authority Bias — the tendency to attribute greater accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure. If thought leaders / influencers advocate a cause or a product, then it is taken seriously by their audience base.
Moreover, this social proof must exist on channels where target audience is highly active.
Let’s say you built a photo sharing app for folks who are in college — then you should probably look at channels like Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat or even college fests and campus events.
On the other hand, if you are building a SaaS platform for UI designers — then you would perhaps look at channels like Twitter, online communities like Dribbble, Designer Hangout, IDF community and Slack channels for UI / UX designers.
The point is — go where your users congregate & identify who is the leader of the pack. Your job is to onboard these leaders as your early adopters.
Building Block 2: Recruit early adopters with pre-built audience
The second aspect is recruiting these early adopters.
Here, the emphasis is on recruiting rather than acquiring — because the focus is more on personalized outreach rather than running marketing campaigns.
A common playbook that has been adopted across consumer products like Facebook, Quora, Superhuman, Substack & Clubhouse is a two step user recruiting process:
1st Step: Seed influential users through personalized outreach
At Clubhouse, the founders and early investors themselves extended invites to selected VCs in silicon-valley, angel investors and tech entrepreneurs to join. This set the benchmark for the quality of audience & speakers on Clubhouse — this includes even speakers like Elon Musk & Mark Zuckerberg !
This in turn raised the expectation of the subsequent users who joined in.
This is similar to what Quora did, back in 2009, when it was still in beta — founding team Charlie Cheevers, Adam D’Angelo, Rebekah Cox and others personally onboarded personalities like Duntin Moskovitz (co-founder, Facebook) & Jimmy Wales (Founder, Wikipedia) as a part of Quora’s pre-launch contributors. From thereon, Quora became quite a rave in the Bay area !
Another recent example is Substack. The founding team at Substack personally invited established media personalities like Bill Bishop (foremost expert in Chinese affairs), Kelly Dwyer (famous NBA columnist) and Daniel Ortberg (famous american author who writes on pop culture, life & gender) to write on Substack. Each of these writers brought their own pre-built audience, which helped Substack not only build an early seed community but also a reputation of being par excellence !
The point is — reaching out to influential users in your domain and personally inviting them to join OR use the product, dramatically improves your product’s positioning.
But the question is — what’s in it for these early adopters? Why should they play along?
One word — Exclusivity.
That brings us to the next step
2nd Step: Create an invite only ‘club’
Difference between a community & a club is simple —a community is ‘inclusive’ but a club is ‘exclusive’
‘Exclusivity’ helps early adopters build social capital.
Exclusivity can be created by welcoming them into an ‘invite only’ club. This club consists of users who have been invited for an early access either by founding team or by existing users of the product.
Let’s look at Clubhouse –
It is an invite only community, where new users can join, only when they receive a referral invite from someone who’s already on Clubhouse. The app is available only on iOS as a testflight link — which means Android users have no access to it!
Just like Clubhouse — Superhuman is also an invite only email service & so was Quora when it started !
Such a club can either exist in the form of an organized group like:
· Private messenger group
· Slack channel
· Closed social community
Or, it can exist as a bunch of users with early access and actively sharing their experience on social media channels. For example — the early users of Quora still flaunt their user no.#, from back in the day, when Quora assigned user numbers to its first few thousand users.
The point is — creating some form of ‘invite only’ user group will incentivize more early adopters to join, while stoking curiosity of people outside this group.
Building Block 3: Handcraft the experience of early adopters
A great First Time User Experience (FTUX) is crucial for retention. It starts with the post sign up onboarding process. User onboarding is generally seen as a series of modals, prompts, tool tips & notifications that provides a memorable product walkthrough & mesmerizes the user.
However it is not so straight forward.
Let us look at the Fogg Behavioral Model to understand better.
Fogg Behavioral Model states that if user motivation or ability to use the product is low — then prompts fail to nudge users towards an action.
In such cases, the product is considered to fall below the action line (red dot)
This means that, for a new product, whose value proposition or user flow is unclear, relying solely on ‘in app prompts’ / product nudges may not translate into meaningful user action.
It is for this reason, that handcrafting the FTUX through a concierge (‘high touch’) onboarding is very useful in delighting early adopters.
This could literally mean, founders or core team giving product tours themselves or helping users set up their first workspace.
Let us look at an example –
Superhuman is a new email client (think about gmail) that promises to provide the fastest email experience for both business & personal email power users.
Where Superhuman stands out is — a high touch onboarding process. Every onboarding is through a video call where a product specialist hand holds the user through a step by step set up process.
The specialist works with user to set up Superhuman on their own inbox rather than a dummy one. All the key board shortcuts, navigation, command functions etc are explained in the context of a user’s own needs. To take it one step further, the specialists manually observe your flows and suggest productivity tips best suited for your use case.
Thus, the overall onboarding process is highly personalized.
It does not only provide a white-glove experience but also moves the users beyond the action line (green dot), where subsequent product nudges can drive user action.
The point is — a high touch onboarding process can create a great first time experience for your early adopters. This process could include steps like –
Founders or core team personally giving a product tour to the new users
Helping users with navigation & workspace set up
1:1 feedback call to check on a user’s experience
Organizing community meet ups between users and the core team
Building Block 4: Incentivize early adopters to share experience with their own audience
The final step is motivating the users to share their experience with their own audience.
A research paper by Harvard Business School identified two sets of motivators that trigger community sharing & participation. These are:
Intrinsic motivators -
· Fulfilment from creative participation
· Curiosity
· Reciprocity
Extrinsic motivators -
· Social capital
· Career growth
· Financial incentive
If we look at Clubhouse, then user participation is fueled largely by social capital, creative participation & reciprocity on Twitter.
Social capital — There are twitter handles that track Clubhouse users with most followers and …
… showcase other influential users who are also part of the tribe.
Creative participation — users share their experience & analysis of product features so that people who are still on waitlist can get an inside view of what’s happening at Clubhouse.
Principle of reciprocation — In the case of Clubhouse, many users on Twitter retweet the posts shared by fellow users, who in turn reciprocate by doing the same. This ensures that each user gets access to a collective pool of audience and improve their reach.
This basically helps in ..
Driving demand through FOMO:
When influential users talk about their early access and share their experience — it creates a hype around the product.
Below are some of the re-tweets on Clubhouse, that show how users are turning into product evangelists.
In other words, it sets in a loop, driven by word of mouth, that results in lot more people joining the waitlist in the hope that they get “accepted” into Clubhouse.
The point is — incentivize the early adopters to drive WOM distribution while keeping the access to product on an ‘invite only’ basis — for sometime. Let the demand build up through FOMO.
Wrap up:
If you made it till here.. then give yourself a pat on the back.
Here is everything in a nutshell,
If you are a consumer social product, then the organic growth strategies adopted by Clubhouse could make sense for you.
This revolves around — recruiting influential users in to an ‘invite only’ club & providing early access to the product.
The next step is to ensure that you personalize their experience and create incentive based triggers so that they — drive positive conversations around the product with their own audience base.
This word of mouth distribution will set in local network effects — that will help drive organic growth for you.
The above outlay gives a solid framework, which can be adapted to your use case. By & large — building an early user base of influential folks gets you access to their audience which in turn sets in place local network effects.
In the next essay we will cover more on this — how to create powerful local network effects.
Till then — Happy reading !
