Why Did Clubhouse Downloads Fall?

“Clubhouse downloads are falling off a cliff, Business Insider reported shortly after the apps popular launch in 2021.

In April 2021, the app was downloaded only 900k times, down from February’s peak of 9.6 million.

Is there a reason people aren’t as interested in Clubhouse? More importantly, is all the hype actually worth it?

Is it marketing? User experience?

Let’s take a look.

Status and scarcity

The invite-only access makes people value the experience and feel more important. When you add the scarcity of invites to this, you get the perfect mix to draw people into your world.

But what happens once you’re in?

Ask without first delivering value

As soon as you sign up, Clubhouse asks you to invite more people.

While this boosts growth, it can backfire as the user hasn’t yet tasted the Clubhouse experience yet. People just don’t know if it’s worth inviting people yet.

Ask again

When you log in, Clubhouse asks you to follow 25 people. This makes sense as it keeps the user active.

For instance, Facebook found that if a user added 7 friends in 10 days, they were much more likely to continue to use Facebook.

Twitter, Quora, and others have similar practices.

Although it might be too early to ask the user to take action without delivering value first, all major social networks do this, so it means it works.

No onboarding instructions

Drop-in audio chats are a new thing for people. Before entering a room, they might fear that they’ll interrupt the ongoing discussion. Or that they’ll have to contribute to the conversation when they aren’t ready or willing.

This could stop them from joining, and Clubhouse should address these objections.

Hard to catch up with the conversation

When you jump into Clubhouse, you have no context about the topic they’re talking about, and what led them there. The app should have some features showing the current topic of the conversation, and what led them here.

Hard to find relevant content

When you land on YouTube, you’ll be served with relevant content for you from their huge library of videos. This is impossible on Clubhouse though, since the rooms are live and not archived.

The solution could be to keep the conversation accessible for 24 hours (or longer). So, you preserve the fear of missing out effect while giving the chance for everyone to get value while keeping a good relationship with the app.

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