Everything you need to know about Clubhouse

We’ve got the lowdown on Silicon Valley’s newest unicorn, an invitation-only audio-chat app

We were given inside access to Clubhouse (lucky us), and here are our thoughts. Basically, Clubhouse is an app that allows users to drop into audio chats happening between others. Did you ever want to be a fly on the wall while Kanye West and Elon Musk are bantering? Well, now you can. The catch is the app is invitation-only. This means that you can only join if you’re invited by an existing user, and each user only gets two invites per account (so use them wisely).

So what goes on behind the Clubhouse’s closed doors? After first creating a username, you’re immediately led to a page where you select your interests – these range from yoga, to Bitcoin and women’s rights. Once the ‘bouncers’ let you in, you’re greeted with virtual rooms of audio-only chats about anything and everything.

The main page of the app is named ‘The Hallway’ (now it’s really giving us shades of middle school). Here you’ll find snippets of all the rooms that are live and the chats that are happening within each one. You can then quietly join any virtual room that piques your interest, similar to listening in on another person’s phone call. If you have something to share, you then raise your hand and the moderator of the room will either allow or deny you to speak ‘on-stage’. You can also slip out of the conversation quietly and no one will ever know you were there. Weird? Amazing? A little bit of both.

The appeal of the Clubhouse app is its potential for networking. You can chat with anyone from all over the world about any topic you wish – or listen in if you’re more the quiet type. The reason this app has received so much clout recently is because of who joined last week (hint: the richest man in the world). That’s right. Last week, Elon Musk joined Clubhouse and there’s a chance you could be in the same virtual room with him.

With the pandemic still limiting social interaction, Clubhouse is another way to bring us all together. People crave communication: Clubhouse audio playing in the background could be interesting (and perhaps comforting) for someone living alone during quarantine. If you’re really feeling the need to chat, you can even create a virtual room yourself. Who will join? Who knows. That’s a chance you’ll have to take.

There are a few cons, of course. The main one being the invitation-only barrier. Another could be the audio you’re listening to. Yes, the app allows professionals from around the world to connect and discuss great ideas – but what about the not so great ideas? There isn’t a screening protocol to pass in order to host a room and become a speaker on Clubhouse. This opens the door to controversial conversations, or even conspiracy theories and misinformation being shared.

As this app continues to grow in popularity, it’s also captured the attention of Silicon Valley. Clubhouse was reported to have a current valuation of $1 billion (hello, Next Big Thing). The high valuation of the platform just further increases its exclusivity – and we all know that people want what they can’t have.

The irony of all this is the technological limitations of the app itself. With Clubhouse dubbed tech’s newest unicorn, you may be surprised to learn that it’s only available on iOS. Android users can’t be invited to the club even if they wanted to be. It also isn’t recommended to be used on an iPad, and the website is basically nonexistent. So why the hype?

Contrary to popular belief, the app wasn’t recently launched. Clubhouse was created in March 2020 by Paul Davison and Rohan Seth, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Why we’re just hearing about it now goes back to its exclusivity. In the beginning, Clubhouse hosted an extremely small community, mainly comprising venture capitalists. The list of impressive users still continues to grow though, with Oprah joining Clubhouse, along with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

If you’re one of the select few and score an invitation to Clubhouse, how will you know which rooms to go into? Where do all the ‘cool kids’ hang out? Well, the calendar feature on the app allows moderators to create events on certain topics. You can view the calendar, find a chat that’s interesting to you, and set yourself a reminder to listen in when the time is right. This is important to remember because the chats that happen behind closed doors are not recorded. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

Clubhouse can be downloaded via the App Store, but we can’t guarantee you access. If we get the secret password, we’ll let you know.