With all the hype and attention dragged to Clubhouse and the new trend of voice chats, the whole industry is kind of shifting in the new direction. The global mobile application market is valued at hundreds of billions, and there is an explanation. 2021 has already made its point of how a new creative idea, eventually a startup, can snowball that it becomes the top headline of major blogs and magazines worldwide. Clubhouse has proven its growth, and it’s now at its peak. However, it may be only the beginning of many other better voice chats to come and be brought to market.
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What is Clubhouse?
Clubhouse is a voice chatting app where people can join or be a speaker of conversations on any topic. This app is mainly for people to listen to live chats of experts or famous people that talk about a specific topic that one wants to find out more about. However, it is also a platform where friends and family can create live rooms and discuss personal matters.
The app was launched in April 2020, and since then, it has gained around 10 million users. As perfect as the app might not seem, is it the best platform for every person to chat and share their opinions, knowledge, expertise, ideas, or problems? Probably not. Clubhouse may be a great platform in many aspects; however, there can be voice chatting platforms dedicated to a specific group of people, such as families, bloggers, dating, truckers, and many more!
How Has Clubhouse Grown!?
In May, after Clubhouse launched in April, it had just 1,500 users and the company was worth $100 million already. In February of 2021, the number grew to 3.5 million users, and in just two weeks the app had more than doubled its users with 8.1 million! With today’s data, Clubhouse is a Unicorn startup with a valuation of $1 billion that was achieved in just one year!
There are multiple reasons for the app skyrocketing its users and valuations in such a short period of time. One of them is linked with the guest appearance of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk that had a conversation with Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev on the voice chat app. The talk took place on 31st January of 2021, and it boomed in China, which resulted in massive downloads in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan! This generated a nearly 15% growth in users!
Another aspect that has generated a flow of thousands of new users was the production of The Lion King on Clubhouse! This was in December 2020, when musicians and actors performed Lion King live on the app!! The downloads of Clubhouse nearly doubled in the following times!
Clubhouse drew a lot of attention to itself when people found out that it was an invitation-only app. This increased the desire of many to get the app and become a user, so people began to download it and bring their friends and family with their invitations to the app.
Clubhouse also gained popularity by bringing something new to the community by replacing text messaging, which can sometimes be tedious, with voice chats while also not giving the feature of video calls that increase user’s privacy at the same time! This made it easier and more fun for users to communicate while multitasking, like working, getting ready, doing laundry, or even grocery shopping!
The Growing Industry
Today existing apps have been putting efforts to adapt to the growing trend and include a voice chat feature in their application!! The biggest showcase is Telegram, an enormous and powerful messenger with over 500 million users who recently added a voice chat feature for their cross-platform app! They added this feature before Christmas in 2020, and it has been adapted by the users very quickly!! It can also be said that telegram users that used to voice chat in the clubhouse have now received the same opportunity from their trusted app!!
It has been not only existing messengers that have added features to challenge clubhouse, and there are people today striving to get new ideas that would become the Clubhouse 2.0. There are over 5 billion mobile internet users in the world, and the global mobile application market is worth over $150 billion that is projected to grow to above $400 billion by 2026, and there is a reason for that! Businesses and individuals are entering the mobile app market knowing that this is the key to true success in today’s world, and Clubhouse is the best example for it. It is an app that is around for about a year and is already a $1 billion worth of startup. The industry’s current most significant and fastest-growing trend has become voice chatting. This results in people wanting to bring something even more valuable and successful than Clubhouse to the market, and here are some ideas of potential Clubhouse Challengers.
New ‘clubhouse’ App Ideas
For Families
A voice chatting app designed for families could enable big families that are spread in different countries, regions, and all around the globe to chat together, share new experiences, and make new memories. Considering that many people cannot see their loved ones in the offline world today, creating a platform for them would be the best solution.
Many would say that there already are apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram, IMO, and many more where families can call each other. Still, the idea behind a ‘clubhouse’ for families is a quick and easily accessible platform where family members could join the conversation whenever they are free and could create online rooms in a faster and easier way, without having to schedule a call and discuss ten different suitable times for each family member.
For Bloggers
The idea behind an app developed especially for bloggers to chat and share their experiences and ideas sounds just amazing. Bloggers could join live conversations and share ideas about new topics to blog about, new blogging standards, or even share new ways of blogging.
It could also be accessible for video bloggers and vloggers that could discuss and share locations for their vlogs, new equipment to shoot better videos on, such as new cameras, drones, or new technologies like 3-axis gimbals. The new ‘clubhouse’ for bloggers could give beginner and already experienced bloggers to gather in the same online room and have a voice chat about recent trends, past experiences, possible collaborations, and many more!
For Dating
Yes, there are already too many dating apps and websites out there that people tend to use to find their soulmates. However, a new ‘clubhouse’ for dating could have a perfect shot to being a game-changer! The new app could bring together two people with the same interests, as in every other app, and give them a chance to have a chat about whatever they feel like talking about. By just talking with another person and not even seeing them, one can get close to the other and see if they are suitable for them. Video calls are great, and they have many advantages for dating. However, the only voice chat feature will give people more privacy, and most importantly, people could find exciting individuals that they might date in the future!
For Truckers
The truckers’ primary focus, people who drive long distances on lorries, is to get the truck from point A to point B. There aren’t many activities that truckers could engage in during their dive, while a new app that would keep drivers interested and entertained along the long route would be an incredible creation. The app would allow truckers to voice chat with other drivers, discuss different topics, share their experiences, and many more. This app can create new friendships and fellowships, while it could also allow truckers to find other drivers with a similar route and stop at the exact location for lunch and meet each other in person. This would add tons of interest and engagement to the whole long-distance drive!
For Networking
Networking has proven to be a fantastic tool to get in touch with interesting people and even to make new connections with professionals to cooperate with in the future! An app for this purpose could serve as an emerging platform in 2021 for easier and more accessible networking opportunities. People from all kinds of backgrounds and professions could meet online and have voice chats to share information and build social or professional contacts!
For School
A new ‘clubhouse’ type of app could be developed for both teachers/professors and pupils/students. It could let teachers share information about upcoming exams, new topics to discuss in classes, share class materials and discuss new student engagement ideas. On the other hand, students could talk about their homework, group presentations, discuss topics, opinions, and brainstorm ideas for their upcoming group works!
Corporate ‘Clubhouse’ for Use Within the Company Among Employees
This concept design for the app below is a fantastic product development objective that we have created for one of our clients. The app’s idea is a corporate voice chat feature that allows colleagues and co-workers to meet in an online room and discuss work-related issues. Employees could schedule daily meetings, gather up spontaneously to discuss an idea without having to get all dressed up because they have to switch their camera on as their boss will see them in their PJs. This would almost have the same mission as a walkie-talkie/handheld transceiver, while the company wouldn’t have to pay an extra $300 on just a pair of two but just download the app! This could become an app that would make companies’ workflows much more efficient and could be used by most companies worldwide!
Why New and More ‘Clubhouses’ Are Needed
Clubhouse is a great new app with millions of users already. It was created mainly for people to listen to some experts or famous people’s live conversations and have the opportunity to be a part of a live podcast type of voice chats. The app has been very successful over the last year, but it may not be the exact match for every person. There are plenty of ideas about new voice chat apps that would target different groups of users, such as families, truckers, those desperate to find a partner, teachers, co-workers, and many more. All these ideas could not only help many people communicate and chat in a faster and easier way, but they could also be the beginning of a new way of interaction in the 21st century! The global mobile application market is growing at an incredible pace, and people are making huge profits out of it!! 2021 is proof of how apps can become the number one headline worldwide, and even without looking at Clubhouse, there are still plenty of apps coming to change the world!!! Are you someone who plans to do that?? Let’s see…
Written by | Luka Botchorishvili
