After about a year of beta testing, you no longer need an invite to join Clubhouse. Now you can hop right on the app and start joining the conversation.
Clubhouse Is Finally Available to Everyone
A post on the Clubhouse blog revealed that the app is finally out of its invite-only stage. In other words, anyone can use the platform, whether they want to start a club, join public events, or invite friends, family members, and fans to the app.
Since January 2021, Clubhouse has seen substantial growth. “Our team has gone from eight people to 58. The number of daily rooms has grown from 50K to half a million,” the Clubhouse team wrote. In addition, Clubhouse has added about 10 million people to the app since its launch on Android.
The platform’s direct messaging feature, dubbed Backchannel, has already seen 90 million DMs sent, despite the feature only being a week old at this time of writing. Judging by these numbers alone, Clubhouse’s community will surely see a massive amount of growth now that it’s no longer invite-only.
Has Clubhouse’s Invite-Only Policy Hurt Its Growth?
Clubhouse’s invite-only policy has been both good and bad for the budding audio-based platform. On one hand, it allowed the app to gradually accommodate its growing userbase and squash any bugs that cropped up, but on the other, it gave similar platforms a headstart.
As users waited patiently to receive an invite for Clubhouse, the biggest names in social media cranked out their own Clubhouse clones. To make matters worse for Clubhouse, the app was only available on iOS until May 2021, when it finally reached the Google Play Store.
Twitter Spaces, for example, took the lead in audio-based conversations when its beta launched in December 2020. Although it was initially available for iOS users only, it quickly became available on Android in March 2021. Spaces’ quick launch and wide availability instantly put the platform ahead of Clubhouse.
Facebook even took a crack at stealing Clubhouse’s spotlight by rolling out Live Audio Room. Spotify also released a feature for audio-only chatrooms, called Greenroom. Other platforms like LinkedIn and Reddit have Clubhouse clones in the works as well.
Can Clubhouse Compete With Its Clones?
Clubhouse has some intense competition. The platform is pitted against the most popular social platforms, all of which already have a huge advantage over Clubhouse: an already-existent userbase.
Fortunately for Clubhouse, its community only appears to be growing. Now that the app is available to everyone, does it have the potential to become the next Twitter or Facebook?
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