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Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

My lesson from Clubhouse is that if you want to make social media app then you either need to be lucky or able to enlist tons of celebrities. MySpace, Twitter and Clubhouse are all examples of how they skyrocketed as celebrities pulled in and how then fell to ground as they left the scene. In early hype, it was obvious that founders were able to leverage their connections to celebrities very effectively.

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From an outsider's perspective (I never got into Clubhouse), it really seemed like its success was getting the right people on the platform (like you mentioned), plus the fact that the pandemic put a temporary stop on in-person meetups and talks. I'm sure this was partially due to the hard work of the people at Clubhouse, but to me it seems also like being in the right place at the right time.

What I don't get about articles like this, is that the growth is just taken for granted as if it's easily replicated. It's all about hard-fought learnings about product/ops/GTM, and none of that is relevant if you don't come up with an initially compelling product. How can you nurture growth if there is no growth in the first place? Maybe I'm a dumbass who just doesn't "get it," but it seems to me like a premature victory lap to celebrate these learnings before proving that they are fundamental to repeatable success.

i'd change the keyword 'celebrities' to 'top of the social pyramid'. You want to start the social group at the top of the social pyramid of the respective social circle. Create a social clique, which everyone would be jumping off the ground to join. Facebook was started at Ivy League, which allowed it to spread like wildfire in colleges. Similarly Clubhouse was started in Silicon Valley with top VCs and Founders.

Of course, each social app goes through various inflection points and arguably celebrities is towards the peak end of it. Celebrities usually catch on once it's already going mainstream or has a mainstream appeal. For example, Twitter had already created strong base of engaged users before celebrities caught on.

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