The first thing you need to do is to tap on the screen and you can be in the same chat room with famous entrepreneurs, investors and other top industry professionals, and if you "raise your hand" to speak you may also have a direct voice conversation with these big names. Do you want to try such a software?
The company's social networking software, Clubhouse, has recently launched a Chinese version of Clubhouse, and some even predict that there will be a large number of Chinese versions of Clubhouse coming up. Is the voice social networking a pain point of demand, or is it a wind that comes and goes quickly?
Musk "sparked" the voice chat room
"If you haven't used Clubhouse, you'll be embarrassed to say you're in the Internet industry." A seemingly joking statement, but in fact a vivid description of the recent fire of this voice social software.
Clubhouse is an instant audio social networking software created in the United States. Every public chat room, as long as the topic you are interested in, can be clicked into at any time to listen. If you want to speak, just "raise your hand" and the chatroom host will approve it and you can open the mic at any time.
On January 31, Elon Musk, the newly richest man in the world and CEO of Tesla, posted a message on a social media platform teasing that he would be creating a chat room. The following day, netizens flocked to the room causing the 5,000-person cap to fill up for the first time, necessitating the opening of an additional side room and even opening a live stream on another video platform.
Unlike many voice-enabled social networking apps, Clubhouse is invite-only, and users must obtain an invitation code to sign up and log in.
The celebrity effect of Musk and the scarcity of invitation codes have made Clubhouse explode rapidly, and the voice-only, invite-only, listen-and-burn experience has made live voice chat quite attractive for a while.
China's version of Clubhouse may welcome the competition
The Chinese version of Clubhouse is also speeding up its arrival.
On the evening of February 20, Zhu Xiaohu, Managing Director of GSR Ventures, Zhou Yahui, CEO of Kunlun Wanwei, Du Yongbo, Managing Director of China Renaissance, and Jiang Changjian, a famous host, discussed the topic "Can China make a Clubhouse? The theme was "Can China make a Clubhouse?" and they had an hour-long exchange and discussion. The discussion was held on a newly launched domestic audio social product called "Dialogue Bar".
The Dialogue Bar app includes industry exchanges on topics such as "Opportunities behind the rise of new consumer brands", social topics such as "Is trading your life for money the norm in today's workplace", and interest groups such as "Midnight Ghost Story Solitaire There are also interest groups like "Midnight Ghost Story Solitaire". People in the chat room are only able to communicate via voice. This adds a more pure communication and conversation scenario than other social apps with a wide variety of features.
"I can either have a heated exchange with others or be a quiet listener," "It's more like an online voice roundtable discussion," said one user who experienced Dialogue Bar. A media practitioner who faced distress in the rise of short video spoke candidly about the reason he was attracted to the audio social software, "It's an opportunity for self-publishing uncles who don't have high face value but still have some dry goods."
In addition, after logging into the software, users can follow each other, but can not communicate in private letters, if you must deepen understanding, both sides have to "open a room" for voice conversation. The invitation system of registration, some people will dialogue bar, Clubhouse defined as "semi-acquaintance audio social" software.
The CEO of the company, Feng Yousheng, said that after Clubhouse exploded in early February, the team realized that there was a lack of similar high-quality social products in China and that the market was huge. After deciding to enter the market, the internal innovation team of Yingke reacted quickly and started the implementation overtime before the Spring Festival. After completing the development, design and testing of the entire product in 6 days, it was launched on New Year's Eve 2021. According to a number of Internet practitioners, several domestic companies are developing Clubhouse-like app, voice social instantly became popular.
The future of the "voice version of Zhihu" is uncertain
In fact, in QQ, Himalaya, Lychee and other software, similar functions have long been embedded as plug-ins. The market has also long appeared oxygen voice, claw and other voice social APP, but most of the game social, dating and other pendant applications, and did not successfully "out of the circle" to harvest public attention.
With the east wind of Clubhouse, can voice social start a new round of venture capital boom? The Chinese version of Clubhouse will face many challenges due to the community operation ability, communication quality control, and the cash model.
At the beginning of the launch, Clubhouse took the route of high-end users, before Musk, the first users include famous Silicon Valley investors Marc Andreessen, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, American stand-up comedian Kevin Hart and other celebrities. Conversation Bar also attracts high-quality users by attracting industry celebrities to its chat rooms, so it has been compared by some industry insiders to a "voice version of Zhihu", but it is not yet stable in terms of topic richness, quality of communication content, and user stickiness.
Some users reported their feelings when using Dialogue Bar: "Except for one time when I met a guest who was interested in sharing, most of the time I just swept through the chat rooms, but there was nothing interesting and I quit."
Yesterday, Conversation Bar was taken down from the Apple App Store. The response from the screeners said that the reason for the downgrade was product optimization and iteration. In the previous 2 days, reporters browsing between chat rooms of the Dialogue Bar App found that during the daytime non-peak hours, the number of people in the chat rooms was only in the single digits was more common.
Wang Peng, an assistant professor at Renmin University of China, believes that it is easy to scrape up a whirlwind of instant voice social platforms in China, but it is difficult for startups to get stronger and bigger. He believes that at present, China's WeChat, Weibo, Jitterbug, Racer and other social platforms are divided into several worlds, the polarization effect, the Matthew effect is obvious, the giant traffic resources are easy to get users, small platforms have a smaller chance of success. Compared to doing the Chinese version of Clubhouse alone, it's more practical to add corresponding modules in Weibo, WeChat, Jitterbug and other APPs.
"I especially do not recommend startups to do this product, the threshold is very high, the retention is very poor, and the startup team will die a very ugly death." Zhou Yahui, CEO of Kunlun Wanwei, reminded that Clubhouse products are extremely difficult to operate in the early stage, and startup teams should not easily imitate them.
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