Clubhouse, Hype & Startups

In a 2010 essay, Chris Dixon wrote, "The next big thing will start out looking like a toy." Provocative. What he meant was that new technologies are often dismissed as toys because they undershoot user needs, and that that ones that make it out of toy phase and into the zeitgeist do so because they ride external forces.

One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don’t scale. . . . The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to. You can’t wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them. There are two reasons founders resist going out

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But curating, developing, and promoting the best content and Clubhouse-native talent is a crucial task to impress new users and keep people engaged.

Startups, on the other hand, have the advantage that they can start small, and grow, which is why some of the largest networked products in the industry—eBay, Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, and TikTok—started with small, atomic networks. Respectively, these initial networks began in collectibles, college students, limos for rich people, airbeds and breakf

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