How to Create a Clubhouse-like App - Complete Guide

How to Create a Voice Chat App Like Clubhouse

March 30, 2021

10 min read

Is Clubhouse a pioneer among the drop-in audio apps? No. Is it a turbo booster for the growing popularity of voice-only chatting? Certainly.

Sure, there are plenty of reasons for this chatty enthusiasm. A number of companies have fully or partially adopted voice-only chat options in their digital products to cover a wider audience and provide a new remarkable experience to their users.

Let's highlight the main features and benefits of voice real-time chat, and prove why audio-only social media are all the rage right now.

What is a voice chat app like clubhouse?

Clubhouse, an audio chat app launched a year ago, has already hit 5 million downloads. It has caught the attention of tech industry big players like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg (not to mention the Chinese government, which has blocked it within the country).

It allows the double-win chat format: firstly, it's much usable, moreover, in the time of pandemic isolation hearing lovely voices is a game-changer that makes value our friendship and communication as a whole.

Conversation Rooms (Clubhouse voice chat spaces) are structured by topics to discuss, by members regarding their language or professions, and so on. This app involves different people and allows various talks, such as celebrity talk shows, discussions between venture capitalists, musical nights, theatrical performances, political discussions, etc.

So, voice-only chat apps bring back the intimacy of the spoken word. The topics range in Clubhouse is really wide. Here you can find such 'talkspaces' as:

<medium>"Café Português"<medium>, a place to practice Portuguese with each other
<medium>"Dacha"<medium>, a cozy country house founded for Russian speaking members
<medium>"House wine"<medium>, a space for wine producers and wine lovers to raise glasses and discuss the best appetizers

In Clubhouse you have a wide field to experiments with. You can create your own unique space to control conversations or just join an already existed room that matches your interests.

While Clubhouse is gaining momentum other social media platforms don't stay back. Podcasts and Soundbites are coming to Facebook that is promised to become a "sound studio in your pocket"! Do you want to try your hand in the newscasting or sound engineering a little? Today is a perfect time for sound mastering!

Why do you need to create your own clubhouse app?

Audio messaging has been available for years; voice memos on WhatsApp, Telegram, and WeChat audio messages. Every Monday, when Grace is jogging the park, <medium>her colleges are in her ear — recounting their last week and planning a new one, discussing the tasks, and joking about remote work moments.<medium> Fred, a young software engineer, doesn't waste his time talking on the phone; he's just using an audio app that takes voice recordings from his friends and family and delivers them as downloadable audio.

But a new wave of trendy apps is baking the immediacy and rawness of audio into the preferred experience, making voice the way people connect again.

This factor boosts the growing popularity of audio experience and even provokes a race between companies. Telegram voice chats have appeared recently; Twitter has rolled out its own version of audio-only chat rooms, known as Spaces. Facebook is working on a similar product right now.

Clubhouse voice chat as the channel of communication perfectly fits the following types of businesses:

EdTech (online courses, online education, workshops, lectures)
Media, Marketing, and PR (interviews, surveys, workshops)
eCommerce (conversations about industries and trends, interviews)
Arts and Crafts (workshops, interviews)
Blogging (interviews, overviews, reviews)

Just be honest and responsible — <medium>create conversations that matter and share your unique experience and knowledge you have, with no fake news and idle talks.<medium> That's probably the key to success in Clubhouse and a chance to engage a new audience that will appreciate your service or product via an interesting and sincere narrative.

The main features for clubhouse like app

Clubhouse social app was valued by investors at around $1 billion this year and had been christened a "unicorn" startup, like AirBnb, SpaceX, and Uber. Its success leads to a surge of competitors in the 'social audio' space and is still boosting the overall audio chat ecosystem. So, how to benefit from a voice social media app and develop such a product for your needs?

If you are looking for how to build a Clubhouse-like app, the following list of key features might come in handy.

When you're in a room, you can check accounts of people who are currently speaking.

How to make a clubhouse social app

How to build a Clubhouse-like app that will match clients needs? Let's figure out crucial steps on the way to make your idea happen.

1. Find your product-market fit

Have you already checked your idea for viability? Let's get to define your market fit. Who is your audience? Do you want to create an internal application for daily meetings for your employees or set up a platform where users can practice languages with each other?

Your product should be in demand right now and fit the market perfectly. Are you sure there is no voice app that fully covers users' needs you are considering? Be sure that your idea has something unique to not waste time on developing an app that already exists.

1. Identify your target customer
2. Instead of trying to satisfy every need focus on one offer
3. Identify your product's unique benefits and nail your value proposition

2. Line up the team

Whether you start product development, you will need a team to work on it. Even if you feel you can do everything on your own and want to save money on hiring specialists, you need at least a second pair of eyes on all decisions to avoid any mistake or omission.

And, frankly, it's quite a heavy burden to realize the app single-handedly. Unless you're a marketing guru and luminary of software engineering. ✊ Even so, note, that many investors consider the team more important than the idea or the product. It means they more likely will fund your venture if you have a good company of dedicated specialists with you.

So, what is the action plan?

1. Establish a founding team
2. Nurture a business culture, your mission & values and use them in marketing
3. Set up a communication framework and choose modes of communication
4. Select project management and issue tracking tools
5. Hire an outsourcing tech partner

3. Build an MVP

Minimum viable product (MVP) is the product version providing a limited feature set that can be implemented and launched with minimal app development cost and within the tightest timeframe. MVP along with prototype and design mockups is the basis for fundraising and getting first adopters' feedback.

Despite MVP minimizes the number of features, it must possess enough customer value to attract prospective clients willing to use the app and pay for it.

4. Develop a marketing and sales strategy

Even a genius idea will never see the light of day unless you know how to promote and market it. With all the preliminary strategizing works done at previous stages, now it's time to start realizing your plans, including:

1. Brand identity development
2. Online presence building
3. Sales funnel set up
4. Sales tools set up
5. Sales goals

5. Harness the data

This step implies collecting and analyzing application performance data and other data types using business intelligence platforms.

With the diversity and complexity of the modern analytic toolkit, you can make great strides in collecting and utilizing information. Data gathering and analyzing helps to link it with business context, drive decisions and maintain governance at scale.

6. Scale up your offer

While Clubhouse says it is scaling "as fast as we can and open it up to everyone soon" and turns "from a small community of beta testers to a growing network of communities" think about your's app future.

Consider adding new features or expanding your audience once MVP development pays for itself and starts generating profit.

Ways to monetize clubhouse-like audio chat app

Monetizing is at the heart of your product's financial performance. Note, that great brands avoid their apps being crowded with ads and annoying pop-ups. So setting up the monetization toolkit you'd choose should be a responsible and thoughtful process.

Let's talk about three proven ways to monetize your drop-in app and make money from online voice chat performances.

In-app advertisement

Most of the media apps and websites are primarily supported by advertising — such a toll for using the platform for free.

In-app advertisement is the most popular kind of toolkit among digital ads. It drives revenue for thousands of app brands. With sophisticated data tracking and targeting processes, in-app tools allow reaching prospective clients with pinpoint accuracy.

At the same time, ad space is getting too crowded and probably there's bound to be a downward trend. People use different ad block plugins and prefer to pay for an ad-free version of the digital product neither to see commercials every day.

Subscription

Investing in creators is one of the key parts of Clubhouse strategy for today.

While advertising mostly takes a back seat, a subscription is rocketing in media platforms and beyond. New York Times hits 7 million digital subscribers in 2020 and it's online subscription revenue rose 34 %, to $155.3 million. Seems it is not so easy task to achieve NYT-level credibility, but if you find the right niche and create a cutting-edge voice only chat, adopters will come back again and again.

Thus subscription will be a great and simple way to monetize your drop-in app just because it's worth it.

Tipping

Virtual tips is a hip monetization tool for content creators. Different platforms are launching virtual tips today and Clubhouse isn't staying away. It has announced forthcoming tipping and ticket features that will greenlight the way to pay content creators.

It means the audience will be able to support their favorite creators and buy a ticket or tip them directly, with 100% of the net proceeds going directly to them.

So Clubhouse is going to become one more platform where the people will be able to monetize their content with a 'direct-from-fan' support model.

Voice chat apps to analyze before developing yours

Let's make a short overview of voice apps like Clubhouse and highlight the unique features, design, and user experience they offer.

Hope you'll get some interesting ideas from it and analyze some relevant examples from this market niche.

Cappucino.fm

"A daily personal audio show featuring your friends"

<medium>Cappuccino<medium> audio app provides an interesting audio experience with dashes of humor and mood. Voice memos are called here "beans" and Cappuccino means 'mix of your friends' beans'.

The application offers a fun way to:

sharing audio stories, life updates, and jokes with close friends and family
recording a short voice memo ("bean")
listening to your Cappuccino mix every morning

Discord

"Talk, Chat, Hang Ou‪t‬"

Discord is not a voice-only app in the classical sense, but its main channel to communicate is audio chat. It was rebranded in 2020 shedding its former identity as an app designed for gamers' communication while competing.

According to the company research, about 70% of active Discord users reported that they use it for non-gaming purposes in 2020. Anyway, you can use this platform for:

hosting online game nights
organizing movie watch-alongs with friends and popcorn
attending work meetings
conducting interviews

Fireside

"Promoting civil intelligent discourse, shared connected experiences, and genuine relationship-building virtually"

Mark Cuban, an American billionaire entrepreneur and investor, planning to launch Fireside, a "next-gen podcast platform" this year. The app idea is similar to the Clubhouse, except with the ability to natively record conversations.

Now Fireside is behind the scenes being in beta on iOS. All we know is the grand plan of its inventors, cozy name, and a logo in pastel colors. To be continued!

How Freshcode can help you to create a drop-in-audio app

Now Fireside is behind the scenes being in beta on iOS. All we know is the grand plan of its inventors, cozy name, and a logo in pastel colors. To be continued!

Here you can check brief overviews of mobile and web development services we provide.

And here we are welcoming you to book a free consultation to discuss what tech solutions we can offer for implementing your idea.

Quick summary

Remember that just like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube in their early days, Clubhouse is offering free rein for organic outreach.

With such drop-in app, you can both join live conversations that you would never be able to gain access to otherwise and create your own channel to form a network and connect to prospective clients.

Don't wait until Clubhouse becomes the new WhatsApp or Twitter. Create your own audio chat app today or enhance your existing platform with advanced voice chat features. Freshcode experts are ready to discuss suitable solutions for your digital product.

You can book a free consultation on our website or contact our representative via LinkedIn.

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How to Create a Voice Chat App Like Clubhouse

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