Clubhouse: from the “trendy” mobile app to the crisis and massive layoffs

For a while, club house was the mobile app of the moment (App Store link – Free – iPhone/iPad). Between its slightly elitist (and snobbish) registration model at the start and its chat rooms wanting to be a little more “perched” than the average, Clubhouse quickly became one of the big “trends” in the mobile world, to the point to accumulate millions of users. Those moments of glory are definitely a thing of the past. The company founded by Paul Davison and Rohan Seth can no longer take advantage of the “favorable” conditions of the pandemic and is in turn sinking into difficulties, like many other tech companies before it.

As a result, Clubhouse will fire half of its employees, a decision that the two founders try to justify on a blog page: “Rohan and I tried to make this work with our current team size, but we weren’t able to do it effectively,” the founders commented in a blog post. In order to fix this, we need to reset the business, eliminate roles and reduce it to a smaller, product-focused team. We came to this conclusion reluctantly, as we have years of track left and we don’t feel any immediate pressure to cut costs. But we believe a smaller team will give us focus and speed, and help us launch the next evolution of the product.”

This big blow of firedamp proves at the very least that no one in the tech sector is immune to a bad patch. 2 years ago, Clubhouse was on everyone’s lips and seemed untouchable…