Social media is the biggest business industry with the most number of consumers and revenue generation in the world. And the reason is that social media is connected to every other industry now. It is where all the people come to chill, work, sell, buy, and have a good time.
That is why this highly competitive industry keeps getting new updates and innovative trends every other week. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Snapchat are all trying new ideas to intrigue users and stay in trend.
Today we are more focused on a single platform, the latest to join the social media bandwagon, Clubhouse – the best voice chat app as a social media platform.
Many celebrities have become Clubhouse hosts, and their loyal admirers followed them to the platform. Currently, the app has been downloaded by around 13.5 million people boosting to be worth around $4 billion.
Now that the numbers entered the game, you seem more interested. So, let’s find out more about what Clubhouse is and how to make an app like Clubhouse.
What is Clubhouse?
Clubhouse is an audio-only social media application developed by Paul Davison and Rohan Seth. So, no more need to generate text, image, or video content to stay relevant. Just talk your heart out on things that matter to you on this audio chatting and podcasting platform.
It’s the perfect platform for creators who are good at speaking and entertaining listeners, and the best thing, no need to spend a small fortune on lights, camera, makeup, costumes, etc. Just hit record and talk.
People can share podcasts, thoughts, ideas, stories, speeches, and anything else they could think about on Clubhouse. It’s one of the best things that happened to us in the pandemic where we were tired of just sitting at home watching Netflix or attending Zoom calls with friends, family, and colleagues.
Clubhouse is becoming a digital space where people can listen to others without getting overwhelmed by screens and lagging connections. Additionally, the Clubhouse app doesn’t record audio nor store it on any servers. So, all the sessions are present on the app only for the live run and not after. Hence it is impossible to listen to a conversation at a later time.
What’s The Buzz Around The Clubhouse App?
The name Clubhouse spread like wildfire because Elon musk, Jared Leto, Kanye West, and many other celebrities came to this platform. A list of world-class celebrities gave this app the much-needed boost in the competitive social media scene.
Clubhouse has a well-thought-out promotion strategy. They are creating a demand and a need among the people with exclusivity tactics. So, no one can actually join Clubhouse unless someone who is already in the app invites them.
The USP of Clubhouse is that there are chances for any user to talk to celebrities if they are in the right chat room at the right moment. The app witnessed an overnight surge of 2 million users after Elon Musk joined Clubhouse.
Top Clubhouse App Features
An app is only as good as the features it offers to the user. And Clubhouse has some terrific features that make it different from all the other social media apps people use these days. Here are the top features that make Clubhouse the best voice chat app.
Invitation Only Onboarding
The app onboarding, as we mentioned earlier, is by invitation only. Once you join the Clubhouse app, there are plenty of different rooms that you can join according to your interests. By default, all the new users are kept on mute, but they can unmute themself at any time.
Clubhouse Feed
Imagine the feed like a hallway of a hotel with many rooms that you can enter. So the Clubhouse feed is the hallway to all the audio rooms where people discuss and hold conversations. The voice communication app users can see active rooms and topics that are running live on the platform and join them via the Clubhouse feed.
Clubhouse Rooms
Clubhouse launched as an elite social media platform for celebrities and their chosen followers. That’s why most conversations on this platform at present are about business, politics, art, and networking. There is a consistent growth in audio content creators on Clubhouse in numbers as well as categories.
Rooms are where all these conversations take place. These rooms can be open for all or private discussion forums, based on the host’s preference. Once you are a member of the Clubhouse app, any user can create a room of their own to talk with someone or speak by themselves to a live audience. No more than five thousand people can be part of a room at a given time.
Clubhouse Clubs
The Clubhouse room is a place for random discussions irrespective of interests. While in clubs, you meet with the people who are interested in a particular topic. You could say that the Club feature is similar to how Facebook groups work; a group of people with common interests make an online community to talk about it. The user can be part of the clubs as an admin, member, or follower.
Search Feature
How to make a social media app work without the feature, especially group voice chat apps like Clubhouse, where the hosts only create live content? The app users need to search which live rooms and clubs are active according to their interests and topics. The users can find rooms, clubs, profiles, and in some cases, conversation history (if saved and posted) with the search feature.
Upcoming for you
The majority of content on Clubhouse are live sessions, so the users need to make space in their schedule to attend those live sessions. The hosts can promote their upcoming events and rooms for the Clubhouse users. As users, you get to schedule events and add them to the calendar.
Activity Tab
The users can access their account’s activity logs with Clubhouse’s activity tab. With the activity tab, the users can check for other members who follow them, new members, track the interactions, accounts, clubs and their members, and ongoing events in the Clubhouse app.
Notifications
No social media app would be complete without the notifications feature, and that stands the same for the best voice chat app too. With Clubhouse’s notification feature, the users will get push notifications for upcoming events, new rooms, and new members joining.
Why Should You Develop A Social-Audio App Like Clubhouse?
You’ve read all about the accolades that Clubhouse has achieved in the short time since it’s been launched. And you’ve read all about the unique features and offerings this voice communication app has to offer.
Social media is an ever-changing business, and people need something new and interesting. Some believed that Facebook would remain the only top social media app for at least 20 years, but we know now that they were wrong.
Instagram brought endless feed and pictures, Snapchat brought unique filters, TikTok brought short videos, and all of these platforms thrived because they brought something new to the table. Clubhouse followed the same approach with a highly unique idea.
When the whole world was shifting from pictures to short video content, the founders of Clubhouse went the opposite way with audio content. You can do the same. There is no competition at the moment in this particular segment except Clubhouse, so you can get into action right now.
History has proven time and again that such unique concepts and business ideas are what make it into the billion-dollar startup unicorn club. So, if you think you can make a similar app with more interesting features or perhaps an app with a whole new idea and approach, this next section will help you out a lot.
Steps to Create a Clubhouse App
So, you’ve decided to do this, to develop an app like Clubhouse. That’s great! Let’s waste no time and get straight to the process of launching an app like Clubhouse.
Research the market
No one wants to make just another copy of a successful app. So, you too must not want to build just another Clubhouse or any of the social media apps already present in the market. You need to run a complete study of all the top existing social media apps and every app that works on the similar app concept you are planning to execute.
Find out how these successful apps began, where they got the funding from, their business and revenue model, etc. If you ask the right questions, you get the right answers — giving you the right material to build your own social media app.
Research is the only element of this entire process that’s free, so you need to utilize it as much as possible. You need to take this opportunity to study your potential competitor’s app working and what USP they present to appeal to the users. Look into their strengths and weaknesses to find the perfect opportunities to get the competitive edge and develop a higher standard mobile app for your brand.
Select your target audience
Targeting the entire world as your audience may seem a cool idea, but it’s a very expensive goal that needs a lot of money, time, and effort. A better approach is to convert a smaller community or demographic of the audience and convert them into your app users.
Amazon did the same thing, and so did Netflix. They targeted a particular group of people; Amazon targeted readers by first selling only books, and Netflix targeted people who wanted to rent movies in the Blockbuster era.
You need to select a target audience initially and focus entirely on satisfying their needs and keep expanding from there. You can choose your target audience based on age group, geographical location, interests, or app platform.
Finalize the app concept
The first rule of app-based business is to provide a product that either solves a problem or enhances the lifestyle. So you should either make a social media app that resolves issues that people have with their current platform or create an app that brings in a new feature or style of social media communication.
Think of an amazing app idea, a USP factor that separates your voice communication app from all the existing apps in the market. This will be a tough portion to figure out, but trust me, when you come up with that special sauce for success, everything will start falling into the right places.
Two minds are better than one. The more innovative people you bring to the table for this step, the better ideas you could come up with.
Find the right app development approach
There are several ways you can develop your voice chat app like Clubhouse. You can go with custom app development, a team of freelancers, or choose a quick-to-launch solution. All these approaches have their own benefits and drawbacks, and you need to weigh them extensively before choosing.
If you want to save money in the development phase then quick-to-launch clone app solutions are available, but what you save right now will cost you a hundred times if the clone solution fails to impress the users due to the lack of originality and buggy interface. Choosing freelancers could work if you have the technical understanding and skills to lead the app development project and manage a group of freelancers working in different time zones.
The custom app development approach is comparatively costly. But this way, the entire app development project is taken care of by a team of professionals from a certified app development company like Excellent Webworld.
Specify features & requirements
Once you have acquired the dream team to develop your audio chat app like Clubhouse, it’s time to let the team know the game plan. You need to explain your vision for the app platform and what your business goals are for the short and long term.
The team with senior app designers and developers will listen to your ideas and also give their inputs from several years of experience in the app development field. Once the app design, feature list, and requirements are discussed and finalized, the development process can begin.
One of the most important decisions to make here is choosing the app platform/s for your Clubhouses like app development; Android, iOS, or both. The development approach could be native or hybrid based on your budget and app requirements.
Decide on app monetization
You must plan to get back the investment on the app and create a self-sustaining revenue-generating process for your best voice chat app. How do social media apps like Facebook and Instagram make money? Primarily through showcasing advertisements on their platform. On the other hand, platforms like YouTube and Spotify ask users to pay for a premium account if they don’t want to see ads.
Both these approaches can become your main source of revenue. And there could be several other smaller sources like selling virtual goods, unlimited likes, follows, etc., for a fixed price. As the app gets developed, you will start getting new ideas on how to monetize the app.
Ongoing app support & improvement
Once your app is developed and launched, the work is not done. The app will need continuous support and updates periodically. The best option is to get the same team that developed your app to handle this service, as they will be the ones knowing every nook and corner of the app’s code.
Marketing campaign
Social media apps are all about connecting people and bringing them as well as their friends and family to a digital platform. But how will you do that? Especially when all of them are already communicating on apps like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat.
Your voice chat app for Android and iOS needs to be very intriguing for the people to leave their existing social media app or adopt yours too with their existing ones. The plus point here for you is that your idea about a voice chat app is different, and text/picture/video-based content has been highly saturated now.
People will love a new way of communicating, especially voice-over text. It’s quicker, more genuine, and interesting than text messages. You have to surround your app’s marketing around this idea. Letting people voice their ideas and stories with just the press of a button without having to even look at the screen.
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How Much Does it Cost to Develop an App Like Clubhouse?
We already discussed the three approaches to develop your voice chat app, so now the real question is how much does it cost to develop an app like Clubhouse? Let’s find out. We have already rejected the idea of a clone solution, so we will not be discussing that option here.
Hire a freelancer
If you choose to go with the freelancer approach, you will need to bring together a team of freelancers with different skills and knowledge. You would probably need an app UI/UX designer, app frontend developer, a backend developer with extensive knowledge in social media apps backend working and a strong hand in app security.
All of these freelancers need to have previous experience with at least one social media app project. Their price could range anywhere from $25 to $150 per hour or even more based on their level of experience and skill set.
The price may seem high when you count in the fact that you will have to personally manage them almost every day, and they will not offer the app testing or maintenance service.
Hire a local IT company
You can hire a local IT company within your city, state, or country. If you live in the US, UK, or any of the first world countries, this approach may seem quite costly as these countries have a higher cost to run business and costly resources.
Hiring a local IT company can cost you for the social media app development project like Clubhouse anywhere from $90,000 to $250,000 or even more if you wish to build the top-of-the-line app with all the bells and whistles.
If you have the money to spend, you can go with a local IT company or keep reading to learn about a better way.
Outsource software development
Several IT companies In India offer the same quality development services by reducing the app development cost compared to US or UK. The reason being a lower business running cost in India and skilled resources to hire at a more budget-friendly price.
The same service discussed in the above section would cost you around $50,000 to $100,000 based on your app’s design requirements and feature list. Excellent Webworld has recently been named among the top 7 IT firms in India, and you can get the most talented resources from our firm to build an app like Clubhouse as your business startup.
Thinking of creating your own social media app like Clubhouse?
The clubhouse is still in beta and limited to iOS. This shows an excellent untapped potential for new players to penetrate this industry niche in social media and grab the lion’s share. The audio-social media platform idea is here to stay and thrive, and you can either stand on the sidewalk watching or get in the race and run to win.
You can see the ease of use that this idea brings; people can speak about anything they want and consume the app’s content without even looking at it. They can use the Clubhouse app while working, eating, driving, or doing almost anything.
It’s the perfect gateway to enter one of the biggest industry verticals of the world. Excellent Webworld can help you take that step with our digitization services. Let’s talk more about this idea and explore your business potential.
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