Clubhouse is an audio-based social media app, allowing users to join in with group phone calls and discussions with people they follow. Users can dip in and out of these phone calls, known as “rooms” at any time, and choose to either listen in to conversations that are happening or contribute. (c/o The National)¹

I recently had a chance to play around with their app, and wanted to try and reverse it. I fired up BurpSuite and installed the root CA on the iPhone, and had access pretty quickly. Fortunately the app didn’t try and obfuscate it’s API, or even implement any form of certificate stapling, which made querying all the routes pretty straight forward.

Who’s on Clubhouse?

As of 7/12/2020, there are 4943 accounts. The first account was created on 3/17/2020.

How fast is it growing?

Clubhouse growth rate, total number of accounts by day

Clubhouse has seen fairly linear growth since April, which implies the founders are trying to keep a pretty standard growth rate, despite an exponential amount of interest.

How many people are joining per day?

Clubhouse growth rate, new accounts joining per day

Date	New Accounts
2020-07-05	42
2020-07-06	25
2020-07-07	30
2020-07-08	37
2020-07-09	53
2020-07-10	37
2020-07-11	44

For the past week, between 25 and 90 new accounts were joining per day. On average, since March 17th, 40 new accounts have joined per day, although the average for June was ~54. The highest one day join number was 261, on April 18th.

Month	Average new accounts per day during month
2020-03-31	5.2
2020-04-30	42.6
2020-05-31	41.7097
2020-06-30	54.6667
2020-07-31	42.3333

What are the follower distribution counts?

Most people on Clubhouse have less than 25 followers - 2586 of the 4943 accounts, or ~52% of all users. ~23% of all users have 0 followers.

The distribution of user follower counts follows a fairly typical power law distribution.

Clubhouse follower count distribution

Removing the 0 follower count users for visibility, the graph looks like this:

Clubhouse follower count distribution without the 0 follower count column

Who are the most followed people on Clubhouse?

Unsurprisingly the top two users are the founders. After that, a list of partners at various VC firms, founders, and twitter personas make the list. Here are the Top 25, and their respective handles.

Name	Twitter Handle	Number of followers
Paul Davison	pdavison	3402
Rohan Seth	rohanseth	3367
Andrew Chen	andrewchen	3125
Naval		3110
Josh Elman	joshelman	3034
Katie Stanton	KatieS	3032
Sarah Tavel	sarahtavel	3030
Elad Gil		3019
Erik Torenberg	eriktorenberg	3004
Alexis Ohanian	alexisohanian	2991
Sahil Lavingia	shl	2989
Jessica Verrilli	jess	2983
Jana Messerschmidt	janamal	2973
Kim-Mai Cutler	kimmaicutler	2972
Merci Grace	merci	2943
Sam Altman		2934
balajis		2908
Nathan Baschez	nbashaw	2904
bubba	bubba	2831
Garry Tan 🍔	garrytan	2737
Josh Constine	JoshConstine	2710
Nate Bosshard 🔭	natebosshard	2671
Jonathan Gheller	jgheller	2667
Brianne Kimmel	briannekimmel	2667
Jared Leto	JaredLeto	2638

Are you a VC reading this?

While I’m not raising right now, a few friends are working on some pretty interesting companies that are currently raising. If you found the above interesting, reach out and I’ll put you in contact with like-minded people.

Footnotes

1. https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/what-is-clubhouse-the-invite-only-social-media-app-used-by-a-list-stars-including-deepak-chopra-and-ashton-kutcher-1.1030092 ↩