Clubhouse: Open the Gates or Hold?

It is mid-2020. The world is in lockdown, and a new app called Clubhouse is the only place where people are "hanging out." It is a live audio social network, and it is currently the most exclusive club in Silicon Valley.

You are a Product Lead at Clubhouse. Every venture capitalist, celebrity, and tech founder is on the app. The "FOMO" (Fear Of Missing Out) is at an all-time high. People are literally selling invites on eBay for $200. You have raised a Series A at a $100M valuation with barely a dozen employees.

Your founder wants to keep the "vibe" intimate. He knows that live audio is fragile—if the rooms get too big or too noisy, the "magic" of eavesdropping on a billionaire's conversation disappears. But you have 10 million people on your Android waitlist screaming to get in, and Twitter has just announced "Twitter Spaces" to kill you. Facebook is also rumored to be cloning the audio features.

You must decide how to handle the "Scaling Crisis." Do you stay exclusive and risk being overtaken by a giant, or do you open the floodgates and risk destroying the very culture that made you a unicorn?

The principle: Constraints are the only way to protect community quality during explosive growth. When you are the hottest product in the world, your constraint is not acquisition, it is retention. Removing friction to capture the mass market dilutes the density of the core network that made the product valuable in the first place.