How to Start a Clubhouse Room (and Keep Your Audience Engaged)

Sure, on Clubhouse, you can speak in someone else’s room. But you may have more fun (and get more attention) creating your own. Four prominent users explain how to draw an audience.

Recruit experts.

If you just start a room, nobody will care. But if you start a room with true experts in a field, you’re starting strong. “Your room should be dense with notable insights and worth the time of both your speakers and audience,” says Josh Constine, principal investor and head of content at SignalFire. The more Clubhouse followers an expert has, the bigger the audience they’ll draw in.

Align with a club.

You can start a room by yourself, or you can associate it with a “club” — a feature in which users create groups that host rooms and attract followers. “Thousands of extra people could be notified when the event is first scheduled and also when it starts,” says Ed Nusbaum, a serial entrepreneur who started multiple popular clubs. (Full disclosure: I’ve administered rooms with his clubs for people and brands, including Entrepreneur.) To do this, however, you must be a club administrator or contact a club’s administrator directly to discuss it.

Write instructive titles.

When you create a Clubhouse room, you can give it a compelling title so that people will be interested in joining. “Use an instructive title,” advises Kaleido Insights tech analyst Jeremiah Owyang. The best titles have a clear, concise description that explains exactly what the value of the room is, or what a listener should do in it. For example, Owyang often hosts a room called Share Your Wellness Practices, which he says encourages people to learn from one another.

Create experiments.

“Treat your early days as an experiment,” says Soumeya Benghanem, product management lead at VMware. “As with all experiments, there is an opportunity to learn from success and failure.” In a way, Clubhouse is like a dream R&D setting: Nothing you do is saved or viewable afterward (though that may change), and you get feedback in real time about whether or not something works. That means you can start rooms with different titles and themes, see how they do, learn from the experience, and iterate.

Learn these hacks! Three power users on how they make the most of Clubhouse.

Treat your events like a client meeting.

Clubhouse isn’t made for quick browsing, like Instagram or others, so be regimented with your use. “It has to work into the routine,” says adviser and investor Kat Cole. “Schedule rooms one to two weeks in advance so you can plan around them, and end at 60 minutes.”

Find times that work.

Experiment to learn when your target audience is on the app. For Saba Karim, head of accelerator pipeline at Techstars, that turned out to be 11 a.m. MST Sunday and 6 p.m. MST Tuesday — so that’s when he creates his rooms. “It took me six weeks on Clubhouse to get 5,000 followers,” he says, “where it took me six years on Twitter.” (And for every hour he’s on, he estimates he receives 10 emails from founders afterward.)

Play with the functionality.

Clubhouse has few features, but they can be used creatively to engage your audience. For example, the “raise hand” button was designed for audience members who want to speak. But Jason Fried, cofounder and CEO of Basecamp, likes to use it to solicit audience feedback. He’ll ask people to tap the button if they like something, for example. “It would go up to a 100 and we would know that people dig this,” he says.