Substack Should Buy Clubhouse

A Social Media Match Made in Heaven

Substack should buy Clubhouse.

The social audio powerhouse builds community but lacks content, whereas this platform is a firehose of content without any real sense of community. This is a social media match made in heaven.

Clubhouse was a social lifeline during pandemic lockdown: we gathered in audio chatrooms, performed for each other, discussed news, found drama. The app was—and remains—a collective parasocial phenomenon. Instead of fondness for mega celebrities like Taylor Swift, we found perceived community with people we didn't really know. It felt tight-knit, with high emotional stakes—but our Clubhouse friends were little more than internet acquaintances. There is something inherent in hearing people's voices that makes us feel we know them more deeply than we really do.

Still, Clubhouse provided an essential service during mass social dislocation, and a dedicated user base has continued to find community on the app. Consistent users feel a personal stake in Clubhouse's evolution—when we find something that facilitates crucial connections, we care about threats to its longevity. It's the reverse Fight Club: the first and second rules of Clubhouse are always talk about Clubhouse.

When I got into Substack there were instant and unmistakable echoes from my prior experience on Clubhouse. Robust subscriber chats create communal parasocial networks, while livestreams, video, and podcast content build parasocial chemistry with Substack creators. Much content on Substack relates to Substack itself as the topic, including this post. And as a very heavy user of the app (I’m a reader, community member, and writer), I now harbor the same degree of emotional investment in the Substack product that I once held for Clubhouse.

So naturally, it caught my attention when Substack made news this week with a $100 million investment to fuel the growth of the platform. What might that growth entail? As you are likely aware, video content has been a major emphasis in recent months, layered atop the preceding emphasis on the introduction of Notes. While notes, video, and podcasts can both empower creators and compel subscribers to continue using the app, another feature near and dear to my heart contains Substack’s secret sauce: subscriber chats. In March, I published a celebration of the subscriber chat:

“When a Substack creator attracts a large enough following and cultivates an active enough chat among their subscribers, those participants become stakeholders in a community of likeminded people. They care about the health and energy of the chat itself. They have somewhere to go, somewhere people know and understand them. The publication provides a shared foundation, but the people in the chat become the living, breathing thing that can become more important than the words of its publisher.”

Subscriber chats are largely untapped platinum mines, for both content and connection. With this new round of funding, I hope and expect Substack will invest in a modernization and expansion of that community hub. Users could benefit significantly from a polishing of the feature and from incentives for more creators to facilitate community within their subscriber network. And a game-changing addition to the Substack experience would be the incorporation of social audio within subscriber chat communities.

Substack should absorb Clubhouse’s best in class social audio because of its power to transform this platform’s nascent community-building capacity and trigger a creative explosion from existing and potential creators.

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How would this merger play out in practice? Clubhouse users would open an app that operates entirely the same, but with the added value of all of Substack’s widgets. They would retain their friends and followers, and could still open social rooms outside of any publication. Clubhouse groups, however, would be converted into Substack publications. This would allow for private group chats and private rooms, owned and operated exactly as they are in Clubhouse.

Substack users would be treated to a brand-new app experience: the social room. They could open public rooms to hang out with anyone, create rooms for followers only, or join rooms being held by Substack creators. Unlike Substack video—which allows for people to type comments on a conversation between a small number of creators—social and subscriber rooms would empower more people to speak up and weigh in. They would generate an authentic and organic sense of connection.

Most importantly, audio rooms would allow creators and others to lead discussions and circulate work by “pinning” Substack posts to the top of the screen. Imagine taking your morning coffee with a regular group of online friends, sharing articles and discussing the best posts you’ve read. It happens every day on Clubhouse, but the linked articles take people everywhere but Clubhouse. What if Substack was more than a place to share your work? What if it blossomed into the salon where people gathered to celebrate it and pick it apart?

For publications hawking paid subscriptions, the privilege to speak “on stage” would be a powerful value-add to complement what many successful publications currently offer: the ability to start new threads in the subscriber chat versus simply read and respond to threads. Perhaps paid subscribers could have exclusive access to in-chat audio rooms, but only those ponying up for Founding Member subscriptions would be allowed to speak in the room. These marketing and sales decisions would all lie in the hands of the publisher, just as with chat and the whole suite of publisher tools.

I was such a heavy user, Clubhouse made me its final “app icon.”

Those who are good with numbers might be wondering how exactly Substack would expect to pay for a company most recently valued at $4 billion. Yet I would argue that Substack cannot afford not to buy Clubhouse—and Clubhouse cannot afford to continue languishing in increasing irrelevance. That $4 billion is a wild overvaluation for an app with a shrinking user base and no revenue stream. Clubhouse is worth something, but that ain’t it.

Even as a shadow of its former self, Clubhouse still claims 10 million weekly active users. Onboarding these users represents a potential 50% increase in the Substack ecosystem—as readers, writers, and community members—amounting to approximately $22 million in annual revenue. And that’s before any additional income downstream of new product synergies.

On top of the purchase price and the technological expense of grafting the two apps together, Substack would be required to invest in a small army of tech support agents to seamlessly onboard its new creators and community members. But a human-centered approach to tech support is long overdue anyway. While Substack would be able to shed some of that capacity following the merger, the company would be very wise to retain dozens of actual human beings dedicated to helping users navigate what its powerful but at times confounding products.

Substack could, of course, build its own internal social audio just like Twitter, Facebook, and Spotify. But then they wouldn’t acquire Clubhouse’s 10 million active users and hundreds of millions of former users. And they wouldn’t really make any splashy headlines. “Substack Attempts Same Tired Strategy of Musk and Zuckerberg” is a far less compelling story than “Two Revolutionary Social Media Companies Team Up to Dominate User-Created Content Space.”

In retrospect, purchasing YouTube may have been the smartest thing Google ever did. The same could be said for Facebook acquiring Instagram and Microsoft buying LinkedIn. While a cascade of amalgamated darkness pours out of Silicon Valley, Substack has been a rare and crucial beacon of light.

Leveling up through the transformative power of social audio isn't just a logical next step—it's essential for maintaining that light in an increasingly shattered world.

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Previously, on Certain Thoughts:

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