How Clubhouse Pioneered the Social Audio Space

Clubhouse is an audio-based social media app that allows people everywhere to talk, develop ideas and friendships, and meet new people worldwide. In this slogging AMA, we had the pleasure of chatting with Clubhouse's Android and iOS engineers, Mopewa Ogundipe and Kate Findlay. We covered everything from their programming background, how it was to develop Clubhouse and the app itself.

This Slogging thread by Mónica Freitas, Kate Findlay, Mopewa, Jack Boreham, David Smooke, Limarc Ambalina, SuperSaiyanProgramming and Sara Pinto occurred in slogging's official #amas channel, and has been edited for readability.

Hey @channel, please join me in welcoming our next AMA guests, Mopewa and Kate Findlay. Mopewa is Clubhouse's Android engineer, and Kate is Clubhouse's iOS engineer. Clubhouse is an audio-based social media app where you can listen in on fascinating conversations, talk with people around the world, and make new friends.

Please feel free to ask Mopewa and Kate anything about:

Hi Mopewa and Kate Findlay, thank you for joining us. It's a pleasure to have you with us! To start, can you talk a bit about yourselves and how you got into the world of app development?

Thank you for having me!

A little bit about myself - I'm Kate and I've been working as an iOS developer since I graduated from college. When I started school at theUniversity of Michigan (Go Blue!), I went in as pre-med. Turns out I actually hate science, so I switched my major over to Informatics. My mom, stepdad, and dad are all software engineers, and I thought what they did was so boring. All I knew about their jobs was working in a cubicle all day - I vowed never to do that. Low and behold, turns out I loved all of my coding classes, so I ate my words and decided to pursue it as a career (albeit without the cubicle life 🙂).

I had no idea what kind of engineering I wanted to go into, but I was part of a professional fraternity called KTP that got me a lot of great exposure. I toyed around with iOS development and realized I loved the nature of building apps. It's so gratifying to me to see my work visually and know that I can directly impact users with the things I build. From then on, I was pretty hooked, and I've worked as an iOS engineer at a variety of companies.

Hello all! Glad to be here 🙂
I'm Mopewa. I'm an Android engineer on the Clubhouse team which I joined in Feb 2021. I was previously also an Android engineer at Medium and Khan Academy. I was born in Nigeria and grew up there until I was 10 when my family immigrated to the U.S. and I spent my teenage years in Maryland. I have two older brothers who are engineers so I've been interested in science and engineering from a pretty young age. I started Android development in high school; my brother got me my first smartphone as a birthday gift and I had a free period in school so I started trying to build an agenda book/homework tracker app. I was cobbling the app together using tutorials I would find online but I loved the immediate feedback of being able to build my app and play with what I was building. From that experience and also from participating in the FIRST Robotics competitions in high school, I decided to major in computer science and robotics in college. And to make money in school, I kept building apps and doing android focused software engineering internships which eventually led me to my full-time jobs and where I am today!

Mopewa, Kate Findlay, great to have you here, guys. So why did you decide to start clubhouse? What were your influences? 😄

Jack Boreham, I joined Clubhouse because the opportunity and challenge was too exciting an opportunity to pass up! I joined in Feb 2021 as the first android engineer as we were looking to bring the app to the Android platform. I had never worked on a project on that kind of scale before and both personally and professionally, it was a challenge I wanted to give a go.

Jack Boreham, I got introduced to Clubhouse in the summer of 2020 - and I was immediately hooked. It was unlike any experience I'd had on an app before. I was creating real bonds with people I met on the app. I had to opportunity to interview to be the second iOS engineer - and just like Mopewa said, it felt like too good of an opportunity to pass up. I was ready to move to something more fast-paced and challenging than my current position, and it's been a wonderful learning experience for me.

Cool! Thanks so much for spending time typing with us. A couple of product questions (feel free to skip any ;-):

Looking forward to hearing from you Mopewa and Kate!

David Smooke, we were invite-only in the early days as a way to control our growth in a measured way to scale our community and systems. We’re not about being exclusive for the sake of being exclusive. However, as a way to support our creators, our team is exploring ways to allow creators to host exclusive conversations that can be accessed through payments.

My favorite programming language is definitely Kotlin (it took me a while to get onboard after Google announced it as the preferred language for Android development but very glad I did). Especially coming for Java, my favorite things about it are its conciseness, type inference, and the built-in null safety!

The weather is much too cold where I am! To be fair though, growing up near the equator, most seasons in the U.S are too cold for my liking, haha.

David Smooke, pinned links:
Pinned Links has actually been one of our most impressive engagement features yet, I think because it's so versatile. From buying books to purchasing tickets to a creator’s show, it gives our creators a great way to connect with their audiences. Any conversion rates above 10% are impressive and we’re consistently seeing numbers exceed that.

Spatial Audio:
We’ve seen spatial audio being used in various use cases and were excited about the idea of a feature that could really enhance the listener experience in a unique way. This allows the listener to differentiate voices by placing them around them, and lends to a much more immersive experience while in a room.

Replays:
Yes, people are definitely coming back to listen to older conversations! Oprah popped in to talk about her Adele interview and received over 40,000 total listens. We also recently hosted a live watch party of “Don’t Look Up” with director Adam McKay had 13,400 people listen live and are now at 26,000 total listeners. We're hoping to experiment with different ways of Replay discovery, but for now, replays can be found on the user profile, search, and in your hallway!

Favorite language:
Swift 🙂 naturally as an iOS engineer I'm a fan. I just love how readable it is (and so much less verbose than obj-c). Similar to Mopewa's sentiment on Kotlin, I also appreciate the type of inference and explicitness with nullable.

Weather:
It's cold right now! I'm in Denver, but I do generally love the weather here. I'm a fan of winter because I love snow and seasons. Denver generally has a pretty mild winter with many warm days scattered throughout but also has a ton of snow. So it's the best of both worlds for me!

Hey, Kate Findlay and Mopewa, glad to have you here!!

With a myriad of audio call apps, and audio call features of messaging apps, can you comment a bit on what part of the market Clubhouse capitalized on that made it grow so large?

Scaling up is the biggest hurdle for all startups. What biggest lessons did you learn when scaling Clubhouse during its rapid growth in the U.S. and internationally?

What tips would you give or do you have quick thoughts on common mistakes to avoid?

Limarc Ambalina, Clubhouse created an entirely new market by pioneering the social audio space and creating a platform that allows communities to connect, talk, listen and learn from each other in real-time. Clubhouse has particularly done a good job at creating a community around its users and allowing creators to invest in their communities. We also love being involved and getting people excited about Clubhouse through things like the Weekly Townhalls and New User Onboarding rooms. Users have been drawn to Clubhouse for its authenticity and for being a place where people can feel comfortable being themselves, not focusing on image or video. There are a number of new platforms now that are integrating audio into their features, and honestly, we are thrilled to see more people enhance social audio!

Hey! I think giving content creators monetization options is one of the most important things for widespread adoption. What have been the most effective monetization paths Clubhouse has given to users?

SuperSaiyanProgramming, we agree - 100% of Payments go to the creator. After payments launched, we wanted to give creators other avenues to make money and promote their shows. Pinned Links has been very effective - it gives creators the ability to pin to better monetize their efforts (i.e. can pin links to their books, ticket sales, etc).

Hi, Kate Findlay and Mopewa, it's great to have you here! I see that both of you are engineers but for different operating systems. Why iOS/Android and not the other one? Do you find many challenges when adapting the app to each system?

Sara Pinto, I think I ended up doing Android instead of iOS just by the circumstances in which I started coding rather than as a superconscious choice. My brother had happened to get me an Android smartphone, I didn't have a Mac, and the fee at the time to publish to the Google Playstore was I believe only $25 so I just defaulted to Android development. I did end up giving iOS development a go for a summer during an internship but objective-C and I ended up not getting along haha. Swift is much more like Kotlin (my favorite language) though so I might be willing to give it another go.

Sara Pinto, similar to Mopewa, it was just kind of happenstance that I got into iOS. I had a mac and an iPhone already, and a few of my friends in my professional fraternity were already familiar with iOS development. My first project was actually working with them to build a simple membership app for our fraternity, and I had so much fun building the views out. From then on I just decided that would be the path I would follow because I enjoyed it! I tried Android development briefly while I worked at Spotify, and while I didn't hate it, I really appreciate the flexibility that iOS presents in terms of UI and animations.

Mopewa wow! So, you've always had a passion for programming. How hard was it to develop an app like Clubhouse?

Mónica Freitas, launching the Clubhouse Android app was a challenge but a very fun one! Definitely the largest challenge of my career so far. I think the biggest challenges were 1) trying to move as quickly as possible while still making sure to release a quality product and set our future selves up for success in terms of growing the codebase and 2) having to assemble/grow the team to do #1 as we went along. I wrote more about it https://blog.clubhouse.com/shipping-clubhouse-on-android-in-10-weeks/ as well.

Kate Findlay, that's awesome! Following in the family's footsteps. I bet your parents made a whole celebration after knowing you had changed your mind. How was it for you to develop a platform like Clubhouse?

Mónica Freitas, developing Clubhouse is truly like nothing I've ever done before - but that's exactly what I was looking for. I really wanted to be out of my comfort zone. Some of my biggest challenges personally were having to get familiar with parts of iOS development that had always been taken care of me by other teams/frameworks at larger companies (like experimentation, build scripts, app submission and release cut process, etc). Also just having to trust my technical knowledge and make decisions!

Mopewa, Kate Findlay, thank you for answering our questions. That's a wrap on the AMA. It was a pleasure having you here with us! Any closing thoughts?

Nothing I can think of 🙂 Thanks so much for having us!