Why I sold my Clubhouse invite

The psychology of scarcity and social proof

I read that people are selling invites over eBay, Craiglist, and Etsy for a new app called Clubhouse. As an experiment, I signed up for a fresh eBay account and sold one of my six Clubhouse invites. Ended up selling one text message invite code for $20.

This got me thinking about my own consumer psychology and why anyone would buy an invite code to a mobile app. I first heard about Clubhouse in June 2020 with their $10M Series A raise announcement. A social audio-only network with only 4000 people in their beta program valued at $100M. However, this year, celebrities such as Elon Musk have joined the platform and they have skyrocketed to 2 million users.

What is Clubhouse?

Clubhouse allows people to create ‘rooms’ to talk about anything they want. You get access to the app through invitations. Rooms ranging from tech startups to silent meditations are being hosted. The easiest description of a Clubhouse experience is sitting at the dinner table with your role model.

Let’s take for example you are invited to a special dinner with Keanu Reeves. He talks about how he became the John Wick. You are able to listen to the conversation. You are awed by his presence and super glad to have had access to the…