The "voice Twitter" that has also addicted Altman has become extremely popular in Silicon Valley.

In the era of mobile internet, it has become increasingly difficult to see innovation in the product aspect of apps. Airchat brings a fresh perspective. Over the past period, this invite-only app has gained popularity among venture capitalists, tech company executives, and other Silicon Valley celebrities.

In short, Airchat can be seen as the voice version of Twitter, redefining the way people interact on social media. Here, you can follow people of interest, post tweets, or communicate with netizens just like any other social platform. The difference is that any information you post must be in the form of voice; typing on Airchat is not allowed.

As the slogan on the Airchat official website says: "Just Talk."

According to the marketing intelligence company Sensor Tower, since its launch on April 12th, Airchat has been downloaded over 30,000 times. Due to its overwhelming popularity, Airchat even closed its invitation channel just 4 days after its release. Silicon Valley elites like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have appeared on the app and have also invested in Aitchat.

In fact, Airchat released a version last year, and the two co-founders, Brian Norgard and Naval Ravikant, led the team to restructure the app.

Both co-founders are influential figures in Silicon Valley.

Naval is a well-known investor who has invested in many unicorn companies such as Twitter, Uber, Notion, and Stack Overflow, and is also the founder of the equity crowdfunding platform AngelList. In China, he is better known as the original author of the best-selling book "The Naval Canon." Norgard was the first investor in AngelList. Before founding Airchat, he was the Chief Product Officer of the dating app Tinder.

So, what exactly made this "voice version of Twitter" so popular in Silicon Valley?

01 "Just Talk"

In terms of product form, Airchat can be seen as a combination of Twitter and Clubhouse—it is first and foremost a social platform like Twitter. However, like Clubhouse, Airchat prioritizes audio.

After launching the app, the system will prompt you to follow some users, and then you will see a familiar waterfall interface. These waterfalls are made up of individual text blocks. Airchat does not have the option to send text; these texts are actually transcribed from voice. It is worth mentioning that Airchat's voice transcription recognition is quite high and has received praise from many users. Media in Taiwan mentioned that Airchat can even transcribe text based on the user's accent, determining whether to use simplified or traditional characters.

Click the play button in the bottom right corner of the screen, and the audio will play at 2x speed. In other words, if you are just consuming content, Airchat has two options: listen and read. However, once you want to publish content or communicate with other users, the only way is to send voice messages.

Naval believes that voice is a more intimate medium for conversation than text—compared to text, voice can convey more subtle differences in emotion and tone. Nogad defines Airchat as a conversation network rather than a social network. He explains that both he and Naval are very passionate about talking, making new friends, and discussing interesting things, which is almost impossible on the consumer internet. Therefore, they set out to build an application that can do this.

Twitter and Musk should also have played a big role in the establishment of Airchat. Someone asked Naval on Airchat, "What is the ultimate goal of this app?" Naval answered a series of questions with the theme of "love and peace," and the last point is "to prevent world leaders from bickering on Twitter and dragging the world into nuclear destruction."

Like many early invitation-based apps, the current user profile of Airchat is elite, including professionals and investors from Silicon Valley, as well as tech company founders. OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman has appeared on this app, as well as Taylor Lorenz, a tech reporter for The Washington Post, and former Republican congressman George Santos.

With a large influx of users, many have begun discussing Airchat on social networks, mostly in a positive light, as the experience of "listening to Twitter" in this way was unprecedented. Brett Dashevsky, founder of the Creator Economy NYC organization, has shifted his average usage time from Twitter to Airchat, citing the platform's more human and interesting aspects.

However, not all feedback is positive. Wired journalist Lauren Goode has expressed concerns about Airchat's content moderation system. The recent creation of an Airchat channel called "War" has attracted over 529 users discussing topics such as Israeli drone attacks, the Gaza war, "economic weapons," and predictions on oil prices. Some have expressed strong opinions, shared unverified news, and claimed to have "done some research."

It is currently unclear whether this channel was created officially or by users themselves. According to Airchat's latest platform rules, users cannot create channels on their own but can request administrators to do so.

Due to the founder's philosophy, Airchat's moderation rules can be described as lenient, even with a sense of community self-governance. Airchat refers to this as a "self-moderation policy," suggesting that when someone offends you, Airchat recommends muting or blocking them. Airchat will remove users who engage in harassment, impersonation, vulgar behavior, or post illegal content, but will not remove users from the platform due to polite disagreements or political reasons.

Airchat's transcription feature has received positive feedback from users, possibly due to advancements in AI technology. However, the founder seems uninterested in training a large language model for user voices or selling Airchat's data to AI companies, especially considering the relatively small user base and unclassified data. However, Airchat may use people's voice data to train a model to improve its own audio and transcription features, depending on whether users agree to participate in this plan.

In terms of commercialization, Airchat does not seem to have a clear plan. In an interview with TechCrunch, the founder explicitly stated that the company has no pressure to profit and did not mention anything related to membership fees or audio advertising. Most of Airchat's funding currently comes from the founder's own venture capital fund and Jeff Fagnan, founding partner of Accomplice Ventures. It was also revealed that Sam Altman has "blindly written a check."

Do we need another social platform?

Airchat easily brings to mind another popular voice platform—Clubhouse. Clubhouse's popularity catered to people's desire for communication during the pandemic, but after its public release, this once-trending app was quickly forgotten.

Will Airchat follow the same path as Clubhouse?

Similar to early Clubhouse, Airchat also adopts an invitation-based registration method. This is a good way to achieve a cold start, as early elite members contribute high-quality content on the platform, and their followers will also come to the new platform. During the peak period, a Clubhouse invitation code even sold for a high price of $100 on eBay.

From the current situation, Airchat is very likely to replicate the early popularity of Clubhouse.

However, the celebrity effect is short-lived. The essence of the themed chat rooms that Clubhouse focuses on is similar to Baidu Tieba, which embodies the unique culture of their niche communities, also implying exclusion of the general public. After Clubhouse opened registration, with a large number of users pouring in, the scarcity of these small circles was greatly diluted. This is something Airchat needs to be cautious about.

Compared to Clubhouse, presenting voice content in an asynchronous form is Airchat's advantage. Clubhouse only provides the "voice live broadcast" scenario, which means that users must enter the live room at a specific time to consume content, greatly limiting the user's consumption scenario.

Initially, Clubhouse did succeed, but it also failed because of it.

Steve Jobs once commented that Dropbox is just a feature, not a product. Single features are easily replicated by competitors, while products can provide a whole set of services and establish barriers based on this.

The widespread promotion of Clubhouse triggered the defense mechanisms of big companies. Within a year of its appearance, Discord, Facebook, Slack, Spotify, and Twitter successively launched their own live audio functions. Compared to Clubhouse, they have more money, faster iteration speed, and more users.

The problems faced by Clubhouse are also the problems faced by Airchat. Merely in terms of the "voice tweeting" feature, competitors can easily imitate it. Meta and Tencent are the two largest social networking companies globally, and they happen to be experts in imitating competitors.

If Airchat continues to maintain its exclusivity through invitation-based registration, it may evolve into a closed platform serving a niche elite.

If Airchat continues to be popular, it is not difficult to foresee that large tech companies will quickly follow suit and launch competing products or imitate its core functions.

If Airchat really wants to become a social network without intense discourse, it may be in a struggle against human nature itself.

This depends on the true goals of the two founders. However, they also have to face a harsh reality: any topic that becomes wildly popular across the internet will quickly be forgotten in the next month, and this will not change.