Muse Retrospective

New users often wanted to slot us into “note taking” or “sketchbook/whiteboarding” neither of which were a great fit for the problem we wanted to solve.

Our “small giants” approach optimized for mojo over growth. We wanted a small, talent-dense team with a focus on craft, autonomy, and quality of life for all team members. We banished the term “founder” in favor of “partner” and tried to be transparent with all business matters across the team.

We took some capital from investors in order to invest ... See more

I churned through lots of messaging ideas and was generally gnashing my teeth about this. I ultimately answered the question by coming up with a bunch of weird ideas and split-testing them on our existing website to see which converted. A clear winner emerged from among these: calling ourselves a “tool for thought."

I’d speculate that another factor is the half-life of cool new productivity software. Evernote, Slack, Notion, Roam, Craft, and many others seem to get pretty far on community excitement for their first few years. After that, I think you have to be left with software that serves a deep and hard-to-replace purpose in people’s lives. Muse got there f... See more

My background is in product development (e.g. design, engineering, user research), but since we had such a strong product team already I decided to make my focus for this venture be storytelling. I challenged myself to figure out how to explain a novel product, build a brand, and generally get the word out to people we hoped to have as users and cu... See more

Our 2.0 release wasn’t out quite yet and people were getting a little annoyed/impatient, since we had implied it would be available early in the year, and in the end we didn’t launch until late May. But after speaking to some other tools developers, who were seeing similar things, I think this was more a function of the macro economy. The world was... See more

The podcast also helped immensely with our messaging problem. We couldn’t boil our problem statement down into a website tagline very effectively, but if you listened to me and Mark talk about the problem of effective ideation, the value of having good ideas, etc for an hour you came away with an appreciation for the product’s purpose.

Also, leads that came via the App Store were very low quality. People would rarely see our website, or even read much on the App Store listing page. They would just think “oh cool a new whiteboard app, I’ll try it” and then immediately bounce out at the first moment of confusion or friction inside the app. Often coupled with a one-star review!

So while I could try to handwave away my failure as a CEO (“something something Ukraine war something something inflation”), I won’t do that. Instead I’ll ask the question: was Muse a zero-interest rate phenomenon?