(2024-02-20) Wiggins Muse Retrospective

Adam Wiggins: A muse.app retrospective. Muse began life as part of a human-computer interaction lab called Ink and Switch.

The lab's charter involved inventing a new computing environment that would better serve people doing important knowledge work: scientists, writers, entrepreneurs, designers, architects, and so on.

Julia had created a fantastic prototype that ran on iPad.

I was ready to transition from running a research lab to working on a commercial product and joined them to create a commercial spinout. So in summer of 2019 we created Muse Software, Inc. Ink & Switch gave us the existing IP (name, product design, prototype codebase) in exchange for a stake in the new company, and we were off.

We quickly discovered that things that had tested well in the lab were simply too hard to explain to new users.

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 customers.

My first real try at this was starting an email newsletter.

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 took some capital from investors in order to invest heavily in technology, design, and brand—just as a startup would. But we started charging a prosumer price early on, intending to avoid further funding rounds, and instead transition to being revenue-supported.

several people purchased a $100 annual subscription right away.

But by mid-2020 I was having some doubts about the viability of the company

we didn’t have the growth we needed, and it wasn’t clear where it would come from.

We were also struggling to find good messaging/positioning for our homepage. 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.

The opportunity we were going after, one I think is still mearningful and unsolved by any product today, is to bring the earliest stages of unstructured thinking and project ideation onto the computer. (idea generation)

sketch out the beginnings of a new business, a new book, a new piece of art—this almost never happens at a computer

A related problem is that we had yet to target a narrow market, like just writers, or just designers, or just architects. (ideal customer persona)

This seemed to make sense because analog ideation tools are generic

But if I’m honest it’s also because I loved the diversity of our userbase

I had assumed that, at one point, we’d have a segment that would emerge as the most numerous, most likely to buy, or one we thought we could best serve and then we’d find a way to focus on that. But that never happened and we never forced it, which was probably a long-term problem.

we decided to push forward with the 1.0 launch. This would be a pure marketing launch

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." (tools for thought)

Little did I know that the term was about to explode in popularity, largely driven by the breakout success of Roam Research starting to build steam about this time. But I was delighted

In August of 2020 we launched on Product Hunt and Twitter.

To my delight and surprise, the launch was a huge success. We got mentions from high-profile tech thinkers

the 1.0 launch bump produced a “new normal” baseline traffic that was 4x where we were before. The 2.0 bump is only slightly bigger and didn’t adust the baseline afterward.

With buzz building nicely and growth taking off, we had inbound interest from some angel investors whom I respected. So we took another small funding round (about $600k).

I went into this venture knowing that productivity software is particularly difficult to market

there's no specific (early adopter) market (in the Crossing the Chasm sense of people with shared identity that talk to one another) for todo software. There's no "Todo Apps Monthly" magazine or trade show. Hence these markets tend to be fragmented

I generally like the approach outlined in Traction. Briefly: any given business will find a small number of highly-effective channels, and the rest don't matter

So I set about systematically testing many channels.

The marketing/distribution angles that worked best were:

10 second demo videos of the app, an iPad, and the hands/stylus operating it on Twitter. These would sometimes “go viral”

Our podcast, Metamuse. Mark and I had started this because we thought it would be fun

Andy Matuschak was our breakout moment

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.

Podcast monthly listeners, estimated by unique IP downloads. 4000

Overall, I can’t point to any one thing that we did that worked: but rather a succession of unlocks which would work for a time, then level off or decline.

2021 was the best year for Muse

we were often running up against a problem: many people followed our work via Twitter and the podcast but would say: "Love what you're doing, but I don't use an iPad."

it’s clear that desktop computers is where most professionals do their work (laptop)

But a Mac app alone wouldn’t be enough. We needed your Muse boards to be available on both devices

we decided to import another piece of bleeding-edge research technology from Ink & Switch. Namely: local-first sync with CRDTs.

The Mac app was a huge effort by Julia and Lennart. The challenge of adapting our tablet-native canvas to a keyboard/mouse/non-touchscreen was substantial but I think they did an incredible job

It felt like the addition of the Mac app would push us over the edge

In the first quarter of 2022, something strange happened that I still can’t fully explain. Our active users dropped by almost half over the course of a month or two

after speaking to some other tools developers, who were seeing similar things, I think this was more a function of the macro economy

I’ll ask the question: was Muse.app a zero-interest rate phenomenon (ZIRP)? Briefly, I think: yes. Or to put it less harshly, Muse as a brand and a product represented something aspirational. People want to be deeper thinkers, to be more strategic, and to use cool, status-quo challenging software made by small passionate teams.

once you're getting laid off from your high-paying tech job, or struggling to raise your next financing round, or scrambling to protect your kids' college fund from runaway inflation and uncertain markets... I guess you don't have time to be excited about cool demos

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. (interestingness, novelty)

Muse got there for a few thousand people, but the economics of prosumer software means that just isn’t enough. You need tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, to make the cost of development sustainable.

we pushed on through to a launch of Muse 2.0 in summer of 2022

It did make a difference for our numbers: our revenue doubled, from around 60k ARR to around 120k ARR, shortly after the launch. But the absolute numbers were just still too small. 120k ARR is a one-person business, not a team effort.

Maybe we just needed a new business model.

It had always been our plan to create a multiplayer version of the app

We already knew we wanted to move into collaboration—so why not pair it with a well-known, lucrative, venture-capable business model? Namely, B2B SaaS.

But not surprisingly, we struggled to raise from an institutional investor. Because our B2B product was a barely-working prototype at that point, we were effectively a pre-seed “still just an idea” type company

In the end we raised from a dozen or so goodhearted angels and scout funds, plus I put in some of my own money. It was intended to be a bridge round: enough to let us validate the market and product just a tiny bit, and then use that initial traction to raise a real round. It didn’t work.

We had hundreds of impassioned answers from people working at big and small companies talking about the burning pain point of their group ideation situation now that their team had gone permanently remote.

Over and over, team leads and CEOs described to me how they had tried everything out there (including the obvious direct competitors of Miro, FigJam, Freeform, and Whimsical) and none of them solved the problem long-term.

As a way to asynchronously trade ideas and inspiration, sketch out project ideas, and explore possibilities, the multiplayer Muse experience is, in my honest opinion, unparalleled for small creative teams working remotely.

But friction began almost immediately

The team lead or organizer was usually the one bringing Muse to the team, and they were already a fan of its approach. But the other team members are generally a little annoyed to have to learn any new tool, and Muse’s steeper learning curve only made that worse.

Those team members would push the problem back to the team lead, treating them as customer support (rather than contacting us directly for help).

This was in addition to the obvious product gaps, like: no support for the web or Windows; minimal or no integration with other key tools like Notion and Google Docs; and no permissions or support for multiple workspaces.

Had we raised $10M back during the cash party of 2020–2021, we could have hired the 15+ person team that would have been necessary to build all of that. But with only seven people (we had added two more people to the team in 2021–2022), it just wasn’t feasible.

ultimately we decided together: we had reached a dead end in this particular idea maze.

I had become aware of the contrast between the level of execution and the apparent market opportunity. It was my feeling that everyone here, including me, deserved to be putting their efforts toward a stronger opportunity.

since we had built our app local-first, it could hypothetically run for a long time without a company to support it.

one of our team members, Adam Wulf, who felt there was a lot more life left in this business if we reframed it from a team effort to a solo indie developer.

I had some conversations with potential acquirers, but I knew these were likely talent acquisitions

demand was weak even for a well-respected team like ours.

So with our team and investors agreed on a plan to turn things over to Wulf, I went about the painful process

(six months later) things are going well with a 3.0 release that refocused on individuals and a thriving Discord community.

My takeaways

These are in no particular order, just some loose reflections

Inventing a new document type is hard.

canvas document types are still the wild west, and if you follow tldraw's explorations you'll see that there's no shortage of tiny design details to figure out.

Helping to define an emerging category is hard.

We were too unfocused in our target market, and ended up as an “everything app.” We neither focused on a particular vertical (academics, designers, authors...) or a narrow use case (PDF reading/annotation, collaborative whiteboarding, design sketching...).

Part of this reflected our origins: in the lab, Muse was a subset of a comprehensive OS for creative tools, so being general-purpose was in its blood from birth.

we were maybe too cautious to do the mercenary things that help you succeed. A good example here is asking users for ratings; I felt like this was not to user benefit and distracting when the user is trying to use your app. Our App Store rating was on the low side (~3.9 stars) for most of our existence. When we finally added the standard prompt-for-rating dialog, it instantly shot up to ~4.7 stars.

I'm proud that we were so capital efficient, but I wonder about the opposite path. What would have happened if we had raised $5M – $10M back in 2020 and used that to build for more platforms

I think that path has as many or more pitfalls as the one we took, so I don't necessarily think it would have turned out better. But I wonder about it.

Growing the team slowly was a delight.

Stuff that works… eventually stops working. Our newsletter was a great growth souce for a while, but then flatlined. Our 10-second demo video tweets would go viral, until they didn't anymore.

Local-first is great for app developers. Although the digression into building our own sync system was arguably too big of an investment for a small team like ours, the result was really a pleasure to work with compared to backend-heavy / cloud systems. The only problem was that we had to build it from scratch. Happily, in the three years since we started working on it, there are a lot more off-the-shelf options.

Apple platforms are great, but you have to be on the web.

ultimately your product does have to have some web presence. My biggest regret is not building a simple share-to-web function early on, which could have created some virality and a great deal of utility for users as well.

I accomplished my goal to grow as a storyteller.