A Muse Full Movie 2012

[Imelda Matchett]

Between2019 and 2023 I worked on Muse, a canvas-based thinking tool for iPad and Mac. We raised $2M in funding, grew the team to seven, had tens of thousands of active users, and thousands of customers. Despite that, we never reached sufficient organic growth or found the right business model for financial viability. I stepped away along with majority of the team in fall of 2023, leaving the business in the hands of one of my former colleagues.

Muse began life as part of a human-computer interaction lab called Ink & 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.

Mark McGranghan, Julia Roggatz, and I were working together in the lab and started to see a confluence of several tracks of research that we thought could become a commercial product. This included input devices and form factors (tablet + touchscreen + stylus), infinite canvas as a document type, and how digital tools can be more useful at the ideation stage of a project (which typically gets done with analog tools like whiteboards, sketchbooks, and post-its).

We quickly discovered that things that had tested well in the lab were simply too hard to explain to new users. For example, holding the stylus at a particular angle to activate different tools. Most of our early onboarding (done either in person or over videochat) failed in the sense that people did not go on to use the product.

Shortly after we started the company we were lucky enough to land Lennart Ziburski as a product designer. He immediately started finding ways to bring Muse closer to the status quo of what people expect from iPad apps, and before long we had our first handful of regular 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. At the time this was a non-obvious idea, but the timing was perfect: independent writers, Substack, and the newsletter craze in general was just getting started. The early editions of our newsletter were a success at helping tell a larger story, test some ideas (including pricing), and generally keep folks on our waitlist engaged while we tried to get the product in shape.

Despite our weak growth and my concerns about the messaging problems, we decided to push forward with the 1.0 launch. This would be a pure marketing launch: the product was already stable enough for real use and available for purchase in the App Store. But we needed to break out of our small circle of users who had discovered us organically.

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 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. For Heroku, that was attending developer conferences and getting blog posts on Hacker News. For another business it might be YouTube influencer sponsorships and print ads in a niche magazine. So I set about systematically testing many channels.

Our podcast, Metamuse. Mark and I had started this because we thought it would be fun, not because we thought it would be important for the business. Although it took ten or so episodes to find our footing, once we started to secure high-profile guests (Andy Matuschak was our breakout moment, as you can see from the plot below) we found there was a natural slow virality to the podcast.

I think the podcast worked so well because it was authentic. Mark and I had something to say based on our long experience in the tech industry and our work at Muse. From there we wove in guests who were doing interesting work in the space of productivity software and creative tools.

Later on we got some great coverage from YouTube reviewers, most notably DailyTekk but also some smaller channels like Shu Omi and Keep Productive. This brought lots of new users; we later also sponsored some of the channels. My theory for why we got so many video-format reviews compared to traditional web publications is that the app shows really well on video, but is hard to explain with only text and screenshots.

We launched new pricing which seemed to unlock the growth we needed to be on a track to sustainability. But 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."

Mark had previously worked on a research project which implemented this, so he ended up building a from-scratch system over the course of a year. Wulf filled in the client-side implementation in Swift and ported the app from Core Data to the new persistence layer.

After having tried to do sync with many other technologies, this bespoke system felt magical. You could draw on your iPad and see it instantly on your Mac. But you could also disable your network and continue working as long as you wanted, and reconnect to have all the changes merge back together.

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. And Catalyst is an excellent technology for using the same codebase for both platforms.

At the end of 2021, all our metrics were up and to the right. We tweeted a teaser shot of our icon in the Mac dock which got everyone really excited. It felt like the addition of the Mac app would push us over the edge into being a serious tool for work, open us to new audiences, and juice our revenue to bring us to financial sustainability.

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. These kinds of aspirations are easier to indulge in times of plenty. But 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 on Twitter and thoughtful podcasts on product design.

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.

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.

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.

One team lead described to me how they would fly out new employees for orientation, put them in a hotel, etc all so that they could spend a couple of hours drawing on a whiteboard together. If they had to buy those new employees iPads and a Muse subscription they would happily do that as much cheaper and less logistically-difficult than their current solution.

We onboarded a couple of dozen teams, and some of them went on to integrate it into their daily work. We had a few quotes from folks describing how their work was forever changed to have this series of nested whiteboards were they could gather ideas, have a shared artifact during a meeting, easily reference older material, sketch together, etc.

Inventing a new document type is hard. The conventions of text editors, spreadsheets, slide deck software, photo editing software, etc provide a foundation whenever you're building a product in that space. But 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. Users can't rely on muscle memory, and we spent a lot of time iterating on foundational details like how to zoom in and out.

Growing the team slowly was a delight. At several previous ventures, I've onboard people in the hiring-is-job-one environment of a growth startup. At Muse, we started with three founders and then hired roughly one person per year. This was absolutely fantastic for being able to really take our time to find the perfect person for the role, and then for that person to have tons of time to onboard and find their footing on the team before anyone new showed up. The resulting team was the best I've ever worked on, with minimal deadweight or emotional baggage.

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. In terms of development speed, quality of the resulting product, hardware integration, and a million other things: native app development wins. But 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.

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