Things seemed to go well at the beginning. Due to the pandemic and the objective challenges of the traditional Brick & Mortar business, the business operated by Nike Direct (the business unit in charge of DTC) was flying and justifying the important strategic decisions of the CEO. Then, once normality came back, things slowly but regularly, quarter by quarter, showed that the separation line between being ambitious or being wrong was very thin.

In 6 months, hundreds of colleagues were fired and together with them Nike lost a solid process and thousands of years of experience and expertise in running, football, basketball, fitness, training, sportwear, etc., built in decades of footwear leadership (and apparel too). Product engine became gender led: women, men, and kids (like Zara, GAP, H&M or any other generic fashion brand).

Consumers are not so elastic as some business leaders think or hope. And consumers are not so loyal as some business leaders think or hope. So, what happened? Simple. Many consumers - mainly occasional buyers - did not follow Nike (surprise, surprise) but continued shopping where they were shopping before the decision of the CEO and the President of the Brand. So, once they could not find Nike sneakers in “their” stores – because Nike wasn’t serving those stores any longer -, they simply opted for other brands.

Until late 2010s, Nike had been on a total offense mode (being #1 in every market, in every category, in every product BU, basically in every dimension), a sort of military occupation of the marketplace and a huge problem for competitors that did not know how to react under such a domination. The strategic focus was only one: win anywhere. The new strategy determined the end of the marketplace occupation. Nike opened unexpected spaces to competitors, small, medium, or large brands (with exception of the company based in Herzogenaurach, that – as they usually do - copied and pasted the Nike strategy and executed it in a milder format).

One of the empiric laws of business says that online, the main lever of competition is “price” (as the organic consumer funnel is built on price comparison). The proverbial ability of Nike to leverage the power of the brand to sell sneakers at 200$ began to be threatened by the online appetite for discounts and the search for a definitive solution to the inventory issue. Gross margin – because of that – instead of growing due to the growth of DTC business, showed a rapid decline due to a never-ending promotional attitude on Nike.com

Nike has been built for 50 years on a very simple foundation: brand, product, and marketplace. The DC Investment model, since Nike became a public company, has been always the same: invest at least one tenth of the revenues in demand creation and sports marketing. The brand model has been very simple as well: focus on innovation and inspiration, creativity and storytelling based on athletes-products synergy, leveraging the power of the emotions that sport can create, trying to inspire a growing number of athletes* (*if you have a body, you are an athlete) to play sport. That’s what made Nike the Nike we used to know, love, admire, professionally and emotionally.

What happened in 2020? Well, the brand team shifted from brand marketing to digital marketing and from brand enhancing to sales activation.

shift from CREATE DEMAND to SERVE AND RETAIN DEMAND, that meant that most of the investment were directed to those who were already Nike consumers

as of 2021, to drive traffic to Nike.com, Nike started investing in programmatic adv and performance marketing the double or more of the share of resources usually invested in the other brand activities

the former CMO was ignoring the growing academic literature around the inefficiencies of investment in performance marketing/programmatic advertising, due to frauds, rising costs of mediators and declining consumer response to those activities.

Because of that, Nike invested a material amount of dollars (billions) into something that was less effective but easier to be measured vs something that was more effective but less easy to be measured.

To feed the digital marketing ecosystem, one of the historic functions of the marketing team (brand communications) was “de facto” absorbed and marginalized by the brand design team, which took the leadership in marketing content production (together with the mar-tech “scientists”). Nike didn’t need brand creativity anymore, just a polished and never stopping supply chain of branded stuff.

He made “Nike.com” the center of everything and diverted focus and dollars to it. Due to all of that, Nike hasn’t made a history making brand campaign since 2018, as the Brand organization had to become a huge sales activation machine.

Maybe one frame is through taking control of your own personal development and learning: after all “learning is the one thing your employer can’t take away from you”

Over the years we’ve seen the rise of bro-etry and cringe “thought leadership” and crying CEOs. When I scroll my feed I have to sidestep the clearly threadboi and #personalbrand engagement-farming posts and try and focus on the real content.

Networking is useful, but distasteful to many. Instead, participating in self-directed learning communities is networking

“Don’t become a marketing manager, become someone who knows how to run user research”

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.

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 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 envisioned Muse as the perfect combination of the freeform elements of a whiteboard, the structured text-heavy style of Notion or Google Docs, and the sense of place you get from a “virtual office” ala group chat. 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). The team lead often felt like too much of the burden of pushing Muse adoption was on their shoulders. 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.

We neither focused on a particular vertical (academics, designers, authors...) or a narrow use case (PDF reading/annotation, collaborative whiteboarding, design sketching...). That meant we were always spread pretty thin in terms of feature development, and marketing was difficult even over and above the problem of explaining canvas software and digital thinking tools.

being general-purpose was in its blood from birth. Part of it was maker's hubris: don't we always dream of general-purpose tools that will be everything to everyone? And part of it was that it's truly the case that Muse excels at the ability to combine together so many different related knowledge tasks and media types into a single, minimal, powerful canvas. Not sure what I would do differently here, even with the benefit of hindsight.

Muse built a lot of its reputation on being principled, but 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. This was a small example of being too principled about doing good for the user, and not thinking about what would benefit our business.

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.

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.

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

After decades working in product development, being on the marketing/brand/growth/storytelling side was a huge personal challenge for me. But I feel like I managed to grow into the role and find my own approach (podcasting, demo videos, etc) to create a beacon to attract potential customers to our product.

when it comes time for an individual or a team to sit down and sketch out the beginnings of a new business, a new book, a new piece of art—this almost never happens at a computer. Or if it does, it’s a cobbled-together collection of tools like Google Docs and Zoom which aren’t really made for this critical part of the creative lifecycle.

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.