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.

Taken at face value, the phrase tool for thought doesn't have the word 'computer' or 'digital' anywhere in it. It suggests nothing about software systems or interfaces. It's simply meant to refer to tools that help humans think thoughts; potentially new, different, and better kinds of thoughts than we currently think.

Most of the examples I listed above are cultural practices and techniques. They are primary ways of doing; specific ways of thinking and acting that result in greater cognitive abilities. Ones that people pass down from generation to generation through culture. Every one of these also pre-dates digital computers by at least a few hundred years, if not thousands or tens of thousands. Given that framing, it's time to return to the question of how computation, software objects, and note-taking apps fit into this narrative.

If you look around at the commonly cited “major thinkers” in this space, you get a list of computer programmers: Kenneth Iverson, J.C.R. Licklider, Vannevar Bush, Alan Kay, Bob Taylor, Douglas Englebart, Seymour Papert, Bret Victor, and Howard Rheingold, among others.

This is relevant because it means these men share a lot of the same beliefs, values, and context. They know the same sorts of people, learned the same historical stories in school and were taught to see the world in particular kinds of ways. Most of them worked together, or are at most one personal connection away from the next. Tools for thought is a community scene as much as it's a concept. This gives tools for thought a distinctly computer-oriented, male, American, middle-class flavour. The term has always been used in relation to a dream that is deeply intertwined with digital machines, white-collar knowledge work, and bold American optimism.

Englebart was specifically concerned with our ability to deal with complex problems, rather than simply “amplifying intelligence.” Being able to win a chess match is perceived as intelligent, but it isn't helping us tackle systemic racism or inequality. Englebart argued we should instead focus on “augmenting human intellect” in ways that help us find solutions to wicked problems. While he painted visions of how computers could facilitate this, he also pointed to organisational structures, system dynamics, and effective training as part of this puzzle.

There is a rich literature of research and insight into how we might expand human thought that sometimes feels entirely detached from the history we just covered. Cognitive scientists and philosophers have been tackling questions about the relationship between cognition, our tools, and our physical environments for centuries. Well before microprocessors and hypertext showed up. Oddly, they're rarely cited by the computer scientists. This alternate intellectual lineage is still asking the question “how can we develop better tools for thinking?” But they don't presume the answer revolves around computers.

Proponents of embodied cognition argue that our perceptions, concepts, and cognitive processes are shaped by the physical structures of our body and the sensory experiences it provides, and that cognition cannot be fully understood without considering the bodily basis of our experiences.

Philosopher Andy Clark has spent his career exploring how external tools transform and expand human cognition. His 2003 book Natural-born Cyborgs argues humans have “always been cyborgs.” Not in the sense of embedding wires into our flesh, but in the sense we enter “into deep and complex relationships with nonbiological constructs, props, and aids”. Our ability to think with external objects is precisely what makes us intelligent. Clark argues “the mind” isn't simply a set of functions within the brain, but a process that happens between our bodies and the physical environment. Intelligence emerges at the intersection of humans and tools. He expanded on this idea in a follow-on book called Supersizing the Mind. It became known as the extended mind hypothesis. It's the strong version of theories like embodied cognition, situated cognition, and enacted cognition that are all the rage in cognitive science departments.

There's a scramble to make sense of all these new releases and the differences between them. YouTube and Medium explode with DIY guides, walkthrough tours, and comparison videos. The productivity and knowledge management influencer is born.[ giant wall of productivity youtube nonsense ]The strange thing is, many of these guides are only superficially about the application they're presented in. Most are teaching specific cultural techniques

Zettelkasten, spaced repetition, critical thinking.These techniques are only focused on a narrow band of human activity. Specifically, activity that white-collar knowledge workers engage in.I previously suggested we should rename TFT to CMFT (computational mediums for thought), but that doesn't go far enough. If we're being honest about our current interpretation of TFT's, we should actually rename it to CMFWCKW – computational mediums for white-collar knowledge work.

By now it should be clear that this question of developing better tools for thought can and should cover a much wider scope than developing novel note-taking software.

I do think there's a meaningful distinction between tools and mediums: Mediums are a means of communicating a thought or expressing an idea. Tools are a means of working in a medium. Tools enable specific tasks and workflows within a medium. Cameras are a tool that let people express ideas through photography. Blogs are a tool that lets people express ideas through written language. JavaScript is a tool that let people express ideas through programming. Tools and mediums require each other. This makes lines between them fuzzy.