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.

Is the founder focused on a market opportunity, or a way that they want to change and improve our daily lives? It’s the difference between pitching the tool vs. the benefit. The best founders are always focused on the benefit—they’re putting themselves in the shoes of the consumer, instead of just building something because they can.

On how to identify a winning founder: “Great, thoughtful design. Great design tells you if the founder is focused, has good taste, understands the simplicity required to connect with the average consumer, and has a strong, specific point of view on what they’re building. It has always been my barometer. Great design is harder to identify than it sounds, though.”

There are four signs your idea has legs:People pay you money: Several people start to pay for your product, ideally people you don’t have a direct connection toContinued usage: People continue to use your prototype product, even if it’s hackyStrong emotion: You’re hearing hatred for the incumbents (i.e. pain) or a deep and strong emotional reaction to your idea (i.e. pull)Cold inbound interest: You’re seeing cold inbound interest in your product

Every prosumer collaboration product, including Figma, Notion, Coda, Airtable, Miro, and Slack, spent three to four years wandering in the dark until they stumbled on something that clicked.

When I first started meeting founders, I wanted to help with anything and everything. Unfortunately, that's neither realistic or possible. For example, I have many responsibilities at my day job that must come first. Over time, I have honed in my pitch to be explicit about how I can and can't help. See the notes above about ways to be helpful, and find your own unique combination of value to bring to the table.

My contract typically looks like this: We agree to meet ~X hours per quarter/half/year Multiply by Y contracting rate Y ⨉ X = some dollar amount Z Divide Z by the startup's latest price per share to arrive at a number of advisor shares to grant

Be founder-friendly! It's a big deal and a lot of paperwork to get a smaller check or advisor on the cap table (unless they already have a lot of operational infrastructure in place) – this usually means being relaxed about the commitment paperwork or helping out pro-bono for the first few hours while they work through the logistics.

Finding founders you work well with can be a numbers game; you won't be sure what you like doing until you've met a handful of founders, done several advisory meetings, and poked at different types of problems. It's okay to dip your toe and warm up to the process before committing a lot of time and energy to this. I started slow, and have been steadily sharpening my own intuition about what kinds of products and founders get me excited, and where I can add unique value

Of course, you shouldn’t discriminate, but when we say belonging, it has to be more than just inclusion. It has to actually be the proactive manifestation of meeting people, creating connections in friendships. And Jony Ive said, “Well, you need to reframe it. It’s not just about belonging, it’s about human connection and belonging.”And that was, I think, a really big unlock. The next thing Jony Ive said is he created this book for me, a book of his ideas, and the book was called “Beyond Where and When,” and he basically said that Airbnb should shift from beyond where and when to who and what?Who are you and what do you want in your life? And that was a part of the inspiration behind Airbnb categories, that we wanted people to come to Airbnb without a destination in mind and that we could categorize properties not just by location but by what makes them unique, and that really influenced Airbnb categories and some of the stuff we’re doing now.