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That other people tried your idea without success could imply it’s a bad idea or simply that the timing or execution was wrong. Distinguishing between these cases is hard and where you should apply serious thought. If you think your competitors executed poorly, you should develop a theory of what they did wrong and how you’ll do better.

If you think your competitor’s timing was off, you should have a thesis about what’s changed to make now the right time. These changes could come in a variety of forms: for example, it could be that users have become more sophisticated, the prices of key inputs have dropped, or that prerequisite technologies have become widely adopted.

Startups are primarly competing against indifference, lack of awareness, and lack of understanding — not other startups.

There were probably 50 companies that tried to do viral video sharing before YouTube. Before 2005, when YouTube was founded, relatively few users had broadband and video cameras. YouTube also took advantage of the latest version of Flash that could play videos seamlessly.

Google and Facebook launched long after their competitors, but executed incredibly well and focused on the right things. When Google launched, other search engines like Yahoo, Excite, and Lycos were focused on becoming multipurpose “portals” and had de-prioritized search (Yahoo even outsourced their search technology).

Imagine, for example, that you were thinking of starting Netflix back when it was founded in 1997. How would content providers, distribution channels, and competitors respond? How soon would technology develop to open a hidden door and let you distribute online instead of by mail? Or consider Dropbox in 2007. Dozens of cloud storage companies had been started before. What mistakes had they made? How would incumbents like Amazon and Google respond? How would new platforms like mobile affect you?

When you’re starting out, it’s impossible to completely map out the idea maze. But there are some places you can look for help: History. If your idea has been tried before (and almost all good ideas have), you should figure out what the previous attempts did right and wrong. A lot of this knowledge exists only in the brains of practitioners, which is one of many reasons why “stealth mode” is a bad idea. The benefits of learning about the maze generally far outweigh the risks of having your idea stolen. Analogy. You can also build the maze by analogy to similar businesses. If you are building a “peer economy” company it can be useful to look at what Airbnb did right. If you are building a marketplace you should understand eBay’s beginnings. Etc.

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.

Gerwig is drawn to the “euphorically dreamlike” quality of Lewis’ writing. “It’s connected to the folklore and fairy stories of England, but it’s a combination of different traditions,” she says.“As a child, you accept the whole thing—that you’re in this land of Narnia, there’s fauns, and then Father Christmas shows up. It doesn’t even occur to you that it’s not schematic. I’m interested in embracing the paradox of the worlds that Lewis created, because that’s what’s so compelling about them.”

The most powerful thing a product can do is give its user a premise.1 A premise is the foundational belief that shapes a user’s behavior. A premise can normalize actions that people otherwise might not take, held back by some existing norm

AirBnb. The premise: It’s ok to stay in strangers’ homes.

the idea of staying in strangers’ homes for short stays was doubted even by the founders. Crashing in someone’s spare room wasn’t unheard of, but it might be seen as weird, taboo, or even dangerous.

Bumble. The premise: It’s ok for women to ask men out.

The best way to follow through on a premise is to make it the core feature of the app. Bumble did, requiring that women make the first move on the app. A woman would be presented with a list of her matches and would have to make the first "move" before men could reply. This of course became a powerful differentiating feature and marketing hook.

Substack. The premise: It’s ok to charge for your writing.

Substack's premise aimed to normalize the hardest part of internet writing: getting paid. They aimed to show that independent authors could succeed at making a living (and subscription models aligned with this ethos). In doing so, Substack also made the less-hard parts of internet writing even easier. You could start a newsletter and keep it free until you felt confident about going paid. This not only normalized the end goal but also lowered the barrier to getting started.

A premise is valuable not only for “products,” but also for experiences.As I recently shouted, people still underestimate the power of giving a social event a premise. Hackathons, housewarmings, happy hours and the like are hangouts with a narrative. They have a good premise — a specific context that makes it more comfortable to do something that can be hard: socialize. (Side note: some of the best tv series and films are built on great premises.)

Premises work best on end consumers, prosumers, small business freelancers, and the like. Many two-sided marketplaces serving two of these stakeholder groups tend to have a good premise. For example, Kickstarter's premise for the creator might be: It’s ok to ask for money before you've built a product.

when they aren’t hallucinating, what they’re capable of is still impressive, though it’s a bit like watching a dog walk around on two legs — fun, but not exactly an efficient way to get around.

It was my brother, the lawyer, who pointed out that what I had experienced sounded a lot like a coerced confession. “I read enough transcripts of bad interrogations in law school to understand that anyone can be convinced that they have a very narrow set of terrible options,” he said. When I posed this theory to Saul Kassin, a psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who studies coerced confessions, he agreed.

“If someone is trying to get you to be compliant, they do it incrementally, in a series of small steps that take you farther and farther from what you know to be true,” he said. “It’s not about breaking the will. They were altering the sense of reality.” And when you haven’t done anything wrong, the risk of cooperating feels minimal, he added. An innocent person thinks everything will get sorted out. It also mattered that I was kept on the phone for so long. People start to break down cognitively after a few hours of interrogation. “At that point, they’re not thinking straight. They feel the need to put an end to the situation at all costs,” Kassin said.

classics scholar Craig Williams writes that Romans didn’t use terms like “just friends” or “more than friends” to refer to spouses because “the implicit devaluation of friendly as opposed to romantic or married love would have struck most Romans as perverse.” At that time, he asks, “what could be more than friendship?”

Imagine being able to see through walls, or to understand the strength of radio waves emanating from you Wi-Fi router. You'll be able to see which piece of furniture or wall is blocking the signal from getting a reliable connection to that one device in your home constantly getting disconnected.

Imagine never losing your keys or wallet ever again. Like a hint in a video game, the headset will simply highlight its exact location in the house for you through the walls.

Not many people realize Vision Pro’s visual augmentation in passthrough mode is actually a step backward from human vision in many respects. Perhaps that’s part of the reason so many people greet this technology as dystopian? After all, who wants to volunteer to have degraded eyes on the real world? Even for floating windows or the promise of cool virtual worlds to visit, that’s a tall order

Android phones still don’t have this effect. It’s not because they don’t have high-enough frame rates or low-enough latency for touch input. It’s just that the math is off for putting everything together to create the illusion of direct manipulation. The physics aren’t quite right. It’s no longer about hardware specs (although that was a factor working against Android in the early years). It’s about craftsmanship