Transcript

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Because oftentimes when we launch startups, we are very keen to tell the world why we’re so different and so unique, but we often forget to tell them why we’re equally good as what what’s already there.

00:00:17 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is software for your iPad that helps you with ideation and problem solving.

This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it.

I’m here today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey Adam, and our investor Lisa Ankle. Hey, this is quite an impressive use of internet technology, I think, because Lisa, you’re in Singapore. I believe it’s 9 p.m. for you. Mark, you’re in Seattle. It’s 6. a.m. for you, and I’m here in Berlin at 3 p.m. So this is truly a globe spanning call, but it works. Seems to be. So Lisa, welcome to the to the podcast, and can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

00:00:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you. So I’m Swedish person living here in uh in Singapore, have been here for a couple of years, have a background in working for startups, often as an early employee, and for the past 2.5 years I’ve been part of building out a VC firm. Called Antlers. So we actually run startup generator programs where we help individuals find their co-founders and then launch startups and then we invest in the best teams. On the side, privately, I also do a couple of angel investments, um, a few here and there, select ones, and then my background is in, in marketing and product primarily on the growth side.

00:01:29 - Speaker 2: One of the things that caught my attention about Antler, in addition to its, I guess from my point of view, uh, exotic location. Uh, is that it’s taking some of the, I guess, accelerator model pioneered by by combinator and others, and sort of bringing that to, uh, to this new place. But also I think it has just very nice branding marketing presentation. And I feel like that may even be more important for a for an accelerator who’s constantly recruiting companies, you’re a two sided marketplace in a way, right? You’re connecting companies with investors, right? And so being Uh, being something that presents itself in a way that’s interesting, attractive, appealing to both of those parties, uh, seems quite important.

00:02:09 - Speaker 1: It definitely is, and I think it’s, it’s hard because we want to convince entrepreneurs like yourselves that it’s better to to launch a company together with us than to do it, to do it alone and to to kind of convince entrepreneurs, it’s a very hard, I think, persona. To, to crack. So we try to work with kind of repeat entrepreneurs and very experienced founders. Yeah, and then also establish ourselves as a trustworthy investor. So it’s definitely those kind of two sides that you mentioned.

00:02:34 - Speaker 2: Great. Well, I think that the topic we want to do today is authentic marketing, and you sort of suggested this based on uh the couple episodes ago we talked with Max Schoening from GitHub. And I think we were talking more about product things, but that naturally drifted into this, uh, into this field. And um he talked a bit about the being close to product and even what it means to, you know, what is the marketing playbook in 2020. Uh, and in many ways, he felt like authentic marketing is one that that doesn’t have much of a playbook or you’re doing things that are new and special to you or speaking with your voice in a way that makes sense for The audience for your your product. But of course at the same time, while just saying there’s no playbook, obviously marketing is a skill. It is a whole career field. And in fact, I was reminded of a podcast I heard recently with Patrick McKenzie where he basically described his whole career as being built around taking concepts from the marketing world and bringing repackaging them for engineers who typically don’t appreciate the depth of that skill and then repackaging that in a way. That it’s comprehensible and makes sense to them.

00:03:40 - Speaker 1: I think the episode you had with Max was super interesting, especially around the product principles and kind of having them, having them in place, and it reminded me quite a bit of what you also talked about the company values and the importance of, of choosing what not to do because it’s so easy to say with this, this, this and that, and by choosing everything you don’t have any decision making in the company and I think that’s kind of ties into very much around the marketing and Positioning as well because you want to be for everyone and you want to be this wide, you know, very broad and wide thing and you don’t want to exclude anyone, but by doing so, you also don’t help, you know, the customers or the potential users to to navigate or or to understand you better. So I think that was a very good kind of similarity.

00:04:23 - Speaker 2: Yeah, if you’re everything for everyone, then you’re someone understand what you are. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:04:29 - Speaker 2: Well, maybe that naturally leads to a conversation you and I have been having here as we are gearing up towards our product launch and thinking about how we want to explain news to a wider audience. We have our kind of our core group of people who’ve been following our story, maybe even back to the research lab days, and if they, I don’t know, read our 5000 word research article and listen to Mark and I talk on the podcast for 10 hours, they can understand the product, but we’re trying to find a way to package that a little bit more tightly so that more people can get access to that message. And and one of the things that has come up there in our conversations or as you’ve been, have been advising us is what category are we in? And this is honestly a real struggle because it’s important to put yourself in a category that’s an easy way for someone to understand what you are. Are you a car? Are you a kitchen knife? Are you a word processor? Are you a photo editing program? And of course, you can be new and different and better, but starting with, here’s what it is, you know, Google Docs maybe was quite different. In some ways than what came before, but ultimately, you could have described it as well. It’s Microsoft Word, but on the web. Um, but we’ve really struggled with this at Muse. What’s your take on the the sort of the category question and how it fits into the larger positioning topic?

00:05:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, you’re not alone in feeling this way. It was the same when we started Antler. It’s been the same with multiple startups I worked with. It’s really hard to kind of choose because oftentimes you actually do something new. That’s why you’re a startup and you don’t want to be like someone else. It’s already out there, but I think the risk of not choosing is so high, so you kind of have to choose, even if you choose something that you’re not super happy with.

I tried to compare it with like, if you walk around in a grocery store, you want to know what shelf you’re gonna go to, if you want to find the nuts or the dried fruits or going to the candy shelf or going to the fruit stand, and by positioning yourself next to the fresh fruits or next to the candy, it tells a lot about your brand and if you are kind of a healthy snack or if you are not a healthy snack, like the peanuts, the salted peanuts will be. Next to the chips and candy, right? But then if you have a whatever nature bar, they will be next to the fruits. So it does tell a story.

I think it’s important to take, to have the discussion and to take it, and you may not land in something that feels completely right because it’s new, so you will feel a bit uncomfortable. But if you don’t choose, then others will choose for you. And that’s the big risk. Then you will have journalists, users and customers, and they will start calling you things and they will all start calling you different things, and that’s horrible for SEO and it’s really bad. Uh, because no one will remember you.

So even if you choose something that’s not awesome, at least you have something and you can be consistent.

00:07:00 - Speaker 3: This reflects my experience talking with friends and family about Muse.

Initially, I would try to describe the app from first principles in terms of all the novel things that we’re doing and the the unique interaction model and man, people had a really tough time understanding what it was.

But once I started describing it in terms of things they were familiar with, note taking apps, personal. Information management, those are the two main ones. I really stuck better and then you could give them the deltas, you know, it’s that, but here are the deltas and the deaths. It’s Microsoft Word, but it’s on the web. People get excited about on the web and likewise, we have a series of deltas for use that was quite effective. Although I had never thought about the people start to pick names for you angle, which uh now that you mentioned it seems quite important.

00:07:36 - Speaker 2: And sometimes that’s good. You want to wait and see how people describe you and then maybe adopt that because in many cases, the target audience or The people who want what you’re offering are actually better able to find the right words.

00:07:50 - Speaker 1: The problem with doing that is that your very smart customers are not, they don’t have a big following, maybe some do, but some of them may not have a big following online and the people who do are the tech journalists, and they might not have time to think this through, and they take a concept they already know and they will just splash it onto the article and then there you are.

00:08:10 - Speaker 2: Yeah, when it comes to journalists and even reviewers that go relatively deep, you know, in the end, they need to crank through a lot of articles or reviews or whatever it is they’re doing in a relatively short period of time. They don’t have weeks and months to get deeply familiar with your product and your philosophies and your all the ideas you’re trying to to share. So of course, they’re going to look for the, the shorthand.

So if you don’t, if you don’t give them that shorthand, then yeah, you risk a lot of just fragmented. Sort of description. Yeah, for me, this was the very point. Once we got into this discussion, I started working through this, uh, it, it really called back to me to my Hiroku experience. And so here when we were working on this platform for web deployment in the late, uh, sort of like 2008ish period, and we ran into the same problem because there was this clear, I guess you call it category which was hosting, but in many ways it had all these. Associations really led people in the wrong direction, particularly the historic kind of shared hosting FDP and PHP kind of stuff. Um, and cloud didn’t exist yet and cloud infrastructure didn’t exist.

And eventually we did go along with an industry term which was platform as a service. In some ways I was never that great. I don’t think customers are like, I don’t know, industry analysts would use that, but customers didn’t really use it. They didn’t, they didn’t really think of it that way. Um, and, and we struggled with it for a long, long time, basically, as long as I was there, and many years later, I don’t know, 10 years after we started the company is when the industry settled on some terms. One was containerization, that’s for the Dockers and Cougarneti stuff, you know, at Hiroku we made up this weird word dino. Because there was, there was nothing that that behaved in this way. And so we needed a new word for it. And eventually the industry came up with a word which was container.

And later on, there’s another cat there was a category or a name for this type of platform, which is serverless. Now that’s a well known space. And we even had like a no servers or forget about servers, that was part of our message, but it just, it wasn’t a category. We were just doing this weird thing that no one could understand and then yes, exactly that problem.

Customers, journalists, colleagues, investors, whatever else they want to stick you into this, into a category that isn’t a good fit. And then yeah, I don’t know it was this, it was this constant struggle. In the end it worked out for us, I guess, because we’re doing something that I think was different and special and, and, and ultimately people. Enough people got it, uh, to make the business successful, but still, it was a constant source of pain for me personally, not only to just, I don’t know, write a good homepage or something, but also even what I usually call just the cocktail party experience, which is just what Mark, you just said, Mark, which is chatting with someone that you haven’t caught up with in a long time, whether or not they’re tech industry people are not around the dinner table at a family event, and they say, what are you doing? And you want to like sum it up in a couple of sentences and Just could never do it and just people were left scratching their head and they thought that I was being withholding or I didn’t want to tell them and that wasn’t it. It was like, well, no, you know, I need to sit you down and give you a 20 minute lecture on the history of web development so you can understand this product. And yeah, no, that was always pretty unsatisfying.

00:11:12 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think we had the fear of ending up in the wrong.

That really drove my initiatives when we, when we launched and started answer.

I did not want it to be in the bucket of incubators because in Singapore alone there are 53 different incubators, most of them, I mean, of course, some of them are great, but many of them belong to corporates and I mean, I’m gonna sound like a bitch, but nothing good has ever come out of them.

And we didn’t want to be in that bucket because we wanted to build great companies and then we also didn’t want to be an accelerator because that’s a bit different because then you take in an existing team with an existing product and you help them accelerate their growth.

We brought founders together, you know, in the first place and helped them navigate what product to build in the first place and then invest.

So therefore we, we kind of landed after a lot of pain in the term startup generator that we were generating startups and we’ve been sticking to it for 2.5 years and now.

We talk about ourselves more as a VC firm because we’re also now doing a little bit later stage investments as well that we are expanding. So now we have VC firms, and now I’m just a VC kind of boring, but that’s life.

And I think, I think that was necessary for us to kind of stand out when we were launching that to tell the story that we were different from from these incubators you would know or the accelerators you would know.

00:12:24 - Speaker 2: That’s a and and maybe a good illustration of someone’s gonna, you know, pick words for you. I think I described you as an accelerator there just 5 minutes ago or something, something like that. So. It’s the, it’s the easy thing to reach for. I I know that. I know that term. I, I have a space for it in my mind, and that’s that positioning concept kind of calling back to the 1980 seminal seminal book just titled Positioning is it’s all about that space in a person’s mind and we all have busy lives and we have a lot of information coming to us all the time and you just you you always reach for that quick shorthand. Yeah.

00:12:59 - Speaker 3: So, I’m curious if you’re going to position a product or service and you want to be in a space like to stand out in that space. Um, we go back to the Google Docs example of you’re in the word processor space, but it has this unique aspect. Are there particular techniques for doing that so that you stand out effectively?

00:13:14 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so there is actually a framework that I often use. It’s called the points of parity and points of difference because oftentimes when we launch startups, we are very keen to tell the world why we’re so different and so unique, but we often forget to tell them why we’re equally good as what what’s already there. So let’s say I’m starting a neobank. I might want to share that actually the transactions are safe or your money. safe with me, sending some basic comfort to the end user that I’m not this crazy startup, we have, you know, whatever it might be encryption or it’s super safe or stable or something like that. FDIC insurance. Yeah, all those things that comfort the end user to like, OK, this is something I can trust. This is, this is, it might be new, but at least I can actually trust it. So that would be the points of parity. How am I as good as the others in this. Category. And then once you have a couple of points of parity, you would add on your points of difference. So, OK, this is stable, it’s safe, it’s secure. However, we’re also pink and purple and glitter. So we’re all these like startup sparkly difference, but you can still rely on us just as you can with your old bank. So that is called the points of parody and the points of difference, and I think it’s very useful, especially for very early startups who are just Starting up who have no trust and people are a little bit skeptical in the beginning.

00:14:34 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that certainly makes sense. I think in a way, entrepreneurs are people who maybe thrive on or have the personality to be different, stand out, be the purple cow, carve their own path, the rebels, what have you. And so then naturally, when it comes to talking about what you’re doing, or pitching it or trying to explain it, you get really going to focus on here’s what’s different. But here’s what’s the same is actually something that, you know, even now as we’re talking about it, I think we could probably do a lot more of that with Muse.

00:15:03 - Speaker 1: Because that’s why you’re building something new. Like that’s like that because that’s why you’re here and and so it should be that way, but I think for the regular user or potential customer, they need to be, you know, feel comfortable in starting using. Aha, it’s the same thing as, but with these new additions.

00:15:19 - Speaker 2: It just gives you a mental reference point, maybe the bank example uh company that I really love their product is N26, which is this Berlin-based bank.

I think they’re starting to spread global now, but you know, it’s just a sort of a bank account you put money in and they give you a Mastercard or whatever that you can spend money with.

But the thing that makes them different is they have a really nice user experience and a great mobile app and it’s 100% virtual. I really love the product. I also think the marketing is really good, but they do start with that place of, it’s a bank account, you can put money into it, and here’s a Mastercard so you can spend money.

00:15:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, another example is on telco here in Singapore called Circles.life. They are very clear. We use them and they are very clear like, yes, you will have kind of reception like all over the country.

We have good, yeah, you have good data if fast, whatever, but then in addition, we have no stores, so you don’t need to stand in line and hand in your documents.

We have someone ship the SIM card to your home. And then you just show the ID as you accept the SIM card and we do everything in an app, which is different from standing, taking this like, you know, standing in line and waiting to get a SIM card, which is how you do it otherwise in Singapore.

00:16:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, when it comes to the invented category or give a new name to something, you mentioned the startup generator, there’s the platforms of service, serverless thing.

And I was just looking back at my notes for the positioning book and they, because it’s an older book, they talk about examples like say Xerox. which invented effectively what we now call a copier, but for a while, Xerox and copier were synonymous, and that’s the, that’s the reward to inventing a new category is your, your brand name actually becomes the generic name Kleenex, I think is often listed in that. They also mention Polaroid, for example, sort of instant instant photography, that if you can invent a new category and give it a name and maybe your your company name becomes the name of that category and you own. That category in a very impressive way. Um, but it’s very hard to do that. I think it takes a lot of time. I think it takes a lot of just money, basically to get the to get the reach, um, and that’s probably something that’s more suited to a company with big venture backing or a big corporate parent. Uh, to be able to push it over the long term.

And we explored that a little bit with Muse, our, our very first web page had the your thinking canvas was kind of the description of it, but also we were trying to, I guess not quite invented category. I don’t think I would have thought of it that way then, but that that’s how I wanted to describe it. And pretty naturally that fits to other kinds of thinking canvases, which include digital products like Millanote and Figma and Miro, but also include real world products, which is I think a whiteboard is thinking canvas, a sketchbook is a thinking canvas, a chalkboard is a thinking canvas, post it, stuck to your wall as a thinking canvas. Um, so that was kind of, kind of the idea we wanted to go with that. But yeah, I think the conclusion I came to is that just a small team like ours just can’t. we can’t define a whole new, new category in that way. Uh, now, what we’ll do instead is still sort of TBD we’re still working through, I guess. So another topic in the space of authentic marketing is personal aspirations versus solving problems, and I think Mark, you had some thoughts on this.

00:18:22 - Speaker 3: I feel like every few months you see one of these Twitter threads where someone is arguing one of three positions.

The first is that you should describe your product in terms of problems to be solved. You tell your customer you have problems X, Y, and Z, this tool will help you solve them.

Sometimes you see people advocating for uh the aspirational model, which is the type of person you want to be. I go, I go back to the classic iPod ads, where you’re just kind of this dancing, energetic, brilliant silhouette, you know, you want to be like that, so you get an iPod.

Um, or perhaps the more utilitarian approach where you just say what the product does, and that’s it. Pro X, Y, and Z, you figure out what it’s for and if it’s, if it’s right for you. And I feel like there’s always a tension between those three approaches in marketing.

00:18:59 - Speaker 2: I feel like it’s especially relevant to the prosumer class of of product, which, which we are in because it’s something you buy for yourself, but it’s expensive enough that it’s, you want to buy it because it helps you be better in your work life.

Most likely, it helps you be more successful at how you earn your living, and so yeah, the the iPod is consumer so that quite naturally fits with, I think the kind of aspirational, who do you want to be or what, what kind of lifestyle do you want to live, which certainly I don’t know, even things like bottled water and so on are sold in that way, like the advertisements show the product very little and instead they show smiling happy people uh living lovely lives.

And you think if I buy this product, they’ll be like that, and then maybe the utilitarian one you described that probably works pretty well for certain kinds of B2BA or just enterprise software where there’s just a person working in a business that has a very specific problem to solve. They have budget to solve it and if you can articulate their problem clearly and convince them that your product is trustable and a solution to their problem, then OK, great, there’s the fit. But when maybe when you get to the prosumer stuff, particularly in this current time, um, I’m thinking of this article signaling as a service like that in the show notes here, but I think there they talk about, for example, things like superhuman, and so the idea that it has this kind of elite thing to it because it’s invitation only and because of the price point and then you get the little, you know, you put the little tagline in your signature or similarly, I think a similar thing has happened with uh hey, hey.com email, brilliantly marketed, of course, those uh the base camp guys. They are always great at that, but I think there’s an element of this where you can’t use a custom domain and actually getting your hey.com domain name, and the people that even just tweet their I guess their their hey.com email, they tweet that out and it’s a way of saying, hey, I’m cool, I’m, yeah, it’s a kind of, it’s a kind of signaling. um, and there’s nothing. Let’s say there’s anything wrong with that exactly, but in theory, they are for helping you be more productive, creative, better at your work, more informed citizen, that sort of thing, rather than a handbag that, you know, is going to impress others. Uh, so yeah, there’s, there’s an interesting tension there.

00:21:05 - Speaker 3: So maybe there’s, there’s two variants of the aspirational side. There’s this, uh, more outwards facing uh status signaling type aspiration, which OK, has its place, I guess. To me, the more interesting variant is when you’re aspiring to something for yourself. So let me tell you a little story, Adam, you recall that we went to the Trinity Library in Dublin. Yeah, it’s this incredible. Like if you Google like amazing libraries, the first image that shows up, right? I don’t know that’s literally true, but you know what I mean.

00:21:31 - Speaker 2: I’ve seen it as a slide in a lot of presentations. Um, there’s actually I think a photo of me, you and you, Lea, because that was sort of our first real team summit. Uh, right there in that library. But yeah, now I recognize it all over the place. It’s very distinctive, this long hallway with the kind of the dark wood and what have you.

00:21:48 - Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, anyways, I remember very vividly when I was in that hall, I felt like, man, I should be writing a book, you know, isn’t that isn’t that what one should be doing with one’s life? And I feel like you get a smaller but still um visual sense of that when you’re holding a really nice leather notebook, you’re like, man, I should be, I feel like I should be taking notes or like doing a creative project, right? And I think that’s something that prosumer digital tools can tap into. It’s a sense that A tool just by virtue of its quality can make you aspire to do more creative work.

00:22:13 - Speaker 1: And I think a place we often fall into, especially if you have like software products, is that instead of talking about how this thing will help you, a lot of website actually describes different features, feature A, feature B, feature C, so or it will describe what goes into the product.

So I had another comparison that I learned many years ago where she’s like, OK, if you describe a car, you can even describe it like, OK. It is this kind of metal thing. It has an engine for wheels, or you can describe it as this, this thing will take you from place A to place B, and there’s a huge difference there, and I think a lot of startups often because you’re so focused on your features and what you’re building, a lot of times we talk about, you know, feature A, B, and C, instead of talking about what these features, what, what kind of magic they will create for you and how they can be helpful for you.

So I think there is kind of a 3 steps there. I think we can land in the middle because I agree like signaling and that is at the end that that’s also something and, and I think it’s, it’s a difference like you said between signaling and just inspiring, inspiring you to create something. But yeah, there is definitely a trap in describing features in a rather uh non-sexy way that doesn’t really make you feel anything. Right.

00:23:25 - Speaker 3: And we keep coming back to this theme on this podcast of Creativity being uh an incredibly emotional act. It’s very human, right? If you deny that, if you don’t recognize that in your product, your marketing, um, I think you’re leaving a lot on the table.

00:23:37 - Speaker 2: That reminds me of another influential book I read many years ago called The Substance of Style by Virginia Pastorrell. I reread it recently and it’s a little dated just because she spends a lot of time referencing the original iMac and I think the PT Cruiser and other current products. Of the early 2000s, whenever it was, the core idea is still just as valid today, which is that there’s a tendency to want to separate out the substance of something that is the the meat, the function, what it does from the surface. We even say beauty is skin deep. She makes the argument that especially when it comes to products or tools that we use in our life, these things, it actually matters because The the surface, the aesthetic will make you feel a particular way. And these products and tools are designed to be used by humans and our feelings matter a lot for motivation, for creativity, for being successful and whatever the thing is that we’re trying to do. And argues, you know, I think at the time that was when Apple’s was kind of ascendant with this new kind of design forward approach, and she spent a lot of time on that and saying why she thought that was really meaningful in the world. was going to set a trend and was quite right about that because you can sit there and say, OK, well, sure, the Apple product and the comparable products do basically the same thing. You can send an email just as easily from a Mac as you can from a say a Windows machine, but it just feels so much nicer. It feels so much more inspiring. It feels so much more creative to do that kind of task from the Macintosh, at least for many people. Absolutely. And so tapping into that is, I think, really important, something we go for with Muse, which is we feel like, OK, sitting down to think deeply about a problem, look up all the prior art, reference the source materials, pour through it all, recombine it in a way that helps you find your own understanding and meaning. That is really hard work and people often don’t want to do it even when it seems like it would be valuable. They think, well, let me just take the shortcut, let me just make a snap decision. Uh, but if we make it really fun and enjoyable and feels really nice to go in and use over something, well, hopefully you’ll want to do it more. I’d love to hear if you have examples of tools or products you use that have this aspirational quality or this inspirational quality in terms of helping you be more productive, creative, make you want to do the thing that it is designed to help you with more.

00:25:58 - Speaker 1: I think there’s so many different categories of this. One is a great pair of running shoes, uh, will help me run more or like I order now during the kind of lockdown we had in Singapore. I ordered lots of workout clothes and I started working out as much as I’ve ever done. Like I, I that’s, I just did it a lot and I think a lot of it is because I felt great wearing my workout clothes and I often wore them every day all the time anyway, because that’s the most convenient and comfortable clothes. But I think that is a great example of how things can just random things can actually.

Inspire you to do things and and and run further and and run more often, even if that is a bit of an obstacle as well.

And another example is, so Andreas and I, my partner, we have been moving around a lot and when we left San Francisco in 2014, we, we sold everything and we hated stuff that you had at home. We were like, we’re never going to buy stuff to our home, right? Because we’re gonna live in two suitcases and that’s it. And we did that for a couple of years, but then now we’re slowly building up a home again and we were like, we’re not gonna buy something just because it looks good, like who would do that? We don’t want to have stuff that don’t have a meaning or don’t feel a purpose in our home. So we have a lot of functional things. But then we kind of started like, oh, but maybe we buy this whatever nice little, uh, I can make my cold brew and it’s actually this Japanese cold brew thing, and it’s actually really nice. And it doesn’t really have much purpose in my life, but I’m, I’m happy and I get good coffee and now we’re just slowly filling up our lives with lots and lots of nice stuff that makes us happy. So we kind of go. 180 on that one.

00:27:26 - Speaker 2: Very much with you on that. I’m uh I don’t like stuff. I don’t like clutter. I’ve moved a lot. I moved multiple times in one, you know, most recently across continents, but other times in my life, for example, going from Los Angeles to San Francisco where my Living quarters were going to be a tiny fraction of the size and I basically had to get rid of everything.

And yeah, every time I’m thinking, why do I have all this stuff? Why do we need this? It takes up space. It’s um and that’s uh I think this is the moment we have to do the obligatory Marie Kondo reference here, right, things that spark joy, it kind of sounds like that’s the direction you’re going with the, with the coffee.

Maker there and I feel that as well, even though I don’t, I don’t like stuff that I don’t use or doesn’t really serve a serve a great purpose for me, but the things that I rely on every day, whether it’s something like, yeah, the right tools in the kitchen that I use to make healthy food, obviously my software products, or, or even something like say my bike.

I got into cycling as a primary means of transit once I moved to the city where it’s such a nice place to ride, and it took me a while to find a bike that I really liked. But once I did, it’s just, yeah, it’s this, it’s this um virtuous cycle of I want to write it because I like it. And then when I write it, that it helps me be sort of better at cycling and, and then the other, the two kind of reinforce each other.

And um, yeah, that’s uh that’s always a great feeling for objects in your particularly physical objects, at least software can be kind of mostly out of the way. It’s just a square on your home screen or some bits on your hard drive, the physical. Objects, I feel very sensitive to that kind of clutter.

00:29:01 - Speaker 1: But we had, I mean, as Zoom did it just works, right? And I think that’s their tagline, it just works better and we had an interaction with the new school our kids are going to and of course, as a school, kind of, of course, but they were having Microsoft Teams and I was gonna download Microsoft Teams and I was like, I told Andreas before they called, no worries. I would download it. I, I mean, you know, I’m kind of ahead of time. I, I prepared myself, and then the call starts and they were like another 8 steps and, and Andreas, he was like freaking out, he’s like, oh, we need to change school. What are we doing here? And there was just such pain. It was just so painful and why, right? And, and that’s just a good, I guess software example.

00:29:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, obviously being tech industry people were probably much more sensitive to good software and good tools, but I think it would be hilarious if you submitted a resignation or, you know, we’re moving our kids to a different school because I’m sorry, you use Microsoft Teams. I think all we’re a slash family.

Yeah, exactly. So another place where you’ve been helping us out here, Lisa and I thought it’d be interesting to talk here, especially because it’s timely is launches. So I think when, when I first, uh, or when, when I first brought up this topic with you, I basically led with, well, here’s some things we’re thinking about doing for a launch, but I think I started with even should we do a launch, the launches even make sense in this time period? And uh yeah, I’d love to love to hear your take on all that.

00:30:21 - Speaker 1: I think there’s so many, it’s it’s a super interesting question, and there are so many opinions about this because when you build a product, of course, you want to kind of slowly make Tends to like slowly on board users and then iterate and and don’t have this kind of big boom launch and and when you do those kind of things that often go wrong.

So I think there are lots of reasons to not have this big launch, but I think what you guys are doing, you’ve been having a beta for a while, you have now, you know, started adding more users and being more out there. So I think it makes perfect sense to actually use the launch as an opportunity to announce it to the world, especially if you look at The news media and journalists, they need of a why is this news? What’s the news and why is this relevant and why now? And if you have, if you say, well, now is, now is the time when we announce this, this is, you know, this is our launch and announcement that is making it timely and relevant for journalists to actually write about it because it is news and that you are revealing a new product to the world, even though it has been seen by a few handful of people.

Well, you may think that you have already told everyone about this and you, you’re so tired of telling the story. It’s just so few people, right, that have heard it and the rest are still waiting and I have no idea what this is and we’ll read it for the first time when you actually do your launch.

00:31:34 - Speaker 2: That was a lesson I learned from a little bit, I got a little bit of exposure to this fellow Mark Benioff of Salesforce when I was part of that organization for a little while, of course.

Absolutely brilliant marketer in some ways maybe has a lot of the qualities that I shy away from personally being a more product and engineering minded person that I care about, you know, this kind of authenticity and down to earth and sort of no, no bull approach to explaining things and, and talking about things at the same time, just incredible skills there.

And one of the things that he really embraced was you launch things over and over again. Because a launch is just when someone new is learning about it, some new audience is learning about it. There’s a lot of the world is very big. The internet is very big, and it’s when you’re, you’re going beyond your existing audience to a new, to a new audience. And I think that’s, that’s how we’re thinking about this upcoming launch.

00:32:26 - Speaker 1: No, and people also forget. If you hear about it once, people might think, oh, that sounds interesting, and then it’s gone.

But then if you repeat the message, and that’s why traditional advertising will hate. Because you tend to you repeat the message and that’s when it actually sticks there.

So when you go to the grocery store, you pick that is, you know, washing detergents instead of the other. And so I think like repeating yourself, it feels really annoying, but it actually it works and it can be helpful for people because they heard about it somewhere or they read about it and then wait wait, what was that again? And then they can’t remember. And then when they get reminded, oh, yeah, that’s right, then they might start doing their own research about it.

00:33:02 - Speaker 2: I like the old Paul Graham quote, people don’t notice when you’re there, they notice when you’re still there.

00:33:08 - Speaker 3: It’s a good one. I also think that for an early stage company, there’s something to the successive levels of publicness that you’re releasing into. So first you tell some friends, you’re starting a company, and then you have an alpha product and you have a beta product, and then you release it, and different people want to kind of jump on the train at different points. And so you announce each stop. We’ve had people who said, you know, you sounds awesome, but I don’t have time for like weird beta stuff. Just let me know when it’s ready. And so when we launch, they’ll know, OK, it’s ready for that.

00:33:33 - Speaker 1: I learned this when I was, uh, my first job was as a theater producer, which is super fun.

But I was 18 and like part of the producer’s job is to do PR and and get people to buy the tickets for the show. And I remember we had, I did lots of PR announcements. I don’t know, but I just had that every month we had some kind of news like, you know, these are the actors or this is what we’re gonna do.

And now we’ve done, we’re done with the clothes, come look at them, whatever. We just made up a lot of news. And what happened was first the local press started writing about it, and then after a while, after my 5th or 6th announcement, whatever, the TV called me and they said, well, they’ve been writing about you so much. You must be on to something. Can we come out and do a like a interview with You guys, and I was like, sure, you’re welcome. So then by just getting that niche local media first, and they wrote about it again and again and again, the bigger sharks read, you know, they eat the small fish, right? They read the smaller sharks to try to stay up on what’s going on and what’s happening. So while I didn’t really target the TV channel, they kept seeing those that the news in the local media and that’s why and how we got the big attention eventually, which that was just me being like new and lucky and naive and just doing this shit because I was stressed.

00:34:36 - Speaker 2: I think it counts for a lot in any business, right? Yeah, I think, um, I keep hearing about this is one of the best phrases to it’s not just you’re there and you’re still there. It’s something about I keep hearing about this. What, what is this? I need to look into it. I want to give it some of my attention because of that, yeah, repetition.

00:34:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and if you were, if you or kind of the PR people are the only ones nagging a journalist about something, they would never find it interesting. But when they start reading or hearing about it from different sources, that’s when they, wait a minute, I need to look into it. So, so that’s why if you cannot target lots of different things, then eventually the big fish will find you interesting as well.

00:35:11 - Speaker 3: We’ve alluded to it here, but I think it’s important to note that we’re somewhat disconnecting the product changes from the messaging and marketing that’s going out. There needs to be some coupling, of course, and you want some of that, but also they, they don’t need to be super hard coupled together so that the same day you launch on TechCrunch, you’re letting your first user sign up, right? Right. There’s some apps where you need to do that like maybe consumer apps or something, but mostly you want to have more control over these axes independently.

00:35:33 - Speaker 1: No, I think you definitely need to separate. To, because it’s simply too risky to onboard lots of new users, um, and you don’t really know how things will behave.

You also want to have the freedom of iterate and and keep releasing new features and new ways of working, so you can’t be too, you can’t have the message too kind of literal, if that makes sense. Like it can’t be too descriptive of what the product actually does or describing all these features because those features you want to keep changing or iterating and the overall message needs to be repeated and repeated and repeated.

When we worked with consumer apps, we had like these video. And then we did them, but then two weeks later they were outdated. I think you have a lot of videos, but you show very specific features in those videos and they’re extremely helpful. But if you kind of have telling the entire story with a lot of screenshots, it doesn’t make any sense because in a couple of months, you have to redo it.

00:36:20 - Speaker 3: Maybe the most extreme version of this is just to schedule a release, you know, for the same day every year, um, which is what, of course, they did at Salesforce. And I just, when that day happens, like, whatever you have, that’s what you launch. It actually works really well. As an engineering manager, I like that a lot because I think it’s best to limit. and that scope and so a calendar based marketing release does that for you.

00:36:37 - Speaker 2: This is Dreamforce you’re talking about their big convention and they basically tries to figure out what what are you going to have for Dreamforce it’s sort of the internal function of the company. Exactly.

00:36:46 - Speaker 1: But Google is the same, right? They always have a couple of news around Google I and a lot of these tech companies have actually copied that part, and it’s probably because it works and and people can have and then the press starting to get excited and and they know it’s coming they can plan it in the editorial planning, so they have space for it.

00:37:02 - Speaker 2: There’s some. Energy inside the team.

I’m a big fan of continuous delivery to the point that I spent quite a lot of my life, uh, building a product to make that easier and sort of iteratively letting stuff out and not doing the big bang release and what have you.

But on the perspective of getting folks excited both externally, potential customers and so on, but also internally on the team, there’s something very powerful about rolling stuff up and do a big release.

I’m reminded of a classic post from uh Mark Shuttleworth, uh, the Ubuntu Linux project.

And they had a, uh, they very famously brought in a 6 or famous to me. Maybe that reflects my interest in, but Uh, they brought in a 6 month release cycle where they would do a new release every 6 months and just if your stuff’s ready to go into the release, it does, and otherwise it’ll wait for the next one.

And this was in contrast, you know, they were building on the Debian Linux project and Debian was famous for we release it when we’re ready, but that meant that their stuff was always felt pretty behind and out of date and they would go years between sort of major revs to the, to the system. And that was a bit of a problem in the fast moving technology world and creating this rhythm. We try to get stuff in, but don’t worry if you don’t make it. Hey, there’s another one coming up in 6 months, was a really powerful thing for them internally as well as the external factor of explaining it to the world or sharing it with the world.

00:38:21 - Speaker 1: I got to know this behavior quite a lot when we were at RAP at a previous startup, we worked with the biggest, some of the biggest retailers in the US and in other places and I worked then closely to their market. social media teams and retail, they have their retail calendar and they have a holiday or there’s something going on always.

It’s back to school. It’s Halloween, it’s Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year, you know, starting of a new year, and I got crazy. I was like, oh my gosh, there’s so much going on.

But then for them, that was how they planned everything. And that was a reason for the customers to get in back into the store.

Oh, yeah, school is starting, so I need a pair of new pants and. Halloween is here, so I need whatever outfit and then there is always a reason to have a sale around a specific theme, but that retail calendar if you want to have like plan your marketing around calendar, that’s that’s somewhere to look because it’s fascinating. Maybe wouldn’t choose to do it myself, but just learning that and see how they were working with this calendar it was absolutely fascinating.

00:39:20 - Speaker 2: It taps into something that you hear in sales kind of skill development, which is you need to create urgency. There’s a reason not just buy generally. To buy right now and creating events for things like, yeah, you generally need new clothes in life, but do you need it now or do you need it in 3 months or do you need it next year? Creating an event is a reason whether it’s a sale, whether it’s a calendar holiday or something like that.

Now, for me personally, a lot of what happens in the retail world around that kind of stuff is that’s where maybe I would almost say that’s the inauthentic parts of marketing and the parts that feel maybe manipulative is too strong, but this thing of there’s Always a sale.

It’s always this made up reason why you need to buy right now, and it’s gonna expire in 2 days. And I’ve seen that creep a little bit into the software world as well, and it always kind of icks me out a little bit. And I understand that it works and people, you know, they have businesses and they need to sell their products so they can put food on their table at home. Fair enough. But that’s something that is a part of the sales and marketing world that I’m a little less fond of.

00:40:21 - Speaker 1: So we won’t see any Halloween specials coming up, bad news.

00:40:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, but then maybe on the flip side, you know, I, I have ended up buying, I think I remember, um, 23andMe many years ago, they did like a DNA Day special where they sold sold the thing for much less, and it seemed like a good reason. Oh DNA Day and that that connects to my values, right? Like it’s a holiday celebrating an important breakthrough in science. Um, and so yeah, that totally worked on me. So, you know, I kind of understand where that, where that comes from. I don’t know, maybe there’s, yeah, if, if someday there’s a, there’s a holiday that somehow connects to thoughtfulness and deep work.

00:40:56 - Speaker 1: I think it’s a really hard balance and I agree with you, and I, I kind of hate it, but it kind of works, but I also don’t, I don’t really prefer doing marketing that way.

But then sometimes there has to be a reason where the why now is actually pretty big. Why can’t I wait until tomorrow? And I think if it’s something that is very the messaging focusing on why this product makes you better or a better person, a better creator, then I think that is a really strong why now.

Because I want to be a better creator today. I don’t want to wait until tomorrow, but I think the fundamentals are still similar, even if you don’t have Halloween, but you, you, you have something else that makes it relevant and a little bit urgent to actually download it or try it out now.

00:41:33 - Speaker 2: I like that coming back to your earlier example of the running shoes, you buy the running shoes because you want to run more. You want to be more fit, you want to do this thing that you know brings you both. Faction and health in your life. Maybe there’s an angle like that from M. Muse is sort of the running shoes equivalent for being thoughtful, for decision making, for being creative, for being productive. And so the urgency is more, I want, I want to start investing in myself, in my mind and my creative output today.

00:42:00 - Speaker 1: I definitely think so and I think you’ve been pondering that a little bit with a thinking tool and help you think and help you like this modern. better and I think also, yeah, just working, you know, working the creative sides of the mind is, I don’t have any tools for that. So like that sounds awesome. I, I know how to work, you know, I can, I can do some math. I can do some writing. I can read a book, but working that creative side is trickier. It’s harder.

00:42:24 - Speaker 2: Well, it sounds to me like we’ve got the muse marketing and positioning all figured out. It’s running shoes for your mind. Well, if any of our listeners out there have feedback, feel free to reach out to us at @museapphq on Twitter or hello at museapp.com via email. We’d love to hear your comments and ideas for future episodes. Lisa, thanks for coming on to talk with us here for being such a great advisor as we navigate this, how to explain what we’re doing here to the world and of course for otherwise supporting us on our journey.

00:42:55 - Speaker 1: Thank you so much for having me.