Transcript

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: A product launch needs to prepare and calibrate the potential user for how much the world is going to get shaken up by this thing. So Muse 2, it’s still muse, but it’s a major version change, so prepare for a moderate amount of novelty in your life.

00:00:21 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse.

Muse is a tool for thought on iPad and Mac.

This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here as ever with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And there’s a little bit of excitement in the air here. Uh, those who’ve been following the Muse story know we’ve been in a pretty deep maker cave for a while working on our 2.0 product. And I think we’ve talked a little bit before about the sort of big releases versus incremental, and I think there’s much to be said for both.

Incremental has a certain momentum, velocity, you feel more in touch with the people that you’re serving, your users and customers, but of course the big releases are where you can really kind of reinvent the universe and there’s the feeling that anything’s possible, something like that.

And of course we’re undertaking something pretty ambitious here, at least for our small team with Basically adding a whole new platform, which is the Mac, in addition to iPad, and then on top of that is this local first syncing technology that we’re trying to take from the research lab and bring it into our product is a pretty big bet here.

So we’ve been grinding away at that for a few months, but very happy to say that the Beta is now available to prom members, so we think it’s, we’ve been using it internally for a little while, you and I both have used it quite a bit as our kind of daily driver in our work, and it is nowhere near bug-free or glitch-free or even total feature parity with Muse one, but it all does work, and it’s quite a thing to see, I think, but I’m really excited to share it with everyone and see the reaction.

00:02:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, very exciting times for me, actually, the multi-device and local first sync capability was perhaps the thing I was most excited about with the original Muse vision, and it’s taken a few years to get up to that point, so I’m really excited to be releasing this capability into beta.

00:02:20 - Speaker 2: And I’ll link the memo in the show notes for those that are interested, we do a little bit of a, a walkthrough, particularly on the Mac side, but also take a little look at the sync side of things, although that will certainly bear much more explanation in the future.

But with that be kind of out the door and baking, as we sometimes say, so folks will be trying it out and sending us bug reports and feedback of all kinds, and while we let that sit for a while, we can start to think forward to the product launch, the Muse 2.0 release.

Which is very exciting for me. I get excitement from shipping things in general, even something like a beta, but doing a full product launch is quite its own wild ride, I think, and we haven’t done one for a year and a half since Ms 1.0 came out, so I’m kind of looking forward to that, and indeed, that will be our topic today, which is launching products.

00:03:11 - Speaker 1: Nice. And now Adam, I’m gonna turn the tables on you. You usually ask me to define these nouns that we talk about, so I’m gonna ask you what does a product launch mean?

00:03:22 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I see now being the other see why that’s difficult, because it seems like everyone knows, right? And you go to kind of actually define it and realize you don’t have a real good crisp definition. And I probably like you, have been involved in product releases of many different kinds over the course of my career, and I think it was really only the Muse 1.0 launch where I really sat down to try to more deeply understand what is the anatomy of a product launch and what even is it, because if you’re sort of iteratively releasing improvements and features all the time, what is it that makes kind of a launch? And I think one of the descriptions that I saw someplace is the idea that you’re creating a moment. You’re creating kind of a feeling of an event, and you can think, of course, of the really dramatic examples like Apple, right, they do these just completely huge events, you know, back when they were in person, but even now with the kind of virtual stuff, hugely produced, all these, you know, press are lined up, you know, all the product review people had their stuff ready to go, and so it’s this big event, big moment. But I think you can equally as well do that on a much smaller scale, right? Even if you’re just like, for example, making a little app to share with your 10 friends, if there’s a moment where you release that and everyone feels excited about it and they’re kind of talking about it with each other or sharing the link with each other or something like that, I think that serves it just as well. And then the other part of it is just like, what actually are you launching? So the moment of the event is an announcement, something exists, something that is truly new. And I think here we get into a more subjective definition for sure and product hunt, which is an interesting piece of this puzzle, we’ll come back to a little later, but they actually do have some rules around. They don’t want you to launch just new features, but new products. Of course, that begs the question, well, what actually is a product launch was a feature launch? It’s not really that clear and there’s a few guidelines there. Being on a new platform, having a totally redesigned interface if you’re covering some new use case, but I think there is just an implicit feeling or sort of subjective feeling just like we’re talking about here with Muse 2. This is something that feels really new and different, even if it shares a lot of the fundamental qualities of what we’ve been building all along.

00:05:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I actually quite like this definition of product launch is creating a moment cause it’s user centered. It describes it from their perspective. When we’re talking about product management, we often say that you should describe the benefit or the capability and not the functionality, like at least think in terms of what the user is getting. And when I was thinking of launches, I was thinking of like a marketing push or you turn the thing on, right? It’s these things that we’re doing versus the moment that the user is experiencing, so it’s a great lens.

00:06:09 - Speaker 2: I may have gotten that from uh there’s a series of posts on the site, launch notes. They have one that I’ll link to in the show notes that I quite liked about a launch Mailchimp did a couple of years back, and they’re obviously a huge company, so what a launch for them means is quite different than what it means, for example, us, but I think again, those concepts.

Your channels are different, the scale is different, the quantity and quality of the materials you can create are different, but the basic idea I think is in there. And by the way, you can also launch a product that has yet to be built.

So I think the landing page with a waitlist is absolutely a thing you can launch. And in fact, we did this, that was basically the first Muse launch. We kind of call it the soft. internally, but, you know, we had come to the point where the team was working on it. We had made a Slack channel named Muse, we’d registered a domain, you know, we had incorporated new software, Inc. and we said, you know, we should tell people we’re working on this. So we made a little one pager landing page with just a little place you can sign up and it would just kind of store the email, and we weren’t sure what we were going to do with it quite yet. And our launch was just, we all tweeted it, and maybe the incode Switch account tweeted it. But that actually got us, I don’t know, first few 100 signups and some energy on the team in the sense that like, OK, something exists now that didn’t exist before, when it’s just a one-page website with an email sign up, but that indeed is a launch.

00:07:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, indeed, one of the first lessons that I learned about product launches from you and from Hiroku was that you can and should separate delivering the product, turning it on from doing the launch. You can do the launch before you ship the product, you can do it afterwards, you can do multiple launches, you know, you have all kinds of flexibility and you should take advantage of that.

00:07:52 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that’s key in thinking about the when part of things. I am big on decoupling a product release from a launch, a marketing launch or a storytelling launch, whatever you want to call that.

And so, the Muse 1.0 launch was a good example. We went live in the App Store, I don’t know what, 5 or 6 months before we launched, and we had turned on payments, and we had migrated our beta, a good portion of our beta users over from test flight, but we had a new website, and we had A chance to say, hey, everybody, we exist now. And so the MS 1.0 release wasn’t necessarily something that you couldn’t get before. It was just something you didn’t know about because we hadn’t really publicized it beyond our little internal circles.

And we may have pushed some kind of release that had something or other in it, you know, maybe a 1.0 version on it. But really there was no big change to the product, and I think that becomes even more important, you know, there’s obviously things like getting through app review, but if you’re doing infrastructure, you don’t want to be doing big changes to your systems exactly the moment you’re getting hit by a bunch of new traffic and a bunch of new people.

I think it’s very tempting to feel like you need to do that, that wait a minute, you know, if I could have tried this product a week ago, what am I actually launching? And again, I think it’s really about you’re telling people that didn’t know about it before, or that maybe had heard about it, but you’re saying, hey, this is ready, it’s reached some new milestone. It’s 1.0, it’s 2.0, whatever that is.

00:09:23 - Speaker 1: Right. And this is a good example of where the user lens is so helpful from our internal lens, it’s this product that’s been released for a while and hasn’t undergone a big change in the past few weeks. This is at the time of the 1.0 launch, but the reality is, approximately everyone in the world has never heard of it. So you can’t think of this thing.

Already existed or people already know about. In fact, people are hearing about it from the first time. And this is part of why creating a moment is important and valuable because you’re signaling to the market that there’s something important happening here. They can’t read every app store update to decipher when you’ve undergone a big step change in capability. You need to signal that to the market with your marketing. As an aside, this separation of product release from marketing launch reminds me of what we do in infrastructure engineering with gradual rollouts, so that the obvious thing to do with shipping code is you code up the feature and then you deploy the code and then the code is active and the feature is active. In fact, what you do with infrastructure engineering, once you get beyond any small scale, is you completely separate the coding and the shipping of the code from activating the code. So you’ll have a new code path behind a feature flag and you’ll ship that code up to production dark where it’s not running, and you’re very slowly in the case of infrastru. you do it slowly, you turn the knob to activate this code 1%, 2%, 10%, eventually up to 100%. And of course you can also flip it back without deploying the old version of the code. So it’s sort of isomorphic with this idea of separating product releases from marketing launches.

00:10:53 - Speaker 2: Gradual and iterative is essentially always better, but in the sense of doing a thing or making changes and being in the business of software and technology is essentially a change business first and foremost, but the point of a good launch is to make a little bit of a splash, and to do that, it should feel like there’s kind of a lot coming all at once, rather than being dripped out. But again, you can do that exactly like the feature flagging on the infrastructure side. One trick that we used on the 1.0 launch that hopefully I’ll get the chance to use here is we actually had our new website on a subdomain, like some preview URL, and then we can share it, for example, with press. So someone that has, for example, reviewed news in the past and we say, hey, you know, we got this new product coming, we’d like to give you early access. Here’s what our new website is going to look like. And that’s really important because if they’re trying your new product but reading your old website and then they’re trying to make sense of that for some review video, they might make, it will be a little bit incoherent. But on the other hand, you want to push out that website again, feel like there’s something big and new the day you’re announcing something. And so that’s kind of a way to do it again incrementally and a little bit iteratively. And I think that gets harder to do is for a small team like ours, it’s easier to do, certainly our 1.0 launch where, as you said, approximately every in the world had never heard of us. Um, as you get bigger, it gets harder, people actually want to, but that’s a nice, that’s a whole other set of problems to have, which is that like you worry about leaks and people getting early access. But when you’re at that size, in a way it’s a nice problem to have, but it’s sort of a whole other domain that I’m talking less about here, and then you need new techniques to kind of keep your secrecy or the press embargoes and all that stuff, but even so, I think that iterative and doing things in a gradual way, so that you’re not just flipping a bunch of switches and then everything collapses right in the moment you most need it to really be stable.

00:12:49 - Speaker 1: Right. I think there’s a theme here where if you execute a product launch, well, it should mostly be not surprising to you. It’s going to be news and therefore sort of surprising to a lot of the broad market, but you can basically understand what’s going to happen along a lot of these dimensions. So for example, you’ve already released. the product, you know, that it works. You should, by the way, be observing the rate that new bugs are coming in and that should be hopefully decreasing and reaching some acceptable moderate level, because the bugs aren’t gonna suddenly stop coming the day you release, right? So you got to anticipate that.

Also, you were alluding to this, you can Basically beta test a lot of the marketing and messaging with the press. You can also do this with the users. You can say, here’s how we’re proposing to talk about the products and see if that resonates, if they’re nodding their head up and down, and if so, you can anticipate that will catch it will stick when you eventually do your marketing launch. I think people have in this mind as users of products that marketing is like big like basically frenzy where everything’s super uncertain and everyone’s figuring stuff out and who knows if it’s gonna work or not. That should be only the perspective from the outside, from the inside, you should have a lot of data about how this is going to unfold.

Now that also speaks a little bit to, I think our bias, which is like B2B that is business to business and prosumer software and those domains, like especially with B2B, you have like 1000 customers, you just call up Amy, hey Amy, you know, you paid us $100,000 last year for a B2B software. What do you think about, you know, B2? Of course they’re gonna give you their take and we can sort of do that also with Prosumer because it’s something that the user has made a bit of an investment in. As you get into consumer, it’s harder because each consumer is worth whatever 7 cents or something, but that’s one of the reasons why I like B2B and prosumer software.

00:14:27 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that certainly comes to each individual represents a larger share of your revenue, so you can care about them more if that’s the right way to put it. But then you’re actually much more likely to have a relationship with them, you know, there’s folks that we’ve had as customers stretching all the way back to those early days, and they’ve written them with lots of great feedback and we’ve had our back and forth. And so then, you know, it’s pretty natural to go and say, hey, check out our new website, what do you think? And also that usually they’re comfortable with saying, I hate it, here’s why, which is important. And of course you can do that with consumer stuff, but I think it’s harder. The scale is bigger, the individuals matter less, and it’s more of these like gross trends, yeah.

Speaking about numbers a little bit, I think another question that I’d like to make sure to ask on teams is, why are we doing this? Hopefully that should go with anything you ever do in a company, but I think you can take it, especially folks who have been in marketing a long time, take it as just a given that you need to launch. And I actually do kind of agree with that. You can’t expect people to know about your product if you haven’t launched it, sort of how I’d put it, unless you have some viral growth loop thing that’s really, you know, quite remarkable. For the most part, you’ve got to get some real effort into getting out there and both one packaging your message in a way that people will be able to understand it who are not part of your inner circle, and then 2, make sure that message gets into channels for people who care about what you’re doing or you want to serve her listening. So I think that is reasonable.

But in the why thing or going a layer deeper there, I think it’s important to try to define success upfront. And one place I think it’s easy to get a little bit diverted here is the what I’ve called the press launch. So, especially if you’re in, as you said, B2B software as I have for most of my career, there’s tech press, Silicon Valley Press, so here I’m talking about TechCrunch or Gigaom, maybe the Verge, there’s a variety of sites like this, and at least back in the rogu days, you know, we got pressed pretty early on, we were just a couple people working on a thing, you know, barely worked. We were in my combinator, so that helped, but it’s nice to see those stories or a lot of folks maybe take it as a sort of ego boost to see those stories, but they actually don’t help that much with getting you users. And what they do help a lot with is getting you investors and helping you recruit people both in the moment, you know, you’re in conversations with investors, they see your TechCrunch article come out and that kind of adds some heat to, you know, bringing the deal to a close, for example, but also the Googling later on, which is you’re trying to recruit someone, they want to learn about your company, they type the name of your product into their search engine, and if some articles come up where there’s some, you know, headshots of the founders looking fancy. It just kind of confers legitimacy. OK, these folks are really in it. And so that’s part of your goal is to set yourself up for fundraising and recruiting, then that kind of press launch is excellent. If your goal is actually to get new users or new customers, particularly if you’re in a specific and narrow demographic, which many companies are in their early days or forever, then it’s actually probably just gonna be kind of a sort of an ego exercise and actually doesn’t serve you that well.

00:17:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I also tend to think that people over rotate on classic press outlets.

I don’t have a whole lot of hard data on this. I just have an intuition that a lot of people’s media is now basically socially oriented, and it’s coming less through these hierarchical media outlets.

So to the extent that that is true, I think of a launch as more about planting a new memetic seed out in the social networks about what your product is. OK, the Muse 1.0 seed is a flexible canvas for not taking in the iPad, for example. And then that propagates, people tell their friends they post about it on Twitter, it goes in the Discords or whatever. I guess there’s some media coverage of it as well, perhaps.

00:18:25 - Speaker 2: And if I can interject there, incidentally, that helps, and I think one of our goals for the Muse 1.0 launch was be in people’s minds around, yeah, fluid iPad apps for thinking and productivity.

And one of the, I forget if we have this exact metric in here, but I think, you know, just in writing out what did I want from the.

Launch some of it was new users, but one of them was, can I put it exactly, but if you see someone mention.

Muse or especially tag us on Twitter in a thread where someone asks, hey, I just got a new iPad with a pencil, what sweet apps should I try? And it’s someone who’s sort of in the sphere that we’re in, I don’t know what you want to call that tools for thought or thoughtful people who are interested in sort of doing productive work. And if you see a couple of folks jump into the thread and say, hey, you should check this one out, you know, that means that the launch was successful in the sense that we’re sort of in people’s minds under that.

Whereas if we don’t get mentioned, then it means, OK, we didn’t quite plant that hermetic seed, as you said, and that’s not what’s in people’s minds.

They may think, I like this team, they may think they have a sweet podcast, they may think, I don’t know what they like the interface design, but for some reason, we didn’t come to mind when they saw that thread, and that meant that our launch. If that were to be the case, that would mean the launch wasn’t very successful. And so I was really pleased to see there was a significant difference, you know, this was mostly just anecdotally me just like spotting people tagging us, but after the launch versus before in terms of, yeah, people responding to those kinds of questions with, you should check out UA HQ.

00:20:03 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think we did a pretty good success with our 1.0 meme seed.

And I think if we have a successful 2.0 launch, we’re basically telling the world, you know, hey, memetic DNA update here, uh, we got a new and updated things that we’re saying about Muse, it has new capabilities.

We have new ways of describing it. We have new words and phrases, and because we are the memetic source in a way, you know, obviously through the product itself, but also through our website and how we talk about it on our Twitter and so forth, that will then tend to propagate through the social networks, which is where people get most of their information these days. That’s kind of my intuition about how this works now.

00:20:39 - Speaker 2: Now other sorts of success metrics, of course, can be things like new users or, you know, putting a 1.0 on a product convinces people who are already using it that it’s sort of stable and trustable, that kind of stuff.

But earlier you mentioned, you not being too external facing in your description of what a launch is, but actually I do think there is an excellent internal reason that exists for almost any launch, which is basically energizing the team, really something about seeing.

Again, it’s that moment, but a conversation, and again, it can be in a small circle, it can be a hacker news thread, it could be a couple of Twitter threads, it could be comments on product hunt, it can be comments on the YouTube video for some person that decided to review your product, whatever it is, but seeing that what you’ve made is out in the world, part of the conversation, and they usually have this push leading up to it, which the push can be uncomfortable at times. Yeah, certainly, I experienced this a lot in the game industry.

But you make this hard push, and then you see it out there, and then there’s just something really energizing to that and trying to explain yourself to the world, I think strengthens your own internal culture and sense of identity and why are we all doing this, and what’s our mission and what are we here for? We’re not just pushing pixels around on the screen, we’re here to X where X is, whatever your company’s and your product’s mission is.

00:22:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think this is huge in terms of strengthening the team identity and sensible accomplishment.

I have very fond memories of our initial launch of Hiroku Postgress, which you and I were a part of, along with Peter Van Hartenberg, and I think a few others, or Ryan Henry, and we were grinding on this thing for so long, and we felt that we had infinite work in front of us.

And in fact, we did, we probably at that point had accomplished 1% of the engineer year’s worth of work that have since been accomplished on Haruka postgras if that. But I think if I recall correctly, you were in there saying, guys, we gotta basically pick a point and launch it. And again, we felt like we had so much more to do, but it ended up being great just to put a stamp on it and to go out as a team for a night and celebrate that we had accomplished this release.

00:22:45 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the milestone aspect of it. I’m a huge fan of kind of milestones in general as a life hack, that’s not quite a technique one can use in your personal life, in your company, in your family, which is, you know, it’s very easy that the day passed day by day by day and you’re doing all the things you’re doing and you’re very heads down and focused on the details, and I like Milestones that cause us to zoom out and look at the bigger picture, maybe birthdays and, I don’t know, holidays serve that in personal life, but in companies and products, I think that shipping a product is one of the most important milestones. It’s something you make happen, and then you get this results that you see of what you put into the world, which is sometimes bigger and smaller. Every launch goes differently, you can’t totally predict it. There’s certainly a big element of, call it luck or randomness, in terms of how it will be received, but the fact that you did this together, you pulled together, you had this singular purpose, it all comes down to kind of a date, you know, one day or a couple of days, and then afterwards you can have that shared celebration, that’s a really powerful thing.

00:23:53 - Speaker 1: And I think sometimes you gotta basically manufacture it a little bit, to the extent that you’re artificially manufacturing, it’s not gonna be an external product launch necessarily, but I think humans, creators, they have this natural rhythm where every, you know, I don’t know, maybe every 4 to 6 years you want a big change, like you start a company, you join a new company, something like that, and every 246 months you need to kind of win like a feature level win, and every week or two you need to get commit level win or whatever.

And if for whatever reason, you’re not getting that, which can happen if you’re working on, especially these big enterprise products that basically go on forever, like you’re never done. You got to manufacture and say, all right, this is version 7.2, stamp, celebrate, take a day off, that sort of thing. I think it’s important.

00:24:34 - Speaker 2: I think we talked in an earlier episode about the Ubuntu release cycle, and I know you’re a big fan of using time boxing or limiting time rather than scope to figure out products.

Now you do still have to package things up in a way that’s coherent. And in this venture where I’m in the role of, for example, writing a memo to describe what actually is in this product launch, it needs to be something good and exciting.

We actually had this debate in the team quite a bit, because honestly, the Mac app plus this local first sync is a huge chunk of work for our 5 person team, like really big. Actually, it’s quite a big risk.

I think we’re taking with the business that we essentially have been doing no changes to our core product, the one that people are actually paying us for. Other than critical bug fixes for quite a while to work on this, and we’ve been working on the look for sync technology for over a year, not even counting the research time, so it’s a big risk, but we really talked through, OK, can we do just a Mac app or just sync between iPads and, you know, it just didn’t feel like 2.0, it didn’t feel exciting enough, it didn’t feel And maybe we could have done a sync between iPads as kind of a smaller feature and then we kind of don’t make a lot of noise about it and then go work on them. I don’t know, something like that, but it just didn’t feel like a good package. And that’s why we kind of decided to go to put all this together.

And again, I feel this when I’m writing a memo or in some other way trying to describe, here’s what the team did and why you should find it interesting. And when I struggled to do that, I struggle to find that narrative, then I go, hmm. We don’t have the right package here.

00:26:12 - Speaker 1: Right. And I think having a good compelling package is important because again, you’re asking people to sort of break their frame.

You take 30 minutes out of their busy professional lives to read our new memo or whatever and digest it, and our side of the bargain is obviously you need to have good features as part of that, but you also need to have some way for it to make sense to be able to do the memetic transfer over and for a product that’s the size and shape of music, I think it needs to be a story size package.

It could be a feature if it’s smaller or use 2.0 complex of features if it’s larger, whereas Another example we could look at is something like an operating system, so they’re Ubuntu or Mac.

They don’t really have, I would say themes. It’s more like it’s better as 13 is better than 12 sort of thing, although even there, at least with Mac, I know, I should try to find the source of this story, but My understanding is that they try to shape the release such that it has good like optics in the sense of it’s not all bug fixes, it’s not all workhorse features, it’s this combination of like big shiny kind of showstopper type features that are very visual and understandable. You got a bunch of workhorse features that people have just been asking for and then you got a bunch of bug fixes and you got to kind of balance that for it to be a compelling release.

00:27:33 - Speaker 2: Now you told a little story there about theoka Postgress launch. Those were good days for sure. And now, after Hiroki, you went on to work at Stripe for quite a while. Now obviously they’re a highly respected and also much larger company. I wonder if you can compare to how they went about launching things or at least your view from the time when you were there.

00:27:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so at Stripe, I worked a lot more on what I would call horizontal systems, so shared infrastructure, developer APIs and tooling and risk and compliance infrastructure.

This is stuff that’s sort of cut across all of our products. So whereas at Roku, for example, I was more involved with launching discrete products and doing the the core product development of that at Stripe I ended up doing more of supporting in my own small way, a bunch of individual product launches over the years.

And so the view I got there was really focused around how do you coordinate and deliver across all these different functions in this very complex enterprise, these product launches, and we could talk about it if it’s interesting, but the short version is one does not simply launch financial services products.

00:28:42 - Speaker 2: Well, that’s true, that’s a highly regulated industry and also one where, you know, my very first business venture was a payment gateway, and I do remember bugs in my code causing, for example, people’s credit cards to be double charged.

And you know, sometimes that’s a problem when you, it’s a debit cards, it’s actually reserving money, that’s actually real money sitting in their bank accounts and now they can’t buy other stuff that they need, etc. It’s a higher stakes situation, not to say that productivity software, people are using that to do their work, they’re relying on it, it’s important that it not lose your data and that you’d be able to do your work and all that sort of thing, but there is something about, yeah, financial products, i.e. money and medical products. I, I don’t know, life force, those two have a particular high stakes element.

00:29:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and with financial services software it really strengthened my sense of working across teams to launch products. So with a typical like a SAS product, for example, obviously you have engineering, you have product management, you have design. And hopefully you involve marketing with launch, although a lot of product development people, you know, kind of forget or omit that step, it’s very important. But with financial services, you got like, you know, legal compliance, risk, support, and you really got to bring the whole company along across whatever 8, 10 functions. So there’s a lot of product management work that goes into that.

00:30:05 - Speaker 2: And did you find being in that horizontal role and part of a much bigger team was that more or less or the same in terms of satisfaction for getting your work into the hands of end users. I mean, in some ways maybe your customers, so to speak, or internal ones, right, like building internal tools, you could still I guess you do releases, you’re not going to do a big press launch necessarily, but if you have 100 people in the company using your internal tool, you might need to do some kind of announcement, try to get people excited and get them to bridge the gap from the old world to the new.

00:30:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s an interesting angle.

I’m actually a big fan of doing internal product releases for internal tools. That’s something you don’t get to until you’re a medium size or larger, where you have dedicated internal tools teams, but I don’t know you probably hit this around 50 or 100 people or so.

I think a lot of the ideas and lessons and movements from doing. External product launches can be applied internally.

For example, this feeling of accomplishment and team identity can absolutely be magnified by doing an internal product launch, which can be as simple as sending an email to the whole company.

Stripe actually had this really cool thing called Ship at ship at stripe.com and email alias, where people would write. When they had released a new capability. Now it was used both for external and internal releases, but it was especially useful for internal releases because there was no, you know, blog or Twitter that they could post to, and I always found that very focusing and rewarding to articulate to the company, what you’ve done, why, and what benefits they’re gonna get from it.

00:31:41 - Speaker 2: Yeah, you have a bunch of people who are incredibly busy, focused on the things that they need to do in their day, and you need to kind of get a little piece of their attention and convince them that you have something that will make their life better or easier. And that’s quite hard to do. And yeah, high energy, big company, there’s a million things to keep track of, a million projects, a million people, and you need to somehow edge in, or you need to somehow. be heard for the people that you genuinely believe you could serve, and say, hey, there’s this new thing and it will make your life better, and here’s exactly how and help them bridge that gap. And some of that is just having them be excited because they see, oh wow, this is actually is going to make my life a lot easier. Great, because there’s inevitably going to be some transition pain. And so that excitement of glimpsing what, how their life will be better on the other side, helps them get over that hump.

And so it’s the same thing with launching a product there, it’s obviously less direct because you’re not inside the same company, but you’re trying to get someone’s attention in this extremely saturated media environment, someone who is in your target demographic that you believe you can help with your product. And help them understand if, and if so, why and how your product is going to help them, because once they get in there, they’re going to have to do some things to transition over to getting that value and so if they come into it sort of excited and with a vision in their mind of how their life will be better, they’re far more likely to be successful or try it all.

And maybe that brings us to another important question to ask oneself in launching, which is who are you launching to? And I think that is again a challenge with some of the press launches, particularly if you think, oh boy, it would sure be great to be covered by some really mainstream outlet, I don’t know, USA Today, The New York Times, something like that. And actually it probably wouldn’t in a lot of cases, like I don’t think it would help Muse very much if for some hard to understand reason. Someone wanted to cover us there, right? We exist in a niche, that’s a very broad channel, and what we want to do is find where the people are who are right in our demographic that we can best help.

And even talk about channels actually in a minute, but when you think about the who and trying to, you know, be a little crisp about that, I think even once you describe your demographic, you know, here’s exactly who we, you know, our target customer, you also can think in terms of where they are in their cycle of awareness of your product. So I think naturally you tend to think of brand new people. And those are always interesting because.

The gap may be between, especially when you’ve been at it a while, we’ve been doing this, you know, coming up on 3 years now, we have a very strong mental model for cards and open canvases and Gestures and all these things that we’ve been thinking about, as does people who’ve been following our work or using our product. So when we launch a product, it might be inclined to say, wow, this is great, now you can have nested boards and cards on an open canvas, but also on your Mac, and to folks who’ve been following our work, they might think, oh yeah, that sounds good. And then to a brand new person who may well be in our target demographic in terms of they would need or want the tool if they can understand it, but they hear that’s a nested boards, cards can’t. What are you talking about? And you know, they just don’t even understand it. And so thinking in terms of how do I explain not just this release, but you’re really launching everything you’re doing from scratch, right? You’re basically explaining from the ground up for that set of people, here’s everything that Muse is and represents and how it might help you in your life.

But you also definitely need to think about your current users and customers, right, letting them know first of all there’s new capabilities, which is both to get them excited, so maybe they’ll use those things, but also so that they’re not surprised, right, because inevitably, and this is certainly going to happen with News 2.0, but I’ve seen it happen in other, for example, we worked together on launching Hiroku Cedar, and that had, I think it was overall a vast expansion of capabilities and improvement of the platform, but it did change things in a way that There were some small set of users and customers that maybe they didn’t like the new thing as much. What was there already was serving them well, or just they were used to it. And new stuff comes along and I got to learn some new things, and that’s annoying, why are you bothering me with this? And so again, creating that excitement or just helping them understand, here’s why we’ve made this big change to a product you already use, like and pay for. We think it will overall make your life better, but here’s some things, you know, you should know to be prepared for.

And then there’s a third category which is people who are in between those, which I think will be quite important for us on this launch, but I can see also similarities there with, say, Hiroki Cedar, which is people who may have tried the product before but dropped off, or maybe they kind of been following you because they’re sort of like, I don’t know, for example, they think our demo videos on Twitter are neat or whatever they like us personally or something like that, but they just weren’t in our demographic before because they say, well, you know, I just don’t use my iPad that much. Oh, there’s a Mac app now. Now I’m interested. Now I want to try it again. Or it might not be that crisp, but maybe they tried the product before, and yeah, it didn’t quite stick for them, whatever, but now there’s this big new release. People seem to be excited. They’re like, oh yeah, that was pretty cool. I’m trying to remember, what did I think of it before, I should check it out again, and then you go check it out again, and of course, a lot’s changed, it’s more approachable, it’s more usable, maybe it looks cooler, whatever it is, and so you have a chance to kind of reactivate or reconnect with those folks.

And so I think It is a challenge in the messaging that you want to speak to all of them. You don’t want it to be boring as you re-explain all the fundamentals of what you’re doing to your base. I think as they sometimes call it in politics, the folks who are already your users and customers, but you also want to make sure you’re not alienating the new people. A big part of the reason you’re doing this is to reach a new audience. And so you do need to explain that whole thing. And then there’s the folks in the middle as well. So I think there’s quite a bit of nuance in that, but I think it’s an interesting storytelling challenge.

00:37:44 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think there’s an important marketing fact embedded in that, which is people generally don’t buy and use software because they’ve heard about it once.

Usually people will need to hear about it multiple times from different people on different channels before it really sticks.

And we’ve talked about how we went through this with notion, for example, where you and I heard about it from several different people, you know, here and there, it took several passes for it to stick for us and for our company. I think it’s the same way with any other software. And so part of what you’re doing with the launch then to kind of reframe what you just said is you’re making another pass over everyone and hopefully for some people that’s the critical, you know, end pass where they get it or you’ve planted the seed that will eventually propagate to someone, you know, some YouTube reviewer learns about Muse and they do a video and then that is the end pass for a new customer. You’re always building this reservoir, if you will, of familiarity with the products.

00:38:45 - Speaker 2: So I mentioned channels, and that’s I guess a piece of jargon or marketing terminology that describes how people might hear what you have to say.

And once you are an existing product or company, you do have the benefit or luxury perhaps of an existing audience, so all your Twitter followers, your email list, if you’re on other social media, and I think that’s a really important one to speak to right from the start.

If those folks get excited, They will help and support you.

And by the way, I’ll mention that one of the things that made our 1.0 product launch really rewarding for me was just how much support we did get from all folks out here, folks who listen to the podcast, colleagues that you and I have worked with, folks who were early beta testers in the product, and just others that just liked to see more innovation and cool stuff happening in the tools for Thought space.

And so we had quite a lot of folks coming out and showing us. Really lovely support in comments on product hunt, comments on hacker news, retweets, all that kind of stuff. So I think your existing audience, now at the very beginning, you don’t have an existing audience, that’s where you bootstrapped it, maybe a little bit with that landing page, but we do have that luxury this time around.

But then you go to more traditional channels, now it would be, yeah, aggregator sites, Reddit, Hacker News, it could be events. Certainly there’s, well, companies put on their own big kind of marketing events. We talked about Apple, but there’s also more conference style events. Hiroku got a lot of value from using basically the kind of rails comp and other developer community events, either to launch products or to make connections with the community.

I press that we’ve talked about a little bit before, which includes classic press, but also, I don’t know, YouTube influencers, product reviewers, that kind of stuff, and even something like paid media.

You know, I don’t think too many folks are big fans of advertisements. We dabbled with it a little bit from use and didn’t get great results, but I have been part of a lot of businesses where paid media was a huge part of how they managed to get started and get their early audience or how they managed to scale something they had that was working, so it shouldn’t be ignored.

And I think you can think of all of these together, you have a single message, a single thing you want to say, that’s probably mostly conveyed through your website. And then you think, how do I repackage these things for all of my channels? It also includes even something like marketplaces.

So you know, if you’re a game company, probably something like Steam or Xbox Marketplace or Switch Marketplace or whatever is probably a really important channel for you. Obviously for us, the App Store and being in the Mac App Store will be a big one for us and then there’s editors, you know, human editors who work in that and look through the deluge of new apps that come out all the time and try to pick out ones they think are interesting to kind of bump up to the top of the pile. And so, The challenge is each one of these channels has its own shape, right? You know, Twitter has, well, now 280 characters, and you can attach media. Instagram is very media oriented, not so much on the text, but you actually can’t put links. How you post something on Reddit, for example, just looks completely different from how you post it somewhere else. And yeah, paid media, it’s just a whole gamut of different things, right? Like every single ad, whether it’s banner ad or Google AdWords or whatever, they just all have very different formats. So you want to make sure you have the same message, but adapting that message to all these different formats and what’s right for the channel.

She’s a huge amount of work. When I think I frequently underestimate. And as a reason why I think it’s good to to kind of focus in on a small number of channels that you think are really likely to get a good result for you and try to make those channels, try to invest in them in a way to make the message really strong there.

00:42:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah, honestly, it’s been especially challenging from you because it’s such a rich multimedia visual app to create assets for that for all these different channels can be tough. It’s one of the reasons, by the way, that I’m so bullish on trying to facilitate and encourage social distribution, cause then people adapt and use their own visual content and they’re perhaps more expert at the particular channel format, whether that’s YouTube videos or whatever.

00:42:56 - Speaker 2: Now, one that’s in this list that I think is sort of special in a way is Product Hunt, and I had never used them much or I guess I knew it had become a big deal in the sense of a lot of people use it and certainly use it to launch their products, but also find out about new products. And so it was just kind of an experiment with the Muse 1.0 launch to do product hunt. We did pretty well there, we weren’t the number one, but we were the top few and The comments were really good and so on.

But actually, part of what I think is interesting about it is it is a channel incredibly specific to product launches. And so in a way, just trying to fit into that channel, I think helped me crisp up how I was thinking about launches, and Product Hunt has a how-to guide called how to launch on Product Hunt that’s quite comprehensive, really well written. And the process of reading that and learning about it as I did a year and a half ago, I think it helped me think more crisply about launching generally. So I think I would get value from that even if I wasn’t launching on product hunt. But maybe we’re coming back to this kind of event or moment. Part of what makes it work so well is your product page will basically last 24 hours. And so your website and even something like a blog post or, you know, a memo that you might do on your website, that’s something that’s obviously supposed to be long term. The website.

And the core message and whatever is there, you may adjust it and adapt it, but probably it’s going to be pretty similar for the next, you know, 6 months, year, year and a half. You might have a blog post or something like that, but with any luck that’s getting shared around for a week or two, maybe people are still reading it, even, you know, they put it in the relay or tool or whatever, but product hunt is really specifically time limited. It goes live at I think midnight, I don’t know, it’s GMT or something like that, or maybe it’s midnight US East time, I can’t remember. And then you have one day where people can upvote and post comments and you’re there as the creator engaging and responding.

And yeah, it’s a powerful thing because directing people to that link is a way to say, here’s our long term stuff, you know, go read that or watch this video or whatever, but here’s the event. Here’s the moment, here’s the place we’re gathering, and it’s a place for people to come show you support, but also people who are new to come and just like, feel part of that energy, maybe in a way that you couldn’t just with Twitter that has a very kind of fragmented social graph.

00:45:20 - Speaker 1: Yeah, now I’m thinking of Salesforce’s Dreamforce, which also had this property of being a known launch shaped container, although obviously it was a very different one. It was a very cool structure where my understanding was basically Salesforce said every year at this date, you can come to San Francisco and we’ll tell you everything that’s happening this year. And then people over a decade, they became accustomed to that and Salesforce was very successfully able to use that container to launch products. It’s going to show there’s value in having a place where both sides know they can go to get launch shaped things.

00:45:58 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that points to another reason why something like Dreamforce or Apple events work is you have to be kind of in a certain mindset to be interested in a new product, which is, for example, I remember at the start of the pandemic, we heard feedback from a few users and customers.

Of course, we were pretty early on at that point, but they basically said, oh, I’ve been, you know, forced out of my office for a little while and I’m just using that as an opportunity to kind of rethink my tool stack before I I had a whiteboard on my wall, and that’s where I would kind of go to pace and think. I thought, OK, what other options are there for that in my home office that is more constrained in space as one example.

But there a person’s in the mindset of changing stuff and I’m looking for new tools and I’m In that state of mind. And I think most of us, most of the time, rightly so, we’re living our lives, we’re working our jobs. We don’t want to change things. We don’t want to hear about new things. We wanna continue what we’re already doing.

Necessarily introduction of new tools to anywhere in your life and your work is going to be a little bit disruptive, and that disruption can be well worth it, but you kind of have to be in the mood for it. So maybe when someone goes to, yeah, Dreamforce, Google IO, an Apple event, something like that or watches it, they’re in the, they’re getting their set themselves kind of in the mindset of, OK, there’s going to be something fun and exciting here, and let me open myself to the possibility that I might get exposed to a product, be able to think in terms of how does this fit into my life.

00:47:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah, totally, and perhaps there’s a generalization of this which is that a product launch needs to prepare and calibrate the potential user for like how much the world is going to get shaken up by this thing. So Muse too, it’s still muse, but it’s a, you know, major version change, so prepare for a moderate amount of novelty in your life, whereas a little update would be smaller and sometimes companies introduce whole new named products, which is a way to signal to the user, OK, like, you know, buckle in, we’re doing something pretty different here.

00:47:58 - Speaker 2: And we’ll wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, write us on Twitter at MuseAppHQ or via email, hello at museApp.com, and you can help us out by leaving a review for the podcast on Apple Podcasts. And Mark, I’m excited to come out of our micro cave here a little bit first with the beta, but with the full launch share and share not just the 2.0 product message with the world, but also the larger message that we want to see folks be more thoughtful. We think that the right software could help accomplish that, and we hope that the software we’ve made could help accomplish that for you.

00:48:36 - Speaker 1: Right on, looking forward to it, Adam.