Transcript

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: We’ll just say that I’m so happy that you are taking this forward and making sure this product not only continues to exist and be maintained, but indeed to grow because there really is nothing like it out there for unstructured thinking.

Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Adam Wulf. Hey, good to be here again. Well, we’ll jump straight into it today because we have some important and honestly pretty bittersweet news.

So New Software Incorporated is the company of course that you and I and the rest of our team work for Wulf, and we’ve been working to build this beautiful product.

Unfortunately, I’m sorry to say we didn’t manage to find sustainable business. This is something we’ve been working on for 4 years now, and yeah, somehow the particular combination we’ve tried to do hasn’t worked, so we need to make some big changes.

So in the near term that’s big scale down of the team. I’ll be stepping away from day to day activities. Most of the team is moving on, but the potential silver lining here is, well, if you’ve offered to step up with a lot of passion and vigor to carry on, use the product as a solo printer. So there’s a lot to unpack there and we’ll dive into that throughout this episode, but I just want to lead with that news and maybe we can just start with a feelings check. How are you feeling right now, Adam Wulf?

00:01:34 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, it’s a weird feeling because I’m very excited about the future of Muse. We can keep the product alive, and I know we have a very energetic user base, and so I’m thrilled that Muse, the product will continue, but of course I’m very disappointed, frankly sad that I’m gonna be losing my teammates that I’ve enjoyed working with for the past 3 years. It’s been just a fantastic company to work for, and a wonderful group of people to work with, and Everyone will be sorely missed, absolutely.

00:02:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ll echo that.

I’m feeling a lot of sadness, particularly around exactly what you said, the team.

I really feel this is one of the best teams I’ve worked with, just the perfect blend of skills and personalities, really perfectly suited for what we were working on, great working chemistry, and yeah, I think I enjoyed the day to day of my job here at Muse the last 4 years more than probably any other venture I’ve ever worked on. And yeah, leaving that behind, you know, you and I will still work together as, you know, be in an advisory capacity, I’ll probably be a podcast host, so we’ll certainly be in each other’s lives and I’ll be in the muse world, but it’s a whole different thing from having a big team that’s, you know, fully engaged and working together all the time.

00:02:52 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. I think that’s the thing that’s been emotionally so difficult or strange or confusing to some extent. is so much of the muse I know is Disappearing or changing because the muse I know is the 6 of you, right? And so it’s all of my team is leaving and that’s, you know, extremely disappointing. But then the other side of it is there’s a lot of muse that is staying the same.

It’s the product is staying the same. We have the 3.0 release, uh, that a lot of our users are on right now and are enjoying, and that’s been a huge effort for all of us this past year.

A lot of exciting plans coming up to continue Muse and to grow the feature set, and so, I really feel pulled in kind of two different emotional directions.

One is honestly a grieving process of the group that I know and the group that I’ve worked with is moving on and is going to different chapters, and that’s hard, and at the same time, we use the product is continuing and I believe it’s gonna keep growing and has now uh Business plan that does fit, even though our current one, you know, unfortunately did not fit. I think there’s new. Business stability now, which is a great thing and really gives it a strong future.

But it’s such a weird dichotomy in my brain. My left brain is thinking one thing and my right brain is thinking the other thing, and I’m still trying to, I think, to pull everything together and see it for what it is, but it’s a lot to process, I think, for everyone, for all of us on the team and all the new places we’re going.

00:04:36 - Speaker 1: Well, before we get into what the future holds, what the new era of Muse might be, and why there’s still a long life ahead of it, I do want to address what I think is going to be the first question people will have, which is, you know, what happened or why is this happening? It seems like things were going great. Again, you have this beautiful product, we do have thousands of customers, tens of thousands of users, and how could you not make that work and The answer is kind of complex and I’m not sure I even have fully deciphered it, but I’ll try to give an executive summary of where I see it now and then maybe in the future we can dig a little deeper. So I guess to go back in the history, of course, Muse was born out of the ink and Switch research lab, and the lab’s charter. to look at how we can make productive and creative computing better, seeing the ways that computing has gone in the direction of consumption devices and sort of different forces, economic and social and so on, pulling on how our computers work and that having this effect on using computers for productivity purposes.

And the lab explores a wide range of research around that, and some of that research ended up turning into, or a subset of that was something we said, hey, we think there’s something commerciallizable here or something that could be turned into a product that could be not just a research project you read about and get inspired, but you can use in your daily life and you can experience what would it be like to live in this world that I can switch visions where computing is different from what it is today. So we took, yeah, all this advanced research on gestures and tablet devices, things like the canvas and canvas stuff, and obviously the local first sync, as well as many other ideas, and said, let’s take this, take a bunch of these weird ideas and see if we can put them together into this commercial product. And in some ways, maybe the simple answer there is the ambition of trying to do all of that, particularly in this emerging category, tools for thought thinking tools or infinite canvas. It just takes a lot. It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of talented people, all of that means money, but we didn’t want to go down the venture capital road because we felt that might create some wrong incentives relative to the things we wanted to express about this next generation, creative or productive computing. And so we sought out this kind of unique blend, you might call it a middle ground between, you know, on one hand, we weren’t like an indie developer just building a one-off app, maybe consulting until they get to something sustainable, you know, pure bootstrapping, but we also didn’t want to go the venture backed thing, fast growth, etc. We tried to go this middle ground, we took a little bit of investment money, but we charged very early, we charge a premium price, we tried to be customer funded. And we hoped that there would be this middle ground. I think you see that reflected in the size of the team, right? We’re 7 today. It took us 4 years to grow to that size. You compare that to a venture backed company that might be at 30+ people or more at that age, or, you know, the other extreme, the sort of indie solo developer who might work for many, many years before even hiring the first person, so we’re in that middle ground. And I was hoping that would let us do what we wanted and kind of turned out it was just like a middle ground that didn’t work.

And so essentially that leads to kind of why we’re doing what we’re doing now is we’re saying, look, we got to get out of that middle ground. And so one way to do that is raise a big venture round and we did explore that a little bit, but another way to do it is scale way down, make it into something kind of sustainable quickly and for the long term by essentially making the team down to exactly one person. So there’s tons to unpack there. I am looking forward to the opportunity first of all, to personally reflect in retrospect on this, but furthermore, I’d love to write an article for my personal site or maybe we explore it on this podcast or who knows, something like that where we can dig in a little bit more because I think we made a lot of really good moves and a lot of great bets. But also maybe there’s some things that didn’t work and particularly about the model of how we wanted to finance the company and the size of the team and our ambitions and whatever and so maybe there’s some learning there for either other companies that might come out of the research world later or just others that want to follow our model. So hopefully that’s a somewhat satisfying answer for now.

00:08:44 - Speaker 2: Yes, I think back at the 3 years that I’ve been with Muse and everything that we had set out to accomplish.

It’s really amazing how much of that we have accomplished.

There’s a new product segment now. Canvas tools and whiteboarding for thinking tools. There’s 1000 of these now today in in Muse’s footsteps, and we were really blazing the trail there as we started out 4 years ago coming out of In Switch.

We have a local first strategy, all of the data is physically on your device. We built out local first sync, which is kind of unheard of and is still at the research level but is working in production as good as any other sync and faster in many ways.

And then that last thing is the shape of the business itself, larger than a single solo developer but smaller than VC.

And it’s such a difficult thing to do new things, and I’m incredibly impressed at the number of new things that we’ve done successfully. And it’s just kind of a shame that one of those new things that didn’t quite work out was the business side, was just the structure and shape of how we’re funding this business.

00:09:54 - Speaker 1: Alright, so that’s a little bit about the past, but let’s look forward to the future now. What does this mean for current new users and customers? And in particular, this is a very interesting one because you’re stepping up in a big way here to provide some continuity and some continuation for this product we all love.

00:10:13 - Speaker 2: I think there’s two questions in my mind. One is, what can customers expect today? And what can customers expect tomorrow? And today, everything keeps working. Ms 2 keeps working. We have the Muse 3 Beta, which is either released by the time this podcast comes out or it’s gonna be released very soon. That has a whole host of new features. Collaboration, so you can invite friends and family into your muse board, you can invite your teammates into your muse board. You have separate workspaces, so you can separate out the sharing parts of your thinking versus the private thought sanctuary of your thinking.

So all of that stays the same and is even growing in the very, very near term, which is great.

And then for tomorrow, looking ahead, what happens 6 months from now, what happens a year from now, I am eager and excited to continue Muse development, and that means continued bug fixes, of course, continued customer support and customer conversations. I’m gonna be talking with a lot of you. I know a lot of you are already in our Discord community, which is fantastic. And there’s gonna be lots of new features. Over the past years, we have had goals and visions, as every software product does, that are larger than you could build an eternity. And there’s just so, so much and so many exciting things that we’re looking forward to building, and I’m picking up that mantle, and I’m gonna keep building, so it’s more new things, more customer requests implemented, more bug fixes implemented. Everything you can expect from a continued software development will be happening.

00:11:54 - Speaker 1: And when we first started to explore, OK, we’re coming down to the wire here and you know the numbers aren’t quite working and what are we going to do and it’s important to us that this product continue to exist and we do right by users and customers and how can we best do that and you, to my surprise, stepped up and said, look, I think I can do it on my own and At first that seems counterintuitive, right? We have a big team working on it right now, but first of all, you are basically the only person on the team that has the broad base of skills.

You essentially touch every part of the code, including the back end and the front end. You basically have led the whole kind of engineering effort around all the sync work we’ve been doing, including all the collaboration that we’ve done in the last year, but of course you’re also a very accomplished iOS client side developer. And you have a background in entrepreneurship and so forth.

And so the more I thought about it, the more I said, yeah, actually I think this is possible, and importantly I think it’s that.

The foundation we have built in this product and the kind of ideas that are embedded in it. I don’t say the hard stuff is done, but we tackled a bunch of things that would, I think, have been pretty impossible to do without a team like that Sinclair.

But now that it exists, iterating on that and adding new features is something that’s in reach for, well, certainly not every developer, but someone with your exact skills, and that’s why I got excited about that possibility. So maybe that’s a chance for us to talk a little bit about your background and yeah, just help the listeners get to know a little bit, yeah, what led you here to this adventure.

00:13:23 - Speaker 2: Well, I always wanted to be an entrepreneur ever since I was a little kid and I always loved software in particular, so I knew going into college that that’s what I wanted to do.

I graduated with a computer science degree as well as managerial studies, which is kind of like a pseudo business degree. It’s kind of as close to entrepreneurship as I could get at the time.

And I jumped straight into my own company, so myself and a co-founder founded Jotlet.net, and that was an online calendar application launched just before Google Calendar, if you can believe it. That’s how far back that was, and we were really fortunate. We put a lot of time and effort and love and passion into building that company, and we had a successful exit and sold that and was acquired about 2 years later. And so that really fed the flames for me in entrepreneurship. I loved every second of it and knew that that’s what I wanted to do. And so ever since then I’ve been working for startups or starting my own companies.

00:14:25 - Speaker 1: Two that jumped out at me, I think when we first got in touch with you, which we actually contacted you because you have some open source inc engines for iOS, quite a unique thing that’s hard to find and obviously very relevant to what we were trying to do at the time.

But then digging deeper in your background, some of the stuff you’ve worked on, including you made an app called Here File file, which was kind of a syncing-ish connecting to your home computer app as well as loose leaf, which in many ways feels to me like a proto muse. It was before the pencil. And that sort of thing, but you were making an iPad, digital analog paper, kind of sketching loose, I don’t know if you market it quite as a thinking tool, but you know, you look at that and you go, this has a lot of the qualities we’re trying to get in use, but was maybe too early in the sense that the hardware wasn’t there and hard to do as a single person, that sort of thing, so. I’m looking down this and other experience and just the UK, this fellow’s like worked on ink. He’s worked on iPad kind of loose sketching apps, you know, in the very early days, you’ve done sync oriented technologies of different kinds. These are like all things that are square and exactly what we need. So it was really quite the perfect match, I think.

00:15:39 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. I think one really fun thing is in the era of here file file, which was, gosh, over 10 years ago now.

This was even before or just as Dropbox was becoming a thing. The cloud was all brand new, which we all know is just somebody else’s computer.

And so at the time, I was really, and I don’t want Dropbox, I don’t wanna put my files somewhere else, I don’t trust iCloud, I don’t want things local on my computer and the term local first had not yet been born.

But in my heart, that’s what I wanted, and so that’s what your file file really was. It was a way for your phone to connect back to your home computer, and so that way your home computer was your cloud storage.

All of your things were in your control on software you control, on hardware that you control.

And what I loved about Muse when you all reached out to me was how closely it dovetailed with everything I’ve been doing until then.

That local first intuition with your file file and then all of the ink work and loose leaf.

And building tools for productivity and building tools to help people do better, and to help people be better and to think better and kind of reach their maximum. And that’s what I love about Muse is it keeps users in control of their own data, and it’s just a wonderful thinking tool that has helped me be much more productive and much more clear in my thinking, and I know it has for our customers and users too.

00:17:05 - Speaker 1: And you certainly do, along with Henry as well, some epic engineering architecture boards, you know, sort of flow charts and yeah, code screenshots and that sort of thing. So you become quite an accomplished user of the product as well. You’re often also the one who runs our team summit kind of planning decision section, figure out how to like slot all the time boxes and that sort of thing. So, also helps to be an avid user of the product, I’d imagine.

00:17:33 - Speaker 2: Absolutely, it is my go to tool, thinking through architecture problems and, you know, difficult coding problems and everything else, being able to diagram and Think efficiently is paramount when programming. It is the number one thing I do all day is just think that’s literally my job description and som is invaluable.

00:17:57 - Speaker 1: You know, it’s like that saying that there’s typing problems and thinking problems, and typing problems are kind of the easy one. That’s write the code, not to say that that’s, you know, it takes a lot of years to build skill as a good programmer, but once you have that, the typing problems are relatively straightforward. It’s the thinking problems, the knowing what you need to do before you’re starting to type the keyboard, and in the code, change the code, that’s maybe the hard part of the job in the long run.

00:18:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think it’ll be interesting because what I would love to do over the coming months and years with Muse is to bring even more of that thinking layer out into the public and out into the community.

And so sharing boards that I’m using to think through problems and kind of really code in the open.

What I’ve loved about working at Muse is how we’ve done that and how we’ve been so open in our progress and our process.

Sharing small videos of features as they’re getting built, adding things to the backstage pass, making sure we get feedback from users and that we’re solving the problem we think we’re solving.

And my goal is to continue in that same vein. I wanna be building this in the open with the community, not to the community.

00:19:13 - Speaker 1: I look forward to your Twitch live stream.

00:19:18 - Speaker 1: Don’t tempt me, mostly joking, but also kind of a suggestion.

00:19:20 - Speaker 2: It’s funny because that’s one of the things I did in Loose Leaf is I live streamed some coding and some, you know, who knows, I might end up doing that and Hey, let’s fix your bug life. Jump into the chat.

00:19:34 - Speaker 1: But yeah, for now, I think certainly our Discord community has been the place to be in touch and I hope everyone has sort of a sense, a little bit more of a sense of who you are and why you’re qualified for slash excited about this work, and yeah, I hope everyone will come in and say hi and they’ll probably be hearing a lot more from you through that channel and others.

00:19:56 - Speaker 2: Yeah, if you’re on the podcast and not in the Discord, please jump in the Discord, and I think we’ll have a link in the show notes, so definitely join and come say hi.

00:20:06 - Speaker 1: Alright, well, I think that brings us to the exciting part of talking about the future here, which is what we’re calling Muse 3. So we’ve hinted at this already, something we’re bringing into beta, but tell us exactly what is Muse 3 and how does it differ from the Muse 2 and Muse for Teams beta we have underway right now.

00:20:26 - Speaker 2: So Muse 3 brings together everything that’s in the current App Store version of Muse and everything that’s in the Muse Team’s beta. That includes new navigation, that includes colored cards and text formatting that were in the backstage pass, that includes collaboration is the biggest one. So now it’s not just you and your muse. But you can create a separate workspace and then invite family members, friends, teammates into that second workspace and collaborate live in real time together.

00:21:00 - Speaker 1: Well, I got access to an early build of what was going to become Muse 3.

Let me migrate forward from my Muse2 personal, bring all my data forward, and as soon as I saw it, I said, this is the muse I’ve always envisioned. This is the muse I’ve always wanted. It brings together everything we’ve done for the last 4 years in a coherent and holistic way.

And for me, one big part of that is this call it divide or Weaving together of the private thinking space, the private sanctuary, where you can explore ideas in relative, let’s call it safety, but also the shared space where I can collaborate with colleagues, brainstorm, plan, that sort of thing, and that those things weave together and things move between it, they may start in private and move to the shared space and maybe take some of it back to the private space and then having all that together in one app.

Really makes this be, again, the vision that I always had from you and the workspace model, which we can explain a little bit, but that allows you to have any number of collaborative spaces or private spaces, so that you can have different work groups that you’re collaborating with. And of course we’ve had them use for Teams beta running for the last, I don’t know, 9 months, and that is a collaborative space and let us explore all this thing like live cursors and avatars and presents and comments and so on, but it’s one fixed shared space with one fixed group, and I don’t think that quite captures where we want it to go. So this Muse 3 combination, this unification of these two different tracks into one beautiful app for all your thinking is just really exciting for me.

00:22:37 - Speaker 2: Yeah, workspaces, I think, are the real jewel of Muse 3, because you can create a private workspace, you can create as many private workspaces as you want, maybe for different areas of thinking, and then you get the full M experience. All of your boards, all of your content, all of your thinking, all of your ink and drawing, and it’s just the same use that you know now, where it’s a private, safe, thinking, relaxing place to be, where you know that you have full control. We’ve mentioned on the podcast before that thinking is such a personal action, and you need room to make mistakes. You need room to just be messy and Think through difficult problems without worrying about what the thinking process looks like to co-workers.

And so you have all that same privacy with workspaces, and you can create one to share.

You know, we have one for the Muse team. I have one with me and my wife Christy with, you know, papers about our car and our house and our chores and our our to do lists and all sorts of different things, but I think the real risk, and the thing that we were most cautious about was making sure that it was very clear when you were looking at something that was shared, and when you were looking at something that was private.

Because we did not ever want to get in a situation where, oops, I’m working on something in a shared space and I didn’t mean to, or oops, I thought this was private and it’s not. And so the way that we’ve built out workspaces in Muse 3, I think really respects the way that people work today and also gives everyone flexibility to expand out and share that work when it’s appropriate, or pull back and stay private when it’s appropriate. And that’s a real powerful thing. In a tool that is built for such deep in process thinking work.

00:24:31 - Speaker 1: Now workspaces are obviously the big banner feature here for ME 3, but even if you don’t care about workspaces or collaboration at all, we’ve been putting tons of improvements into what you might call the core app or Canvas features for the teamspa over the last almost a year it’s been now, so this includes things that were in the backstage pass before like headings and colored cards, but you also have connections between cards.

We have board zooming that lets you fairly freely zoom in and out. We’ve got a whole redesigned UI including a Tonav bar that has bread crumbs, which is a really nice navigation feature, a sidebar, and in general it’s a much more discoverable and approachable interface, and I think everyone, if you haven’t had the chance to kick the tires on the team’s beta yet, you’re gonna enjoy using those.

Oh, and by the way, search, one of the most requested features, and that will be in 3 as well.

00:25:22 - Speaker 2: I was gonna say, I think search is something I’m most excited about. I don’t think a day has gone by that somebody has not requested search, and now that it’s in the app, I’m using it all the time. I think everyone’s gonna love it.

00:25:36 - Speaker 1: So yeah, if you’re a member, you should be able to find a link to the migration guide to try out the test flight beta from U3 in your backstage pass, but this actually will probably be a shorter beta, you know, we’ll typically leave something in beta for 3456 months because we want to really make sure that we have time to develop it and thoroughly test it before we bring it out to the wider audience, but in this case, most of what’s here, we’ve tested pretty thoroughly in use for Teams.

So the beta here can be a little bit shorter, but if you do want early access to that and help us give us some feedback before we go live slash just support the new business, we’d love it if you’d buy a membership.

00:26:18 - Speaker 2: And at the same time, like we said earlier, please jump into the Discord as well. I’d love to talk with you and hear questions and feature requests and feedback inside the community too.

00:26:30 - Speaker 1: Now, speaking of the muse for Teams beta, and how that relates to the personal app and this unification.

It is the case that part of the story here, and again I’ll hope to get into more details in some future retrospective, but in the last year we have been testing a new market, right, which is essentially Teams or B2B or enterprise, sometimes is how those things are termed, and this contrasts to the original audience and to this day still the biggest user base and customer base.

Of the Muse thinking tool, which is, I usually call those, you could say individual people, right? These are people who decide they want an app like this on their iPad or Mac, they download it, they try it, they go, actually, this is really good for me, I’m going to pay for it.

But I usually would think of those as less consumers because it’s not really a mainstream or mass market product, but rather prosumers, that to say, they’re probably professionals, creative professionals of some kind, and they may be using it for personal life, but very likely they’re using it for their work in some way, you know, maybe they’re a freelancer and they’re.

Using it to sketch out projects for clients, maybe you’re a startup founder and you’re using it to kind of put together strategy, or maybe you’re an engineer working at a bigger company and you’re using it to do, for example, architecture diagrams kind of for yourself, but you chose the product for yourself and you purchased it for yourself on your own, you know, App Store, Apple account.

And that has different dynamics to a team says we need a product for shared whiteboarding or however they might think about it, for shared thinking, for planning and therefore we’re going to go and pick a product that we are all going to use and probably will be purchased together on some kind of SAS contract.

And I believed then and still believe now that those two markets, if you call it that or two buyers are pretty complimentary, and we did see that quite a bit in the Muse for Teams beta in the sense that a lot of the people who were bringing news onto their teams were people who were already avid users of the personal product, but it also had some Split focus, maybe conflicting needs, you know, for example, making the app more approachable for or being on different platforms like Windows, for example, is something that if you want to get your whole team on there, you probably need that. If you’re purchasing a tool for yourself, the need to be multi-platform is less pressing. And so that’s part of what we’re doing over the last year and I think that was a worthy path to pursue, but at the same time, it did split our focus.

So one detail of this is your plan, and I think part of what’s exciting about it is this, I think you’ve called it like a refocusing on the prosumers and essentially the individuals.

And so even though you’re bringing all these same capabilities that we built for this team’s app into Muse 3, you can still make a workspace and use it with your team. The focus is less on serving that need specifically and more back to basics with the prosummers. Am I characterizing your plan correctly there?

00:29:29 - Speaker 2: That’s exactly right. Going forward, it’s gonna be a refocus on existing customers.

And what this business model change lets me do is it takes a lot. Less growth to support one person, to support me as a solo entrepreneur, maybe a couple contractors, maybe a bit of extra, but it’s a much smaller revenue requirement. And what that means is that I can focus 100% of my time on existing customers, on our existing customer base, and growing to the same academics, designers, planners, managers. Teachers and students, creatives, all the people that came with us in Muse 1 and in Muse 2, and love the product, that’s the focus going forward, is build amazing tools for people that the people themselves are choosing. I think one thing that I think about with team tools, I think you’re right, I think there is a wonderful balance there, and I think it can work with both teams and businesses being a buyer and being a use case. What I love about building tools for individual people. is that they’re able to take their tools with them. And when you sell to a company, well, it’s the company’s tool, and you have to use it. And then when you go change companies, that tool is no longer there cause the company uses something else.

But when you’re buying your own tools for your own thinking and for your own work, you can take them with you. In your personal life, you can take them with you to your job with everywhere that you’re doing, it’s You building up your own tools for your own garden, and I love that about uses, and I love that about the existing customers that we have, and so that’s really the big focus for me is How can I help all of our existing users and customers be even more enamored with new than they already are? I can’t, how can I help them see and use what I see, and how can I bring in new customers? And there’s so many thinkers and planners out there that might not know that music exists. It might just be still a bit niche, and that’s OK, but I think what’s wonderful about focusing on individuals as the target market, as the customer number one. is that all of these are customers that care deeply about the tools that they use, and they bring this tool to their job, but then when they change jobs, they’re gonna bring Muse with them to the new job, and they’re gonna use Muse in their personal life, and they’re gonna use Muse with their family, with their friends, with others. And building tools that people choose for their life is extremely rewarding. Invaluable.

00:32:18 - Speaker 1: You make a really interesting point there about the choosing your own tools or taking your tools with you when you leave a job and go to the next one. And I think that’s part of why you see a lot of the new customer base are people who are freelancers, for example, or yeah, founders, but people who are not sort of taking just what’s given to them but have opinions, want to choose for themselves. I think it’s something like, you know, In kitchens, chefs bring their own knives, right, because a knife is so personal, maybe there’s some knives in the kitchen, but like ultimately for your main knives that you use so frequently throughout the job, you bring it with you because you pick one that fits your hand.

It’s a personal choice. And so I always liked that it was part of the reason why, even if we did see the possibility of moving into the team space later, I really wanted to start with individuals or prosumers, and I think it continues to be just the right market for this tool. It also fits together nicely with local first. And fits together with being a thinking tool because there I think, obviously there’s a case when you’re working for an employer, they own your output, that’s the deal you’ve made. You signed a contract, they give you some money and you give them creative output around a particular problem domain. But it always feels a little funny to me when you leave a job and you know, if you put the artifacts of your thinking into a, I don’t know what a Google Drive, a notion or whatever else, all of that you’re immediately cut off from as since as you leave. And I guess it sort of makes sense that like those kind of intermediate artifacts belong to the company, but I guess I just always feel like it almost feels like they were my thoughts. I feel like I should own my thoughts and that fits together with taking the tool that Sort of feels right in the hand and honing my data and I don’t know, there’s some nexus of things there that all fit together really well and I think that is the area where it’s called the early days idea of Muse, the 1 and 2 days. I think that really worked and why I think that getting back to that for Muse 3 was a great move. Well, maybe now we can take a little sidebar to talk about a more philosophical topic, but a pet one of mine, and I feel like a very relevant one here now which is leadership transitions. So we’ve been in the process of a handover from me to you, really from the whole team to you, but I guess me as the outgoing CEO and someone that had the overall picture in my mind, or at least hopefully did, and handing that over to you is something I’m familiar with because I’ve done it a few times over the years. One really successful example I can point to, or what I find to be very successful is ink and Switch, right? I ran that as the lab director for something like 4.5 years, and when I kind of had reached the end of what I had to say on it, or the end of the era, something like that, and I had the opportunity to hand over the reins as lab director to Peter Van Hardenberg, who’s been on the podcast before, and I’m sure we’ll hear from him again. And what he has been able to do, taking that and building on, I think, what I and the other early people created, but really expanding it a lot, taking it way further, making it way better, and creating a much larger impact on the world and a legacy that frankly reflects well on me. I could say that I worked on that for a long time, but then in the meantime, you know, Peter’s been at it for 3 or 4 years now and has accomplished great things again along with the rest of the team there. So I consider that to be a very successful handover in terms of the result, but it’s never easy to be honest. It’s kind of an emotion laden process. It can be confusing to try to dig out all this tacit knowledge that you have and of course it’s important that the new person coming in, the new leader coming in, be someone that has Their own vision, right? It would not be practical or effective for that person to just try to continue exactly what you’re doing. They need to have a new sense of what’s a vision for where this can go in the future, taking what was good about it before, but also bringing their own spin, their own take, their own vision into it and then you can switch example, for example, I think Peter really had this feeling that like Community that was starting to build up around this, this sort of research, HCI community, whatever you want to call that was really valuable. And I was less tuned into that. I was thinking more about essays and research projects, but he saw that this is an incredible asset, we should keep doing the research and the essays, but we should invest in this community piece and that’s been, I think, an incredible, incredible success. So. Here’s hoping that this transition will be as successful, but yeah, I’d be curious to hear from you about, yeah, how you think about this process so far, what it’s been like to shift gears mentally from owning, obviously a huge swath of the engineering, the application as well as thinking about the business somewhat to being just the overall owner of everything.

00:37:25 - Speaker 2: One thing I’ve loved over the past 3 years is Muse being such a small team, let’s all of us see and hear directly from the customers. Whether we’re in engineering or whether we’re working on the website, or branding or planning out future roadmaps, all of us have been very close to customer feedback and customer support requests.

That said, of course, over my past 3 years, the overwhelming majority of my time was still code. It was the sync layer in particular. It was rebuilding the database layer, some of the UI problems or UI features that we’ve been tackling as well. So it’s been very, very engineering heavy, and so this transition to me has pulled me back into the entrepreneur hat, which I have worn before, and I love it. I’m so excited to Start spending more of my time thinking about marketing and talking directly with customers in the community, and planning roadmaps for the next 3 months and 6 months and everything else.

But one big slice of this transition is just that brain shift, which takes time to think, what have I not been thinking about? For the past 3 years, because it’s not my job to think about it, and I know that somebody else on the team is thinking about it and is very capable, and suddenly I need to start unloading all of those thoughts into my brain too, and shifting my schedule around, which is exciting. But could also be overwhelming because it’s just a lot to feed into a single brain and over the previous month as we’re transitioning, it’s just a lot. Of data to move between biological brains without a Wi Fi or USB port. And so it’s all of those things that The intuition that you have, and the intuition that Yuli has, and the intuition that Leonard has, and All of the unspoken pieces of work that you do, because it’s, it’s your habit to do, and you’ve been doing it for so many years. The knowledge of the transition, I think is the easiest piece. It’s all of the unspoken parts of the transition that are the hardest, and that’s what’s so wonderful about this team is everyone is extremely experienced in their field. And so it’s been wonderful to learn from each of you how you’ve been doing your work, what’s important, what are the things I should focus on. I think I asked every single one of you, what do I not know that I don’t know? Cause I, I have a lot of questions and I’ve run marketing before. I’ve run, you know, very small entrepreneurial projects before, but every single business is different and every single process is different. So I’ve loved learning from each of you, yes, over the past 3 years, but especially during this transition. I’ve gotten a front row seat to see how incredible each of you are, and this team has been to work with.

00:40:30 - Speaker 1: One great trick you’ve been using on this is, uh, as you called the knowledge transfer boards, where you’ve essentially set up one board per person on the team, filled it with as many questions as you could think of about their domain and things they own and work on, and then we each in our own time, kind of fill that out, including, yeah, exactly as you said, that final question, what do I not know, which was an interesting.

Thing to think about, you know, trying to like tease out this like tacit knowledge when you’ve just been doing a job for a while and yeah, it might not be obvious to someone outside that your role, even if they’re working closely with you on the team, and then getting on to one on one calls to sort of talk through in detail on that and certainly our knowledge transfer board was a really large one spanning the realm from, yeah, how memos are written and different marketing and growth channels we’ve tried and Many, many other details, but then also taking a quick glance at the knowledge transfer boards you’ve done with others, which are also completely dense with things from the area.

So I can imagine that’s something that’s a little, gets your brain a little over full at times, but I guess this is also part of the fun of being an entrepreneur, which is that you do need to hold all of it in your mind somehow. So that’s a good trick you’ve used.

00:41:51 - Speaker 2: Part of me thinks about ancient historians. They’re writing out the history, they’re writing out the story, and they might mention, oh yeah, and then Jack and Jane, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, right? Well, we have no idea who Jack and Jane are, but clearly they were famous at the time, and so there’s knowledge in the moment that seems completely obvious to the historian. Of course, everyone knows this. I don’t need to add any context. I’m just gonna mention the name real quick, and then everyone will understand exactly what I mean by metaphor.

But then of course distance and time. Make that knowledge disappear. And so there’s some things that are completely obvious to each of you on the team, that for me, not being in your job and not being in your day to day and certainly 3 months or 6 months from now is essentially lost to me. And so the big piece of what I’m trying to do with these transfer boards and with this whole process is Find out as much of that local context that each of you has during your workday, that is otherwise invisible to me. That is perfectly obvious to you, so there’s no reason for you to mention it because, of course, but might be completely blind to me, and that kind of knowledge, I think is the most difficult to find during a transition like this.

00:43:11 - Speaker 1: Another piece of that that I think comes across partially through the knowledge transfer, but we’re also trying to do explicitly is just seeking to simplify everywhere that we can. So oftentimes you have just the infrastructure things, for example, that are legacies of something set up a long time ago and you just never got around to changing it, for example, our website has been in recent times, a mix of web flow, which we use to build some pages and NetLi HTML and coded pages, and we have a little Netify proxy that goes through the web flow.

And part of the problem with that, it’s basically fine for our team that are doing things on the website because we’re sort of used to it or whatever, but in order to have like less stuff, you need to hold in your head, fewer moving parts, obviously fewer services to pay for we’re thinking, OK, how can we just get this down to one simple way that this gets built and deployed, that is easy for you to understand that is, Yeah, just sort of more call it futureproof or just, yeah, just less prone to breakage, more antifragile or something like that.

And so that oftentimes feels a little bit like, you know, cleaning out your closets and you know, doing stuff you probably should have done a long time anyways and related as you did a pretty thorough audit of all of our monthly services that we’re paying for and trying to determine which one of them provide real value, where can we scale down, where can we switch to Less expensive stuff where maybe in some cases we’re just not getting that much value from it and maybe before, you know, relative to the cost of all these salaries, I don’t know, we just hadn’t thought about saving that small amount of money per month, but in the interest of being a really capital efficient, sustainable business, it’s worth your while to really take stock of that stuff and make sure everything it’s pulling its weight, and that’s all part of the process as well.

00:45:00 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’ve really been looking at all of these different pieces as the foundation that I’ll be able to keep building Muse on for today it’s Muse 3, tomorrow Muse 4, Muse 5. And what I love about local first technology is that there’s a lot of complexity in our Sinclair, that’s fair, but compared to the complexity of a typical web application, web-based application, In my opinion, our architecture is so much simpler to manage and to reason about. And so, starting with a very simple conceptually simple technology layer. And then adding on a few of our most core services, like you said, the web, the Netify maybe the, I think Hugo is the template generator.

00:45:53 - Speaker 1: I can’t remember that content system, yeah.

00:45:55 - Speaker 2: So there’s a few of those on top, but the core of the foundation of Muse and the core technology is strong, and I’m so proud of what we’ve built over the past 3 years that It’s gonna be really exciting to continue to build on this very, very strong platform that we’ve built.

00:46:16 - Speaker 1: And then I guess as a footnote or perhaps citation here for the transition topic, I want to reference a book that I think I’ve referenced on the podcast before, actually, it’s just really quite a helpful conceptual framework for these sorts of things that come up, I think frequently in the business world. This book is called Managing Transitions, and the basic concept is that a transition is something that’s different from a change. A change is before it was red, now it’s blue, but a transition is how did it get blue? And I think some of the examples they use or whatever is more like, oh, you’re an executive at a multinational company and you need to close down a manufacturing plant and lay off 5000 people. How do you handle that? Situations that at least I don’t ever expect to find myself in and I think most people don’t, but for me, that kind of conceptual framework of there is a transition you need to go through that’s different from deciding to do the thing or deciding what the best thing is. in particular, there’s a concept of the timeline, essentially the process you go through, which is essentially a kind of mourning of what’s past and a sort of neutral zone, limbo state where you’re very creative, it’s kind of a confusing and uncertain time. But also it’s like a fertile territory for new interesting things. It’s a very creative time, right? Because you’ve sort of like broken down the old assumptions and new things can arise from that and then a new order can emerge, and maybe hopefully a better one. But you do need to go through that process. You don’t jump straight to things are better, you start with, OK, we’re sad about what we’re losing, and then a period of time of some uncertainty, and then you find your new reality. So, honestly, that’s applied to every Certainly leadership transition I’ve ever gone through every change in job, venture, etc. where there needs to be some time to say, OK, you know, this is something I’m sad about. We mourn it in some way, perhaps we have some little rituals or ways within a team or whoever’s affected by it to say we valued what we had before and we will miss that and it was special and it’s time and now it’s, we’re moving on to this new thing. So, recommended book and definitely in this case, I think it is something that’s applying well, which is we’ve kind of been doing our morning a little bit on the team, but we’ve also in this neutral zone creative time, come up with this new plan for the future and I hope it leads into what’s actually gonna be a new and very promising era. So maybe that leads us to what’s next. So, we’ve already talked about the Muse 3 beta and the unification of all this work we’ve been doing into the one beautiful thinking tool, but yeah, what comes next after that? What are your priorities?

00:49:07 - Speaker 2: So coming up next, M 3 brought so many new features, both the navigation, the sidebar, collaboration, workspaces, of course.

The most immediate next step is gonna be to make sure that those features take root, to nurture those new plants, and to make sure that they grow strong.

A big piece of that is with the new collaboration side.

As I’ve mentioned, I have a workspace with my wife Christy. So, I would like to be able to stay up to date with things that she’s adding into the board, and she would like to stay up to date with the things that I’m adding into the board.

There are a lot of tools you can think of the Slack or the email inbox or anything else that has the giant red blinking, you know, 7 updates, click here, click here, which is very antithetical to a nice quiet thinking tool.

And so, one thing that I’m gonna be working on is how can I help people stay up to date in their collaborative spaces. Well, not making Muse yet another inbox, and yet another interrupter of deep work. The core purpose of Muse is deep thinking, and careful thinking, and deep work, and I don’t want to interrupt that with notifications, but of course, everyone needs to be updated. So that’s gonna be a very delicate balance, to make sure that that feature finds its correct home in the Muse universe.

00:50:36 - Speaker 1: I think that’s a really interesting area to explore.

There’s obviously lots of precedent, like you said, the red dots, dust and such been updated, but I also think of things like see new changes on Google Docs.

We’ve talked about things like heat maps before.

I don’t know how radically you want to go on that, but in the ideal world, you should be excited to know that, yeah, you’re collaborating on a board with your wife and you’re doing some, I don’t know, home decor project, and she was up last night with some fresh ideas and you get up in the morning and it should be exciting to see, oh, there’s some new stuff in here, let me check that out.

And to have it feel like something that is inspiring you, which I think has always been one of the key things we’ve sought in this product that it is about inspiration, rather than the feeling of, exactly like you said, an inbox to check or a to do list of things to check off, but rather a fresh influx of fresh ideas from your collaborator to get you inspired and for you to build on.

00:51:36 - Speaker 2: I think that’s exactly the right perspective. It’s about Letting that collaboration be a source of inspiration instead of a source of to do list, as, as so many kind of inbox shaped notification shaped applications end up feeling.

And related to that, I think.

In Muse 2, all of my content is created by me, and people have such strong memory with The spatial placement of their ideas and of their boards, and of their content. That’s what makes Navigating and use. So different than navigating in something like notion or Google Doc is use is spatial by definition, and that triggers that spatial portion of your memory. But working with other people, of course, that means they can move things or add things or change things and so suddenly where I put something might not be where it ends up.

So similar to how can I see the inspiration from my collaborators? How can we work together efficiently so that way my spatial memory doesn’t interrupt theirs and their spatial memory doesn’t interrupt mine, as both of us are, of course, moving and organizing things in our space.

So content organization and discovery is kind of what that box is in my brain. Some of that is search, some of that is linked cards. The new workspaces feature is, of course, part of that. There’s many new metaphors in Muse 3, and it’s gonna be important to make sure that they take root and grow into strong new features.

00:53:13 - Speaker 1: Yeah, another way to slice that would be. These major new capabilities, things like workspaces and collaboration, then have implications like, as you said, the spatial memory when you put everything down yourself is different than if someone else is there moving stuff around and putting in their own stuff or likewise that When you have new ideas that are being added to the boards that were not things you put there, you want a way to know about that. Those are all implications of these core features we’ve created. So I can imagine you could spend quite a lot of time exploring the implications and the follow-ons from those core new features.

00:53:53 - Speaker 2: That’s right, and then there’s of course just many optimizations and general improvements that I would like to make. Sometimes ink lag has been, you know, on again, off again problem in Muse, Muse one, really. So being able to spend time focusing on that, focusing on battery performance and making sure that Muse is not chewing through too much of your iPad or your laptop battery, just make sure everything is running at peak performance. Before starting on what will eventually become useful, or kind of the next round of interesting new features.

00:54:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. We’ve been in various ways pushes to do big new things like sync layers or collaboration or Mac apps, new platforms for essentially the whole time you’ve been with us, and again, starting from the foundation of what’s there, it’s very solid and known product, a known purpose, a known audience, the infrastructure for the local first is all built out and works really well, that leaves room for both these kinds of quality of life improvements that you’re talking about. As well as exploring the implications of those big, big core features, which may be smaller features, but that can greatly expand the utility of the product. I like the idea of spending a lot of time on that, especially in response to the customer requests that undoubtedly you’ll be hearing a lot of now.

00:55:21 - Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of the things on my plate are spring cleaning. Style issues that I see from an engineering perspective because I know the code, but might manifest in, you know, not obvious ways or not consistent ways to the user. So I definitely see these very first steps as cleaning up some of the things behind the curtain. You know, that we’ve necessarily needed to sweep under the rug.

Let’s finally clean out under the rug.

And of course, responding to customer requests and bugs and feedback and questions.

The community and users, current customers are my number one source of direction for what needs to be improved, changed, cleaned up, tidied up, new features, that’s gonna be my backbone moving forward is What are the common patterns and what are the common requests that I’m seeing? Does that mean a new feature needs to be built? Does it mean an existing feature needs to be tweaked or adjusted? Does something just need to be tidied up, but all of it is gonna be at the service of That are thinking, and at the service of current customers and helping those current customers and current users.

Think better individually and think better collaboratively with Muse 3.

00:56:47 - Speaker 1: Very nice. Well, as long as we’re talking about the future, I’ll do a little PS here, which is basically folks might wonder what’s gonna happen with the podcast, and I think it is a lot to ask for one person to run a product as sophisticated as Muse, but also being a podcast host would be, I think, a bit much and happily it’s something I enjoy doing.

So we’re in discussions now. The future here is a little bit uncertain, but I’m happy to say that the good folks that you can switch has said, They think that this podcast has been really valuable to the tools for thought community, for the research community, and have offered to step up to essentially help with the show running, the funding. I could stay on as a host, but maybe we’ll find different topics and purposes that are uh more in the realm of the weird and wild research world of I and Switch, but obviously that’s very adjacent to a lot of the stuff we talked about in the past, so.

Yeah, the idea is still evolving there, but I think there’s potential for some interesting things on the other side of a transition there. But at a minimum, you can look forward to uh me and Mark doing a little retrospective on the experience of podcasting and some of the things we’ve learned along the way working on this. Hopefully we’ll do that for the next episode and yeah, if you have ideas for what you think we should be doing with this, feel free to rate us.

00:58:11 - Speaker 2: I, for one, am excited to see where you take the podcast.

00:58:16 - Speaker 1: Alright, well, I think there’s a lot more we could say about the past, the future, and hopefully we will get a chance to do that, but I think we can wrap it up here. I will just say that I’m so happy that you are taking this forward and making sure this product not only continues to exist and be maintained, but indeed to grow because there really is nothing like it out there for unstructured thinking.

When I began the process of my own thinking about OK, what’s going to happen in this transition? What do we do? And I was starting to think about, OK, in navigating a difficult question like this, why would use Muse for that? What can I do instead? And I tried other stuff. I tried some text files, I tried some sketchbooks, I tried some other tools for thought, and I was just Thinking, you know, none of it scratches the itch to really tackle a big complex, potentially very emotional, potentially very strategic thing, use as the right tool for that job, and I want to keep using this product for a long time, maybe ever so.

I’m so happy you’re continuing. I suspect a lot of our users and customers will be as well, and certainly I’ll give a little plug here and just say, if you’re not a member already, buying a membership in the app either now or in the future to support Wulf and his efforts to make something sustainable for the long term would be much appreciated.

00:59:34 - Speaker 2: Yeah I need to send a thank you to you as well for even reaching out and finding me 3 years ago. This has been The most rewarding work that I’ve done in a very, very long time, and I am excited to continue it into the future and to make sure that MUS continues for many, many years down the line cause I agree it’s just the perfect thinking tool for me, for you, and for so many others. I’m humbled at the opportunity to keep this going.

01:00:05 - Speaker 1: Well, I think we’re absolutely lucky to find you, and it’s been an absolute pleasure working with you these last 3 years, and continuing to work with you going forward to the future. And yeah, I think that there is a silver lining to all this here, and you’re it. So let’s wrap there. Thanks everyone for listening. Join us in Discord to discuss this episode with me, Wulf, and our community, the links in the show notes. And Wulf, well, thanks for carrying the torch forward.

01:00:33 - Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks for giving me the opportunity.