Muse began life as part of a human-computer interaction lab called Ink & Switch. The lab's charter involved inventing a new computing environment that would better serve people doing important knowledge work: scientists, writers, entrepreneurs, designers, architects, and so on.
Mark McGranghan, Julia Roggatz, and I were working together in the lab and started to see a confluence of several tracks of research that we thought could become a commercial product. This included input devices and form factors (tablet + touchscreen + stylus), infinite canvas as a document type, and how digital tools can be more useful at the ideation stage of a project (which typically gets done with analog tools like whiteboards, sketchbooks, and post-its).
Julia had created a fantastic prototype that ran on iPad, and Mark had been the product visionary (and also came up with the name “Muse”). I was ready to transition from running a research lab to working on a commercial product and joined them to create a commercial spinout.
So in summer of 2019 we created Muse Software, Inc. Ink & Switch gave us the existing IP (name, product design, prototype codebase) in exchange for a stake in the new company, and we were off.
We quickly discovered that things that had tested well in the lab were simply too hard to explain to new users. For example, holding the stylus at a particular angle to activate different tools. Most of our early onboarding (done either in person or over videochat) failed in the sense that people did not go on to use the product.
Shortly after we started the company we were lucky enough to land Lennart Ziburski as a product designer. He immediately started finding ways to bring Muse closer to the status quo of what people expect from iPad apps, and before long we had our first handful of regular users.
My background is in product development (e.g. design, engineering, user research), but since we had such a strong product team already I decided to make my focus for this venture be storytelling. I challenged myself to figure out how to explain a novel product, build a brand, and generally get the word out to people we hoped to have as users and customers.
My first real try at this was starting an email newsletter. At the time this was a non-obvious idea, but the timing was perfect: independent writers, Substack, and the newsletter craze in general was just getting started. The early editions of our newsletter were a success at helping tell a larger story, test some ideas (including pricing), and generally keep folks on our waitlist engaged while we tried to get the product in shape.
For the company and team, we sought a somewhat unusual structure that blended elements from startups, indie businesses, and professional partnerships (such as legal or accounting firms).
Our “small giants” approach optimized for mojo over growth. We wanted a small, talent-dense team with a focus on craft, autonomy, and quality of life for all team members. We banished the term “founder” in favor of “partner” and tried to be transparent with all business matters across the team.
We took some capital from investors in order to invest heavily in technology, design, and brand—just as a startup would. But we started charging a prosumer price early on, intending to avoid further funding rounds, and instead transition to being revenue-supported.
We quietly moved from TestFlight to the App Store in early 2020, and activated a subscription paywall once a user reached a data threshold. Our team was nervous about this: as craftspeople it’s easy to feel like its not ready, see all the flaws, etc. But to our delight, we pushed the paywall live and several people purchased a $100 annual subscription right away.
But by mid-2020 I was having some doubts about the viability of the company. We had a few hundred active users—some incredibly active, using the app for hours a day to do important work like evaluating investment decisions or developing a master thesis. Of those, we had a very high conversion rate, with already 50 or so customers. But we didn’t have the growth we needed, and it wasn’t clear where it would come from. I thought a lot about whether the experiment of this venture was over almost before it began.
We were also struggling to find good messaging/positioning for our homepage. New users often wanted to slot us into “note taking” or “sketchbook/whiteboarding” neither of which were a great fit for the problem we wanted to solve.
The first three iterations of museapp.com. I loved “thinking canvas” but that phrase didn’t strike a chord with users. Based on early feedback, we tried a message of helping the iPad reach its potential as a creative tool.