An End, and a Beginning

Muse's spatial organization is hand-down way better than Notability/Goodnotes where each PDF lives separately in tabs. I also find it more intuitive than LiquidText and MarginNote 3.

I wonder if building "the world’s first large-scale local-first sync system" was a distraction from the core mission.

This is one of those things that developers love doing. There are a ton of cool algorithms to explore and CRDTs are really amazing algorithmically.

However, I would guess that most users, especially the users who will pay for this, really don't care about "local first". They care about working sync, and as a bonus, it would be nice if it works offline. Even enterprises probably want central on-premise sync, more so than local first.

I hope they can make it work as a smaller team.

I’m not an iPad user so I never got a real chance to try the product. The messaging here is a little unclear though: “we did not manage to make Muse into a sustainable business” carries a sense of finality, like it’s too late now.

And the product had so much promise - one of those I wanted to use but it practice found the gesture’s challenging.

On the other hand, despite amazed by their UX thinking, I tried to use Muse and the lack of structured content (tasks, lists, connections) was a deal-breaker.

I don't listen to the podcast, but it sounds like they did end up taking the VC money, and that crashed the business?

You can pretend you only have "one foot in" all you want, but once you take money you are no longer bootstrapped, and no longer in charge. Unfortunately.