Muse Retrospective · Adam Wiggins

Just giving my own perspective. It was hard for me to come across muse within my search for tools in that space, something about SEO was not working. Never had a single ad or organic content hit my timeline in social networks. I actively scraped the depths of YouTube to find their tutorial vids. Those videos had an synthetic and corporate appeal. I was expecting something fully geared towards students and creatives. The Teams integration made no sense to me. My GF does a lot of colored diagrams and drawings while she studies, and she does so in Google Docs! I’m sure there’re many people like her that never heard of the product. I don’t think they marketed to the ideal niche and for enough time. It seems to me like there’s huge value yet to be extracted. Being featured in the App Store, product hunt, etc may give an illusion of achievement but it means absolutely nothing because regular end-users never see this stuff! So, a very serious branding and marketing problem is my diagnosis. Perhaps it was confined to a northern enterprisey-techy-bubble the whole time? I personally think it would be a hit on among LATAM universities and schools.

I can say that the Muse podcast (which was about building software in general, not just their app) was one of the most refreshing things I'd heard. Great interviews with other product builders, and lots of examples that get into the weeds of what makes software fast, fun to use, or easy to build/deploy.

What was surprising was that there was almost no mention of Muse (the app) outside of this podcast, on the general web. Nothing on HN from what I could tell. Their Twitter account was very quiet, plus I never saw organic posts from people who were using the tool.

Which is surprising because the "Tools for Thought" space is chock-full of people online posting screenshots, knowledge graphs and talking about features.

It's crazy that there was more chatter about OneNote (the most boring free-form organization tool there is) and almost nothing about Muse.

As someone who's also developing a product in the tools for thinking space, and going through the ordeal of finding PMF, I can empathize with Muse's journey.

Even though the project didn't pan out the way they initially planned, they handled the inevitable ups and downs with a lot of skill. You can see the amount of thinking that went into their software. Even though this is not an explicit takeaway of the article, I believe that the biggest lesson is to aspire to the same level of craftsmanship that they've shown.

I loved/love Muse and was a happily paid user (still am).

It ticked a lot of boxes that no other tool did or does, and for that reason it retains a place in my toolbox of thinking/ideation instruments.

But there are a couple of fairly minor things (compared to the scope of the rest of the project) that stop me from reaching for it more often. They come down to factors that make the tool feel satisfying to use, and chief among them: does using this tool produce aesthetically pleasing output that I want to keep looking at, and want to make more of?

For me the answer was no, or at least I can get better results elsewhere.

One problem was the limited colour support. I understand their reasoning behind this - too much customisability can lead you to fiddle with your tools, so by limiting your options, you have no choice but to start putting pencil to (virtual) paper and get your work done. But I didn't like the colours, so the end result didn't look as nice to me as output I made elsewhere, which discouraged me from using it.

Another problem was handwriting ink. My digital handwriting always seems to look worse than on real paper and ink but for whatever reason, Muse is one of the least forgiving tools in this regard. Looking at my handwriting in my Muse boards made me want to use the text tools instead, which then meant I was giving up the benefits of mixing freeform note taking with sketching, and the other benefits that brings one to Muse in the first place.

It's hard for me to shake the feeling that with a little more attention to some otherwise neglected lower hanging fruit, the retention of a whole class of users would be rather significantly boosted. But at the same time, it's hard for me to imagine that my idle thoughts on the matter would bear out more successfully than those of the dedicated user research team originally behind the project.

So much good stuff in here. Inventing a new document type is really really hard. Agree wholeheartedly with those takeaways.

Fascinating conclusion that a TFT like Muse was a ZIRP.

Glad to see they're continuing in a sustainable fashion!

This is really beautifully written. I really appreciated the bit about his team being so good they deserved to be part of a stronger opportunity.