Lachlan Campbell
Adam WigginsFour years of my life, $2M invested, thousands of customers, and a product+team+brand I couldn't be prouder of.
A retrospective on my time building Muse: https://adamwiggins.com/muse-retrospective
The story includes:
• research origins
• rocket-ship ride after 1.0 launch
• golden age of the product and the podcast
• a mysterious crash from which we never fully recovered
• attempt at a B2B pivot
• team scale-down and product continuity
Takeaways:
• new document type + emerging product category = hard mode
• partnership model and gradual team growth was a delight
• strong principles can come at the expense of building a business
• iOS/Mac native has some big advantages, but you still need to be on the web
Overall this was one of the most fulfilling experiences of my professional life, even though it wasn’t a financial success.
I feel grateful for all the parts of this that worked: the stellar team, the podcast, the community of toolmakers we got to be a part of.
Most of all, I loved working with our wonderful users and customers, who shared our vision for a more thoughtful world.
❤️
Patrick Dubroy@adamwiggins Thanks so much for sharing this! It's super interesting. I was really pulling for Muse, and it's fascinating to see the details of all the challenges you faced.
[marsh] has moved!@adamwiggins I've been waiting for this! Thank you, Adam, for the transparency. Making some tea and then diving in
Kalbir@adamwiggins I loved this piece you wrote, both for the general "it's lovely when people retro I'm public" and for the specific thoughts and learning. Having followed Muse for a while I was definitely in the categories of "this looks like the kind of thing that would change everything about how I work" and also "can I afford an iPad just for this".
The problem you set out to solve is still very much unsolved in my reckoning. Excited to see what you do next.
Robert Atkins@adamwiggins You didn’t go deep into pricing but tossing about an idea in a similar iPad-first-productivity-app vein (but entirely different market), anything worthwhile seems to need a team of five to do properly, but is hard to pull in the revenue that requires to sustain. Can’t seem to square that circle.
@ratkins Yes exactly. The success stories I've seen are usually solo entrepreneurs or duos, and maybe they support themselves with freelance gigs etc for the first few years of development. Only grow the team years later.
But hard to do anything more ambitious with that setup! Obsidian managed to do it, there are plenty of others as well. But pretty rare and there's no reliable playbook like there is for fully-funded startups.
@adamwiggins Right! Getting all the design, dev, product, marketing and business skill in 2 people is, well, impossible (even if they had the time to do all those things.) If you take VC, then you have to eat the world revenue-wise to make it worthwhile to them.
Is the problem App Store race-to-the-bottom pricing (and subsequent consumer unwillingness to pay), VC rapaciousness or the inherent complexity in building a quality app these days? Or all of the above?
@ratkins Not sure there's any single problem. When we started Muse in 2019, I said that people's willingness to pay for software (vs expecting ad-supported/venture-supported stuff for free) was a blocker. Since then I think most folks have grudgingly accepted that paying (especially with subscriptions) is necessary to have good software.
@adamwiggins That reluctance to pay was a ZIRP? Hopefully.
@ratkins One uncomfortable possibility might be the extremely high salaries of tech people. If the average software engineer earned the same as (say) the average civic engineer, the cost of developing software would be far lower.
@adamwiggins As a software engineer I am… concerned by this on multiple levels. It kind of implies our work only has this value when used for monopolistic rent seeking? 😐
@ratkins I hope not! But maybe another riff on the same idea: FAANG total comp is so high that it sets an unrealistic bar for anyone working on smaller-scale software. I don't know, but it's a puzzle for our industry that I'd like to understand better.
@adamwiggins In a general sense both dev salaries and investor returns are a Pareto distribution. There are a lot more people involved in the long tail, but we’re mostly hearing about (and aspiring to) the top quartile. Where in software are the staid and boring private equity investors who are happy with a 20% return?
Nathan Manceaux-Panot@adamwiggins Still reading the article, but: the tension you describe between respecting your values, and making a viable business, is something I really dread with the app I'm currently building. I really don't want to compromise on my ethics and creative goals, but that might mean the app never becomes profitable—which would doom it in turn. Yikes!
Sasha Cuerda@adamwiggins thanks for the write up. I found muse late in the timeline but really loved the work you were doing.
Devine Lu Linvega@adamwiggins Thanks for the post, lots of good lessons in there. ✊ you do excellent work
Markus Müller-Simhofer@adamwiggins I just read your post. Very insightful and thought provoking. Since we are in a similar niche, makes me think what I can learn from your story. Thank you for sharing it.
Pirijan@adamwiggins really thorough write up and I can def relate to much of the pain points. What would be your advice to me/kinopio?
@pirijan Good question! Offhand I'd say "start as a one-person business and reach sustainability" but seems like you've got that covered ;)
Maybe resisting the urge to be an "everything app" with plenty of integrations—easier for you to do than it would have been for us, because you're web-based.
@adamwiggins good advice thanks. Ya that part of the article really resonated, still figuring out which of those many possible uses I should double down on in messaging
Barry Hess@adamwiggins Thank you so much for sharing this retrospective. Really helpful, and lots to think about as we’re building things at @goodenoughllc. (Incidentally, https://pika.page is the first time I've enjoyed blogging since I stopped using Scanty. :)
oliverw@adamwiggins Really enjoyed using Muse, but it was the integration into the team tools of Notion and Slack that were a barrier for us. Thanks for this insightful article, it was great to hear the behind the scenes/thinking. Your efforts, knowledge, writing and podcasts have been much appreciated. Look forward to hearing about your next adventure!
Mark Phillips@adamwiggins I've just got around to reading this (been open in my browser for a while, can't remember where I got it 😬 ) — thoroughly enjoyed reading the honest appraisal. Tough journey, but thank you for sharing the learnings.