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https://museapp.com/podcast/transcripts/24-small-giants/ Oct 05, 2023

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Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: There’s so many zillions of startups trying to try every single angle and opportunity in that area. And so the marginal return to investing your personal time in terms of the impact on the world might be relatively smaller there. Whereas there’s this whole space that I feel like is really under explored. And if you just make it about 80%, making a profit and 20% making a statement, that opens up all kinds of incredible opportunities. 00:00:29 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins, joined by Mark McGramigan. Hey, Adam. And Mark, since we last spoke, I am a father. Congrats. Yeah, it’s great, or at least the non-sleep deprived parts are great. I’m actually on parental leave right now, but I enjoy doing this podcast enough. I thought I could sneak back for just an hour here, but if my brain is not at full capacity, let’s just say you’ll have to carry things for us. OK. Now, way back in episode 4, we talked about our partnership model. And the context there was we were hiring the 5th member of our team, our engineering partner, and I’m happy to say we have through that process, we added Adam Wulf to the team, really great engineer with a particular specialty in inking, which is quite important for us, and he’s been doing great on the team, so we’re now 5. And in the course of that, of course, we talked about kind of the nature of the company and how it’s different from other models, particularly the startup model, but I thought it would be good to both first take an episode to talk more explicitly about what this somewhat unusual business structure we chose was, and then also it’s been a year and a half actually coming up on 2 years now since we started this thing and so being able to essentially say how’s it going? Is this working out the way that we expected. And just to frame things up a little bit, a starting place and a point of inspiration for both of us is a book called Small Giants, and I read this many, many years ago, I think when I was in my startup lifestyle, I would say, but it it had a big impact on me, and the book basically profiles a bunch of, let’s call them, businesses that are maybe have an outsized impact. But they’re less about huge size or making it to the S&P 500 or something like that. So for example, they have Clif Bars in there or Whole Foods, which I think at the time the book was wrote was really kind of an up and comer, independent up and comer, or Union Square Cafe, which is quite kind of unique restaurant in the New York area, since expanded to other locations. And the process of profiling these businesses, they showed kind of a maybe an alternate to, I think they’re thinking more an alternate to the standard kind of public company path, but I at least for me, I read it as an alternate to the startup world, which at the time I was just completely immersed in. I was kind of the only way to do things with the startup way, and this book suggested another path. 00:03:03 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that book was quite influential on me as well. So Adam, I’m curious, what from the book did you find yourself taking away the most and applying to your future adventures? 00:03:13 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, in prep for this episode, I went and pulled out my Kindle highlights as a PDF and scanned through those a bit, and I have to say I’m not sure it’s actually a great book in terms of how it’s written, but there’s just a couple of core ideas that really hit home. One of those is they talk about businesses with soul or another term they use quite a bit is mojo, which is kind of a funny one. They talk about optimizing for mojo overgrowth and growth, of course, a business exists to Earn money, that’s it’s kind of practical function in the economy, and growth typically goes with that, it’s almost a requirement. So if you’re not growing, you’re stagnating. And that is taken to a real extreme in the startup world. I mean, Paul Graham even has an essay, Startup equals Growth, which just says, that is your sole purpose for being, grow, grow, grow fast as you can, and the counterpoint this book presents is mojo and expressing something kind of artistically and Having the soul is something you can choose. Of course, you still need to pay attention to the business fundamentals. You do still need to grow, but you can choose to have maybe a different balance where you say, you know what, this mojo thing we want to optimize for that and have enough growth to be successful but not have it be growth at the cost of absolutely every other thing. 00:04:35 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. For me, there are a few layers here. There’s that first layer of, OK, you don’t necessarily need to be a huge business or to grow really fast. It’s a sort of mechanical matter, there are existence proofs of businesses that haven’t gotten huge or growing that fast, they’re doing just fine. OK, that’s great. That’s kind of the first layer. Then there’s this mojo idea of you can use the business as a vehicle to accomplish something non-monetary to make a statement. To do an artistic expression, and that’s something that was really important to me in starting this venture. I’m gonna spend the next 25, 10 years of my moral life working on this. I want it to be about something more than making money. And then there’s kind of a third layer, and I don’t know how much they get into this in the book and if you would even agree, but I think there’s a sort of arbitrage here where there are so few businesses that are operating with mojo, as it were, that you can have a sort of outsized impact if you choose to do so and do it well. This is where I think the small giants can punch above their weight class. It’s because so few people are actually operating with this mojo, this sense of artistic expression, that when you do, you really stand out, even if you’re smaller. 00:05:38 - Speaker 2: There’s some examples of companies that come to mind for you that are high mojo. 00:05:43 - Speaker 1: The one that’s top of mind for me these days is Signal. I’m not sure if that’s the company name or the app name, but, you know, I’m referring to the company that makes the Signal app, and I would expect they’re quite small. I’m not actually sure about the size of the firm, but it can’t be that big, but the impact that they’re having on the global discussion around the right of citizens to communicate privately is huge, and they could choose to have a huge impact going forward. So that’s one that’s kind of mindfully these days. 00:06:08 - Speaker 2: One that comes to mind for me is Panic. So they make kind of a variety of weird things, including, I don’t know, FTP clients, but also games. And now I think they’re working on a handheld game console and probably an example of a company that does have both mojo and a lot of growth, but maybe they took their time with that. The growth happened over a relatively speaking a pretty long time period and can build up slowly over time. Another one I remember you speaking about, we talked about this before, is Vanguard. Tell me more about the unusual structure there because I wasn’t familiar with it. 00:06:44 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so Vanguard is like one of the greatest business hacks of all time, and I feel like it’s an understudied story. So my understanding of Vanguard is the founder, I believe his last name is Boggle, wanted to make investing more accessible and more successful for individual retail investors, and he had this insight around indexing, whereby if you index into the market and operate those index funds at a very low cost way, it would be very beneficial to the people who are investing. Now he could have taken this insight and developed a huge and hugely profitable firm with it, but my understanding of what he did instead was he did this move where the firm is effectively owned by the people who invest in the funds. So essentially all the profits that would get plowed back into the funds in the form of lower fees. So he basically forgoes a huge personal fortune to help bring low cost. Indexing investing to the masses. And then it got to the point where it was so successful that it becomes quite hard to compete as a for-profit indexing firm because you can’t plow all your profits back into lower fees, right? Or at least your investors wouldn’t approve necessarily. And that’s kind of the sense of almost art that he’s shared with the world in the form of this somewhat unassailable venture to bring low cost investing to the masses. 00:08:01 - Speaker 2: index funds, you know, S&P 500, ETFs, guess what they’re called nowadays, is this huge technology, or maybe you call it a social technology or just a financial tool or something, but it had this huge democratizing effect for individual investors compared to the managed mutual funds that came before and yeah, the art. Start, as you say, you know, for me that is the reason I am in business is it is a vehicle for expressing something that matters to me about how I think the world should be or how it could be better and the business and the mechanics of all that, how it’s incorporated, how it’s funded, how it earns money, all that stuff is really a means to an end. Right, so optimizing for mojo, businesses with soul, expressing something artistically, that all sounds nice. What does this mean practically in terms of the business that you’re building? And here you start to think about these mechanics, which is, OK, you’ve got a group of people and you’ve got a thing they want to express. Product they want to bring into the world or a piece of art they want to create depending on how you want to think about it. That needs time, it needs money, it needs organization, and that leads you into what I usually think of as kind of a container or a vehicle, which is typically a legal entity, could be a corporation or a nonprofit. Um, and then there are certain models that fit with different kinds of businesses. So, for example, if you’re gonna open a restaurant, and for a lot of people creating a certain kind of food and a certain kind of environment, that is very much an artistic activity for them. You certainly see that if you watch something like the Netflix series Chef’s Table on kind of the high end, but I think even more for your local corner restaurant, many times those businesses are not very lucrative. They’re open because people are really passionate about food and sharing a certain kind of experience with their customers. But there’s probably a certain kind of legal entity you’re form and you’ll probably get funding as a small bank loan or some other things like that. And that’s extremely different from, let me start a startup, move to Silicon Valley, join Y Combinator, get venture funding, and ultimately you still have the legal entity, a source of funding, you know, way to hire people or bring team members on board and the sort of mission they’re signing up to, but the mechanics of them are very, very different. And there’s, you know, there’s a list of other things as well, including nonprofits, or even pure artistic activities, art projects, Burning Man art installations, or you’re starting a band or some, you know, writing a book or something like that. All of these need capital and ways to organize people. And there’s legal mechanisms for that. And so knowing both the mechanisms, but also what you want to express, and therefore, what is the right vehicle for that, I think that’s worth thinking through rather than reaching for a default, which is, I don’t know, everyone starts startups, so I’ll start a startup, for example. 00:10:45 - Speaker 1: Yep. Well, now you got me thinking about the Wall Street that stuff that’s going on on Reddit and in that case, I guess the optimal vehicle was a series of memes. 00:10:55 - Speaker 2: That’s right, I do think it’s ever evolving, and you mostly mean that as a joke, but honestly, the internet has brought us some new structures, right? We have Kickstarter, for example, Patreon. There’s new ways potentially to, in the end, it is really about organizing groups of people. Probably if you’re a solo artist, you’re painting, you’re painting, you’re doing something. Individual, maybe this stuff matters less, but as soon as you have a group of people over time they are investing their energy, their effort, their emotion, and certainly their money, then you need mechanisms, governance and understanding for both what we’re going to put into this and what we expect to get out of it and what our goals are and all that sort of thing. So that brings us to the vehicle we created for Muse, which I think borrows elements from some of the different types of containers we’ve mentioned, but we think also has its own special blend. Can you explain a little bit what that container looks like? 00:11:47 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so first of all, we did believe that Muse needed to be a commercial entity, and the main reason was, well, maybe two main reasons. One is you need a significant amount of investment to develop a novel product like Muse and bring it to market. We’re talking about 3 to 5 engineers or 3 to 5 staff members for 123 years. So it’s not something you could do as a pure art project, you know, say. Furthermore, if you have this vision of impacting the world in a particular way, it helps to have ongoing self-sustaining funding for it. So that’s another reason to make this a business versus a nonprofit or an art project. The meat of what makes Muse unique is how we treat the staff and the other participants around the business. And the top level thing there was we wanted Muse to be the place that we wanted to work and the place that we wanted our collaborators to work. And that meant a few things. One is we wanted to be a relatively team, which has a bunch of implications that we can talk about. We wanted everyone to feel like peers who were at the top of their craft and operating at the top of their game. And we wanted everyone to be treated as well and as fairly as possible. And in particular, we didn’t want to sort of founder class versus an employee class where they’re very different, as in typical startups. And lastly, we wanted a sense of dynamism in the staff and the team, where people come in, they go, and that’s a very natural thing to happen, and you’re less kind of bound and handcuffed to the company. And furthermore, you’re also not constrained in how far you can rise in terms of your impact and your influence and your ownership, just by virtue of when you joined. It’s more a function of your contributions and commitments to the company. So those were kind of our goals that inform the structure and then in terms of where we ended up, well, first of all, we did end up with the Delaware Corp, which is the standard vehicle for startups, among other things, mostly because that’s the best understood by all the potential participants, staff, investors, and has the best support for people having ownership, a variety of people having ownership in the firm, which was really important to us. But then where we went in a quite different direction was this idea of a partner. So at a typical startup, you have sort of three classes of people. You have the investors, you have the founders, then you have all the employees, and they’re all treated very differently and have different economics in the firm, and they’re a function of kind of how you join and how you come to be participating in the firm. And we want this model, like I was alluding to before, where it’s more like the staff members are peers with each other and have the opportunity to rise to that level over time regardless of when they joined. So that’s where our partner model comes in, which is sort of drawn f…

Full show notes at the publisher

https://museapp.com/podcast/transcripts/25-time-based-notes/ Oct 05, 2023

Show notes

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: The moment when you decide to no longer do your own support. Naively, you think, oh, that’s taking so much time. Primary reason to make that decision is to spend more time on the product as a developer, perhaps. But the side effects is that you lose all these direct touch points with your users to the filtering of features of what’s really important. 00:00:25 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins and I’m joined today by Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam and Alex Greekspoor from Agenda. Hello. And Alex, I understand in addition to being a company founder and a product developer, you’re also a musician. 00:00:51 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, that’s a big one. It’s a hobby. Anybody who has run agenda, you know, knows my music if you want to see it later. 00:01:01 - Speaker 2: So yeah, there’s a little video on the home page there, and if you hit play, you get some music in the background, and I think you were telling me that folks ask you, oh, where did you get that music from? And the answer is, you made it yourself, right? 00:01:13 - Speaker 1: Exactly, yeah. I had 2 or 3 requests where I could find it on iTunes, and my wife is always saying that you should put it there. But not, you know, those are the Easter eggs. 00:01:24 - Speaker 2: Well, this is part of the fun of being an indie developer, a small team, as you get to wear a lot of hats or do a lot of making of different kinds. 00:01:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and spend a lot of time on things that the boss wouldn’t have found justifiable, I think, precisely so. 00:01:38 - Speaker 3: It’s funny, I’ve had the opposite experience. We have some piano music on the video on our homepage, and people ask me if they know I play the piano. Mark, is that you playing the piano? No, I regret to inform you I don’t play that well. 00:01:51 - Speaker 1: Well, you know, it’s time to replace it. 00:01:54 - Speaker 2: But notably, yeah, the music in the muse trailer there, launch trailer is one of your favorite pieces. It’s one you’ve played, that’s why we chose it. It’s just performed by, let’s say, a professional, yeah, exactly, yeah. Well, Alex, I was really interested to talk to you because you work on this great app called Agenda, which you describe as date focused note taking, and some of the philosophies behind that I think are quite interesting, as well as being a beautifully designed app and has won Apple Design Awards and all that sort of thing. But maybe we could start with your background and especially I’m interested in your work on papers and how that kind of led you to agenda. 00:02:30 - Speaker 1: Sure, sure, yeah. I guess like I’m not a professional musician, I’m also not a professional app developer. I’m actually a biologist of training. And that as a hobby, I started programming and that basically got out of hand and fast forward 10 years and this is what I do now. But yeah, I started developing apps to help me in the lab. We were in a biology wet lab environment, and I always had an interest in working with apps like Photoshop, but never had gotten myself to programming. And then basically, in the early 2000s when Mac OS 10 came out, That’s when actually I started tinkering with the then new Coco stuff and everything around programming that was newly introduced alongside Mac OS 10, and that basically then grew, started making apps for in the lab, sharing those, all free, they were all free. And we shared them on our website and that’s basically how it all got started. And as I progressed, basically, the apps became more complex and You know, the next one and the next one and then ultimately, I wrote an app called Papers, which was kind of an iTunes for scientific research articles, PDFs, and that really kind of took off and allowed me to go full time in the developer basically. 00:03:50 - Speaker 2: Nice, and Mark and I have worked a bit with scientific computing tools and kind of creating tools for scientists who are working in the lab. And one thing that struck me there, particularly in the maybe in this modern era of, I don’t know what you call it, data science or whatever, but yeah, for biologists specifically, but I think the sciences in general, having some programming skills seems to be a superpower like whether it’s R or Jupiter notebooks or some of these more consumer-ish tools that are still programmingAT lab data, that kind of thing. You started there with kind of automation type things because app development or Mac program development. I feel like that’s a level up from what I think was the usual, a scientist that wants to crunch a few numbers, they’ve outgrown a spreadsheet a little bit, seems like you jump straight to the hard stuff. 00:04:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, but it’s interesting because actually, for me, the hard stuff was exactly a lot of the things you mentioned. And I think the interesting bit is that actually, I was not going from this area of I need the program for my science. For my biology, I didn’t really need any, I was not a data scientist. I was really a cell biologist doing microscopy work. And I wasn’t using any of the programming, little scripting. I had done a little bit of scripting. I had made some web pages more as a hobby or as a, to earn some money as a kid, but nothing really special. I actually, in the, in the contrary, right? I wasn’t able to do any programming of any form. But it was always something that intrigued me. And I came always in from the more visual parts. So I’ve taught myself a lot of Photoshop skills, or video editing skills, that kind of stuff. And I would love to make apps, but at the time it was like C++ and Gold Warrior and all kinds of very difficult stuff. And I was like, no way is this gonna work. But then when Apple released Mac OS 10, they kind of presented that new stuff, the new programming stuff that came from Next at the time as a way that it would make it easy. So I was like, oh, maybe somebody like me can now actually make an app. And I started looking at it. I actually bought the book at the time there was just one book about it. That they then advocated as that’s how you’re learning. And I was like, Oh, cool. Now I can finally make these apps. And I started reading it within 3 pages, I realized, no, this is just still serious programming, you know. But I was motivated enough by then to kind of really buy a book on C and kind of dig into it and put my teeth in it and really go through the hard part till the point where I could go back to that original book that I bought and actually got enough to get going. So I never used any scripts or I never felt like I could use it in my science actually. And that’s the interesting bit because I made apps that I consider not scientific apps in a way because you could better describe them as consumer apps for scientists, right? So you have kind of two types of apps or two types of programming, but uh, you know, you have kind of Two types of programming. One is for your scientific work and usually there it’s just a matter of getting the shortest route to your results. You’re not making something for general purpose. You just want to get to a result. 00:07:02 - Speaker 2: It’s just for you and the code itself is throw away because what you really want is the results. 00:07:07 - Speaker 1: And this is the opposite. This is kind of a consumer product. It’s a product you’re working towards a rounded off thing that others can use. It’s a completely different type of programming. 00:07:18 - Speaker 2: And papers, of course I’ll link the homepage in the show notes there, but you’ve got, for example, PDF reading and annotation on the iPad with the Apple pencil, other features that certainly sound familiar to Muse users. Do you have any big takeaways from building a product, sort of a serious productivity tool with heavy document capabilities that ran on the iPad, among other places? What were your big takeaways from working on a product like that for however many years you did? 00:07:46 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, to go back to how it started and how I kind of also think, I guess. I always think, what is the problem that I like to solve, right? And I almost always, well, always basically a problem that I have. And so I always make the app for myself as the first customer or the first user. And in the case of this PDF reader, we were in the middle of the transition to PDF, right? Before that, you would go to the library. Of your research institute and you would literally photocopy articles from paper versions and you know, when I joined that institute, there was just this transition going on. 00:08:25 - Speaker 2: What year was the transition from paper to digital? 00:08:33 - Speaker 2: Around 2000, 9, between 1995, 2000, certainly a while ago in internet time, but really not so long ago when you think of it. 00:08:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and the interesting thing was that We went through this same exactly this parallel with MP3s, you know, when Napster came out and these apps, you would have all these files on your desktop and you would have an app that basically would play those files, but you were still actively busy with an app in combination with files, loose files, and iTunes kind of solved that by creating a shoebox app that took away all the kind of concept of a file. And just basically bring the real concepts there, which is album, artist, song, right? And so I was thinking that we need that in science, basically an app that basically lets us search for author, for journal, and basically all these concepts instead of having these PDF files everywhere. And so I was at Apple conference in 2004, probably. And Apple introduced a technology for a database. They introduced a technology for a PDF reader and Spotlight, which was to be able to index PDFs. And I was like sitting in the audience like, well, those are the three components that we need to create a shoebox app for creating that Napster for research or that iTunes for research, I have to say. And so that’s how the idea came about, basically. So it’s about thinking about the solution or the problem that you have and then I’m able to see these components and then be able to kind of assemble the puzzle, basically. 00:10:05 - Speaker 2: And I think that is the genesis of a lot of great technology products is a new. Come along, then someone who’s familiar with the domain sees how that or in combination with other technologies can be put together to do something new that you couldn’t do before. 00:10:20 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s it. It’s not necessarily new because iTunes did this for music. So it’s not that I invented the idea of a shoebox app, but I could see that that’s what we need, but translated to this domain, right? And that’s I think there’s still a lot can happen in the innovation. 00:10:36 - Speaker 2: So it seems like that one was pretty successful. I’d love to hear about the journey that took you from there to your current work on agenda. 00:10:44 - Speaker 1: Well, in a nutshell, it’s the same kind of process because what happened was that fortunately papers became very successful. It allowed me to at some point decide, well, this is what I’d like to do the whole day. I was doing up to that point, everything in the evening hours, but I looked at some point, like, we got so much feedback, it was so motivating. I got so much drive to continue working on it. And in the meantime, I had started making money with it, and it was surpassing my postdoc salary. So you’re like, well, I can do this the entire day and live from it, you know, that’s a very easy decision to make. So then it continued to grow. I worked alone at it first and a friend of mine joined me and it kind of organically grew to about 6 people. At which point, And that was in 2012, 1 of the bigger scientific publishers approached me and said they wanted to acquire papers. And so they bought it and I joined the company and we continued growing the team. And at that point, my role became more and more manager than so much being an indie developer, certainly not indie anymore, but you know, also not any development at some point anymore. And yeah, I, I just realized I’d much rather go back to that original phase. So I decided to end that journey also because I had left the lab and scientific area for by then about a year or 10. So I wanted to focus again on something that really was a solution for a problem that I had, right? So, kind of back to that original setup. But interestingly, when I was at that bigger company, I had started hitting other problems. Also, that came back, basically. I was kind of transplanted back in these early days of a new career and you start hitting new problems for which you’re gonna think of new solutions. And that’s basically where agenda came out of. 00:12:47 - Speaker 1: Right, you basically traded your job as a lab scientist for a job as a manager of a small team and company, yeah, exactly, yeah, and then you hit very totally different problems and different issues and you start thinking, OK, what is the solution for this problem, and I kind of naturally start to think about it. It’s interesting because I never thought about it really, but for instance in the case of the PDFs. I started organizing those PDFs. I started manually renaming them, manually putting them in folders, and I in this kind of stuff, so that you start searching already in a very kind of primitive way for small solutions. And in a very similar way, when I, uh, when I was becoming a manager, I started in a very primitive way, starting to develop methods of keeping track of what was going on, keeping track of who I should talk to and what I had talked about with people, what the agenda for the next meeting should be that I had with my team every week, etc. And in the way of note taking. And that methodology has started to evolve to the point where I was like, well, that methodology works really well, and I can see other people in my team not doing that kind of stuff so well. So they could definitely benefit from this solution that I have kind of invented as a big word, but developed, basically. And then That’s where I thought like when I leave this place, I’m gonna, you know, take that kind of approach and just put it in the form of an app that then becomes much more accessible to anybody, really. 00:14:08 - Speaker 2: Well, and that’s precisely what caught my attention about agenda and brings us to our topic today, which maybe I’ll call time-based notes or you talk about date focused note taking, and I guess the meta element there, since we’re philosophical on this podcast, is that I feel that there’s this, I don’t know, type of product, it’s not even a category, but an approach which is taking a philosophy or a way of working and then baking that into a piece of software. 00:14:37 - Speaker 1: So basically, it started by just a simple realization that I should just always have a place to take my notes and seeing that not even that is what a lot of people do. So it started by, I started just using text edit and I always had already when I was programming, always had these kind of 4 or 5 text edit documents open, one for each of the apps I was making, for instance. Where I would get an idea and then just put it in, but also put stuff there when I found a certain bug or something that I should really add. It was kind of a living document that kind of organically shaped what I was gonna work on. And more also as a way to calm the mind, you know, knowing that you have preserved some ideas or some order and where you can find what you need to go back to, etc. 00:15:23 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the mind calming thing is a big part of the getting things done methodology. I always love the t…

Full show notes at the publisher

https://museapp.com/podcast/transcripts/26-no-data-moat/ Oct 05, 2023

Show notes

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: So I think there’s space and the good thing is that niches are powerful now because niches are big enough. So if you only solve a smaller problem, but you solve that really well, you have a shot at that. 00:00:17 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins, joined today by my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and our guest today, Valan Oros of Kraft. Hey, Adam. And B, you live in Budapest, which is a city I had the opportunity to visit for about a week some time back, did all the things I suppose a tourist normally does, got a bike, rode around, looked at the big beautiful bridges, observed the main government building, which is really a stunning piece of architecture. Power limits, yeah, looks even better in real life than in the pictures, I would say. But of course, that’s probably the tourists perspective. What do you like about living in the city as more of a native. 00:01:07 - Speaker 1: So for me, living in the city is really about being close to my friends and family. So I’ve been born in Budapest. I think Budapest is a very livable city in the sense it has walkable areas, it has greener areas, you can use cars. And really interesting part about Budapest is I always think, you know, we’re so small in Central Europe and nobody will know anything about Budapest. But typically, this is what happens when I talk to people, hey, I’ve been beat up and they say, yeah, I’ve been there, you know, I’ve been there for 1 week or 2 days as a tourist and I love the city. So it’s nice, it’s actually more widely visited than I would have assumed earlier. 00:01:44 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, Berlin is also a city that has a lot of tourism, of course, but uh it’s had a different feel in this last year when travel restrictions and the normally areas that are full of tourists are pretty quiet. Not, I don’t necessarily see that as good or bad, it just changes the energy is Budapest got a different feel in this last year. 00:02:05 - Speaker 1: Yes, it got a very different feeling and I actually have to say I loved it. So we have areas like the castle in Budapest, which usually, you know, us locals do not visit because it’s very full with tourists, and in these days it’s been quite empty, so I have a small girl and we went out there a lot and, you know, play on the cannons and in the old streets. So it’s funny how a little bit it felt like you can get back very loved part of your city for locals, and it has a very, very different picture. So at least there are some things that aren’t totally negative in the sense of, we did actually rediscover a big chunk of our city. And I like that a lot. 00:02:54 - Speaker 2: Um, yeah, that makes sense. I mean, obviously there’s a big economic impact for a place that is a big part of the economy is tourism, but yeah, good to find that silver lining, I guess. And before we get into our topic here, I’d love to hear about your journey that led you to creating craft, and of course maybe you should tell the audience also what craft is. I’m a user customer. I’ve used it to write any of the recent news newsletters. I also wrote a pretty long essay called Making Computers Better that was entirely written using craft, so it’s my go to writing tool these days, but I’d love to hear your description of how you pitch the product to folks and your journey in coming here. 00:03:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so it’s very interesting. So for me, Cry at Kraft is a product that helps me think, and I like to think a lot through writing, and it was really inspired by the fact that I’m a very mobile person. My job has been in the last 10 years of I ran a company which built mobile apps and then I ran mobile for Skyscanner, which is a flight meta search engine, so it helps you find flights, and I’ve been overseeing the mobile product. And I always had this frustration that it’s so hard to think on our devices, so hard to capture notes, so hard to structure our thoughts, and really this was the real inspiration for me of how could I use these beautiful touch devices and it’s not just the iPhone, it’s also the iPad. And when I started in 2016, we didn’t have the pencil or the pencil probably we had, but the first generation, and it wasn’t the iPad Pros, but you could just feel that this device is so much easier to move around, you know, you can pick it up, it’s battery life, it’s superior, so it was the tool I wanted to use for my work every day, but just the lack of software because essentially at that time, And even today, frankly, most iPad products are blown up iPhone products. They’re not really optimized for that form factor, and I think that drive of just willing to use that beautiful product every day, and being able to use it productively was one of the core factors of me starting craft, because on the web, on desktop browsers, there are many, many products that are actually really good. But when it came to working on non markdown stuff, because I don’t really like markdown in the way of, I don’t like to see the syntax, and it’s too techy in a way for me, there just wasn’t anything between the complexity of Microsoft Word and plain text editors, and I just felt I need something there to be productive, and this is what led to where we are today with Kraft. 00:05:36 - Speaker 2: That certainly speaks to me personally, but also in terms of some of the motivation for Muse, even though we started in this research background. One of the things that happened there was in looking for sort of tablet platforms as a potential place to explore power tools and then realizing just how good the iPad, and particularly with the pencil once that came along, what an opportunity that represents and how exactly as you said, how woefully underutilized that opportunity is because yeah, the apps just aren’t built for it. So another notable thing here is, I think you built the iPad version first and you have a Mac app now, but that’s built on this catalyst technology and essentially allows you to start with the iPad, do the advanced gestures and that sort of thing. What motivated you to do that and what was the experience like to put it across. 00:06:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so we’ve been iPad first, and then actually went to iPhone, and after iPhone did a tour on the Mac. And really, Catalyst was extremely challenging. It is still is extremely challenging, and the reason we did it was, we figured if it’s for free, because we can just use the same code base, why not do it. And at the start, it seemed very easy because it’s just going to work. But then as we realized that for, you know, a Mac product, we need to do completely different UIs interaction models. It did turn out to be quite an investment, and it is still an investment, but we do see that it’s being used by a lot of users and having access to their notes and writings across platform is extremely important for them. So we would have eventually probably built it. I think we’ve been a little bit overly optimistic on how hard this is going to be, and that turned out for now quite well, but honestly, we are still struggling with performance, especially on the non-Apple silicon chip Mac. So on the new Macs, it’s amazing. I mean, the worst Mac for performance, you wouldn’t imagine, is the 2019, 16-inch MacBook Pro. So what you would think is the fastest because If it’s not plugged into the battery, it uses a much weaker graphics card for that retina display and it makes everything very slow. So it’s very unintuitive, but it’s interesting. 00:08:01 - Speaker 3: Yeah, we had a similar issue with Muse on the iPad and the iPad Pro, where the iPad Pro, large version was that 12.7 inches, 12.9, yeah. Yeah, there’s just so many pixels and so if you have any inefficiency, even the recent models, you get frame rate loss, whereas the older iPads that were 9 or 10 inches, it’s not nearly as many pixels, it’s much more forgiving. 00:08:23 - Speaker 1: And especially, and then if you go back to the old old iPads, which have only the simple, the non retina pixel density, and your product just flies, and you’re like, 00. 00:08:35 - Speaker 2: Yeah, there is a little bit of this treadmill sometimes that hardware gets better and faster, chips get more powerful and everything, but then we want to do more with it, and retin is a perfect example where that essentially just doubled the resolution on both dimensions, but of course that’s multiplying the fact of essentially 4. Tracks load on all your graphics cards and memory and storage and bandwidth and everything else. So it seems we’re always in this home stasis of computers get faster, but our software doesn’t get faster because we use it to do more impressive things. And I’ll parenthetically note here you have a great guide to using catalyst that I’ll link in the show notes for more technically minded listeners. But if you put aside just the engineering effort, even the design side, as you said, the Mac is just a totally or desktop computers is just a totally different platform mouse or trackpad, keyboard that’s very different from Touch from Stylus, and this is something that’s kind of a point we harp on with Muse that we really do think that for a lot of creatives. So these 3 devices in your life, the tablet, the computer and the computer workstation, let’s call it, and the phone, and they all serve different purposes and they’re all important and exactly as you said, it’s important to be on all of them, which is why Muse will probably have a Mac app here in the future at some point. But if you just take one from the other, you take from the desktop and import to the tablet or from the tablet to the phone, or phone to the tablet, as you pointed out, is more common, you get this. The transliteration problem of you’re bringing an interface that is not native there and then it just feels bad, it doesn’t work well. So I would imagine that that process of adapting your sophisticated gestures and your sort of very modern writing tool to also be consistent with the tool that you already had on the tablet, but also be consistent with what people expect on the desktop, that seems like a big job and one that doesn’t end as you add new features, right? 00:10:23 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s very challenging. Like you mentioned 3 different device classes like the phone, the touchscreen tablet, and the workstation computer. And I think really the challenging is that these are merging, right? So when you think about the new iPad Pro with Trackpad and the keyboard, and it’s when you sit in front of it and you interact with it, you want to interact as if you were on a laptop. And then when you look at, you know, some of the new Mac OS releases and how those shift visually towards more favor in iOS. So really what’s very challenging for us is the iPad actually, because the iPad is this very hybrid device which a lot of people use as their laptops, especially students, and the same interactions, fully keyboard, you know, very rarely touch the screen, and then you have the other half of people who use it with touch or stylus, and it’s not even that segmentation because the same individual within a minute difference might, you know, take it out and use it completely differently. And it’s very interesting, for instance, we have a section in search like on Mac OS we show the search previews. So when you get a list of results, you get a hover or with the keyboard you can move up and down and see the previews of actually different results. And the real challenge for us is when you have a keyboard attached, we want to do this, but when you don’t have a keyboard attached, with touch you don’t really move focus. Between UI elements, right? You just touch on something and then it opens. So then we have to hide the preview area, and there’s no really strong API which helps you to understand if the user is actually using the keyboard at the moment or not. So I still don’t think we fully understand, despite starting on the iPad of are we going to base the Mac app based on the iPad, or are we gonna move the iPad towards being similar to the Mac, or is the Mac a completely different story? So it’s extremely interesting because this whole ecosystem is a moving and shifting target. So by the time you think you understand it, there will be a new accessory or, you know, who knows, maybe in March or May we’re gonna get a touchscreen Mac and then we’re gonna go completely bonkers. But it’s extremely interesting. It’s one of the biggest challenges I’ve had in my career, and it still is, of just figuring out how pieces come together. 00:12:51 - Speaker 2: I’m a big fan of multimodal input and being able to convert modes a little bit. I use my iPad that way. I basically haven’t had a laptop in a couple of years, and I use my iPad as my travel device, and I’ve got a full-size workstation that’s stationary and plugged into the wall in my home office. And yeah, the iPad’s convertibility between Flipping out the keyboard versus more classic tablet mode, landscape versus portraits, leaning back in a chair, sitting at a desk, pulling up the stylus, touch versus mouse or trackpad. I really like that and even something like voice input. I really like having a lot of options being able to switch around. I agree that right now both the design conventions have not yet evolved to cover, I think even a tiny fraction of what’s going to make truly fluid multimodal inputs work well, and then some of it is also technical as you said, there are cases where for example we needed to detect whether the virtual keyboard was on screen versus a hardware keyboard because you do different things. There’s actually no API. For that, I think we did some hack that was around just checking the viewport. If the viewport suddenly cuts in half, that means that the virtual keyboard has split up and now you might want to do something in response to that. But I think it’s a good illustration of the deficiencies there reflect that what you are doing, what I hope we are doing as well, are really on the cutting edge of this kind of new world of multimodal input and devices. 00:14:17 - Speaker 1: And, and when you say multi-modal, you know, one person might think 2 or 3 input sources, but we really have touch. You have pencil, which is a very different type of touch. You have keyboard, and then you have mouse, and you can never know which of these the user has or does not have. So designing interfaces and workflows, which can adapt to these. Or as you mentioned, we’re just not there in terms of design patterns and evolutions, and I think even Apple’s own products often are subpar compared to what could be achieved. 00:14:49 - Speaker 2: Yeah, but that also makes it an exciting area to work in, right? 00:14:52 - Speaker 2: Absolutely. I like to be on the frontier, so, exactly. 00:14:55 - Speaker 1: If you like to throw away stuff and experiment and you know, figure out how it could be better, it’s an extremely exciting domain to be in. 00:15:03 - Speaker 2: Well, maybe that naturally brings us to our topic today, which is software which is focused on interfaces. So the contrast here I think is that Kraft and Muse and a few others I might mention are really about offering you and selling you, right? You pay money for software that will give you a really great interface for doing the thing you want to do in the case of craft, that’s writing, in the case of news, that’s thinking. And the way that most software I think is kind of built these days or the value comes often from the data, right? So the fact that with Gmail or Notion or something like that, it’s that all of your company’s data, your emails or your documents are there, and you know, maybe the int…

Full show notes at the publisher

https://museapp.com/podcast/transcripts/27-playful-software/ Oct 05, 2023

Show notes

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: What I think happened was that you got people who knew how to bend and to mold computers and software in the same place as people who were very efficient and effective and curious and playful around things like design and getting things done, and had real needs, right? And sort of that’s some biases there, I think is what drove Mac OS to become such a successful platform. 00:00:29 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Use as a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about Muse’s company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And joined today by Rasmus Anderson. 00:00:45 - Speaker 1: Hello, hello. 00:00:48 - Speaker 2: And Rasmus, I understand you’re an amateur gardener. 00:00:51 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that wouldn’t be very far from a lie. I do have a little front yard, tiny tiny one, and a tiny backyard, and it is a constant fight with nature, but, you know, it’s kind of fun. 00:01:07 - Speaker 2: And I always find it funny, weeds are not particularly a thing that there’s no like clear definition other than just a plant that you don’t want to be growing there. So one man’s weed is another person’s desired plant, is that about right? 00:01:22 - Speaker 1: I think that’s right, yeah. I mean, I grew up in Sweden and I remember my parents playing this like really smart game on me and my brother, where we would have these, they’re called mscruso, which are kind of pretty, but they’re definitely weed. There’s these beautiful kind of yellow flowers, and they can break through asphalt. They’re like really strong growers. You know, and as a kid, you know, parents would be like, hey, let’s do like an adventure thing, and like you find all these in the yard, and like for each of them, we line them up and count them and we would just like, Wow, this is cool. And we would go and pick them and light them up. And our parents would be like, you know, behind the corner, that would be like, we totally fooled them. So yeah, they’ weeding as a kid without really knowing that I was doing that. 00:02:07 - Speaker 2: Nice one. We lived on a farm just for a little while, while my dad was stationed at a naval station that was kind of in the boonies, you might say, and my mom was a pretty serious gardener growing her own vegetables and fruits, and we had fruit trees and stuff like that. But I certainly remember that some things, the tomato plants grew fast and easy. There was the watermelon plants that we got one summer with me and my brother just ate watermelon and spit the seeds into a nearby garden bed, and then there were some others that were endless frustration for my mom trying to coax out of the ground. So yeah, I think my strategy if I’m ever in the position of being a yard owner, will be to just identify all of the hardiest plants that grow, even if you don’t want them to, and just say these are what I’m specifically cultivating. 00:02:51 - Speaker 1: I like this strategy. This someone once said this. I’m sure that there are like children books and stuff written around this. I’m not sure, but someone said this and I thought it was kind of interesting that there’s a gardening approach to like steering a system, right? And there’s sort of like more of the plan and design approach to steering a system, meaning that if you have this sort of like organic type of system, like a garden, right? Or maybe software. It’s going to just keep changing, and the gardener’s approach is that by doing something like Adam, what you were saying, you kind of identify the things that you want to cultivate, and you give them a better opportunities. And then you look at things like weed or things that you want to move, and you sort of like give them worse opportunities, right? You sort of steer the system like that and see where it goes, whereas the I don’t know if there’s a better word for it, but the planning and the signing of the system from scratch, you’re like constantly trying to hope that it evolves in the direction you want to, which is, I think, never really the case, right? 00:03:52 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that is I use gardening as a metaphor often for those kinds of organic growth things for something like a community where you just can’t directly direct what’s going to happen, what you can do is encourage and nurture and create opportunities, as you said, for the kinds of things you want to see and and discourage the kinds of things you don’t want to see. But that’s part of the joy maybe is you don’t know exactly how it’s going to turn out. If you come at it from a kind of a builder, engineer, architect perspective that I’m gonna plan down to every last little detail in the blueprint, and then I’ll make reality match that exactly, you’re likely to be frustrated and disappointed. 00:04:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s right. I think this somehow we just kind of slipped into this, and that’s interesting in itself, but this is kind of what I’m trying to do with my project Playbit. See, we can get into it a little bit more in detail in a few minutes, but I think that there’s this opportunity to encourage, sort of like a different way of building software, not like radically different, but sort of like somewhere in between big scale and tiny tiny scale software, kind of like personal software. But anyhow, I think that a cultural change, right? Sort of like creating this garden where interesting like plants and stuff can grow to kind of spin off this metaphor. It’s a really interesting idea, and that’s sort of like the core of playbit. That is the idea around it. That’s what I’m trying to do with it, rather than to build on a specific type of technology. Now, software is like part of, you know, my strategy to make the change happen, or at least I hope I can. But the goal of play but this is sort of like cultural change or really like offering and, you know, a different or a slightly different at least culture to software building. 00:05:39 - Speaker 2: Culture is so important, certainly for programming communities, but more broadly just creation of any end artifact comes not just from the tools and the materials and the intentions of the creators, but also this ineffable thing we call culture. Yeah, well, I’m really excited to hear more about Playbit, which is a brand new project you’re working on, just for the listener’s sake. It would be great to briefly touch on your background. You’ve got a very impressive resume fresh off of working at FIMA. Before that you did Dropbox. You were early at Spotify, and just looking down that list, you know, I find myself thinking, well, if you were an investor, that would be pretty impressive, and I would assume you’re just sort of leaving the things out that were misses. But as someone that goes to work for companies, you don’t have the ability to do such a portfolio strategy. I’m wondering if you feel like you have a particular knack for spotting high potential companies early on, or is it more a spot of luck or some combination? 00:06:35 - Speaker 1: That’s a good question. I think it’s probably the latter. It’s a little bit of a combination. Really, it’s this kind of idea of intuition, right? You have a lot of experience. I do have quite a lot of experience at this point, and I think that has put up these neurons in such a way that I have some sense at least, at least within this particular kind of industry that I’m in. Someone was asking me this the other day actually, this little Twitter like texting back and forth, but I think that there’s a couple of things you can do that don’t require experience to build up intuition. And one thing is just to like really understand what you like to do, right? And so this is not specifically around, you know, successful technology companies, but I think it’s like a foundational sort of like a cornerstone. To being successful with like, really anything, is to understand like what you really want, right? Not what your parents told you that you should want, or not what like your peers tell you that you should want, but what you really want. No, no, that’s really hard, and maybe that’s the hardest thing in life actually to know what you really want. 00:07:37 - Speaker 2: I’ll echo that as well, which is for me, I had this experience of growing up with video games and that being my passion, and I was just convinced I would go into the game industry, and that was my path, and I actually did that and then I was miserable and I didn’t like it and I what on paper you might say, or hypothetically, I thought I wanted to do in practice didn’t actually work for me. And then when I had an opportunity to join a company. Making basically from my perspective, pretty boring business software. I jumped into that and discovered I loved it and I was much better at a thing that I loved to do or fit with my natural passion somehow. So I think it’s also a maybe coming back to our gardening metaphor, a bit of a discovery and looking for opportunities and noticing what’s growing, what’s sprouting really naturally, and then encouraging. that rather than having some preconceived notion of what you think you should do, which might come from parents, certainly could come from, you know, the tech industry, which lionizes certain kinds of companies or certain kinds of people and instead kind of paying attention to your own internal compass for this is a thing that I could really see myself spending every minute thinking about for the next 5 years, 10 years, or career. 00:08:47 - Speaker 1: That’s just so interesting to hear you say that, but you had that experience, which I think a lot of us have, right? If we had this idea, maybe we want to be a chef or an astronaut, or, you know, a fire person or whatever when we’re kids, right? And like most of us end up not doing that, right? We end up doing something else. And I think that happens a few times in life where, like you, you know, We see this thing, it’s like very exciting, we pursue it, and then we stumble upon something else, and that just, you know, we stumble upon probably 100 different things, right? But one of those things where like, whoa, damn, this is really fun, and this is really interesting. Yeah, so getting back to your question a few minutes ago, I think that if you have that sort of like cornerstone idea of the learning about myself, it’s just something that I should always work on. Then on top of that, I think what you can do is To try to learn about the people that are working at various different companies or like looking for passion in people, like finding out what incentives are driving them to make a change. And with a change, I mean like a technology startup, right, usually exists for one of two reasons, and the first reason is that people want to make a change or want to see a change in the world, right? It can be a very small scale, a very big scale. And the second thing, I think that often you have these ulterior motives, you have power, fortune, you know, impressing other people, like all those things. There’s nothing bad about those things, right? But they are usually then hidden away that there’s this facade of like, no, we’re really trying to make a machine here with this YouTube for cats or whatever. And really like someone just wanted to like build a really cool thing so they can sell it and get rich, right? And again, there’s no judgment here if that’s your thing, that’s cool, but that’s not what I’m interested in. So that’s one of the things that I tried to see and figure out and really spend time on understanding when speaking with a company or a few people who want to make a change, right? Like, are they driven by passion for this change? Like, can they see this world and like, you know, in 3 years, if we have this thing, and people are using it, like, this is how their lives are different. This is how they can like do things that they can’t do before. Like that’s the sort of thing. To me it’s like, kind of rare. It might be surprisingly rare, actually, which is kind of weird. And to find that out, I think the easiest way is just to spend a little bit of time with a lot of different people. So if you’re interviewing for a company, ask if you can spend a few hours with 1 or 2 people on the team, rather than, can I spend half an hour with like 10 different people. 00:11:20 - Speaker 2: Interesting. So it sounds like you’re, you know, come back to that investor kind of analogy I made before where going to work for a company, you’re investing your time rather than your money, which in many ways is even a more scarce and valuable resource. You think of it as less in terms of let me a value. I don’t know, the market opportunity here, whether I think this has the potential to be something good or big or what have you, and instead more is kind of looking into the souls of the people who are working on it to understand their motivation and their drive and their passion. 00:11:52 - Speaker 1: For sure, yeah. This is probably a cliche at this point, but If you have a group of good people that you’re working on, it’s not that important what you’re working on. Right, I think that’s a very extreme way of looking at it. I think in reality it’s not as clear cut as that. It’s not as true as that. But I do think that it does hold true to some extent, right, that if you flip it around, right, if you do some sort of kind of Greek philosophy approach then, you know, you say sort of like, what if everything is good, right? So you start out in like ideal scenario. So it’s every person is amazing on the team. The business is doing great. The mission is something that is so close to my heart, like, I’m just thinking about it day and night, right? And so on. And now you start like taking things away, right? You have this kind of little thing in front of you, and now you start thinking that, OK, let’s see if I take away the mission, right? And I have all the other things still, like, does this feel like something I want to do for 4 years, right? Not in day, right? It’s like, oh maybe, you know, you start taking things away, and I think If you start out in the ideal case, right, you play these different stories out, and you take away the group of people, right? So you replace that with like, people who you would consider, like, not being good, right? Like, maybe they had a bad influence on you, maybe they create a lot of stress for you, maybe they’re just not good at the craft and so on, whatever that means to you. I think for most people, like, it stops pretty early in terms of like, yeah, I would still do this. Like you would be like, well, you know. With making such a big change, and I’m really involved emotionally in this mission and everything, but like the people I work with are paying, it’s like, I don’t wanna do that, right? Life is so tiny, it’s so short, and you look back in the past and the things you remember, it’s not the bugs you squashed in code or like the pixels you made. It’s gonna be the people and like. The change that the company is trying to make and the group of people are trying to make, I think it is very important, right? And this is where it really loops back the first thing that I was talking about a few minutes ago about like learning about yourself and knowing yourself. I have a few friends who are very concerned about the environment of Earth and stuff like that, and choose to leave their traditional tech jobs to go work for, you know, uh renewable energy companies and stuff like that. And for them, you know, the mission is very important, right? And the people are very important. So, I think you want to really like look at all of these different things, like, a group of people who are amazing, who are very unsuccessful at doing what they do, is not gonna be a fun experience anyways, right? So yeah, I don’t…

Full show notes at the publisher

https://museapp.com/podcast/transcripts/28-learning-from-games/ Oct 05, 2023

Show notes

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I actually say mostly seriously that games in the world of gaming predicts a lot of trends. So it goes from kind of pro games to mainstream games to consumer software to software for startups to software for enterprises. 00:00:21 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. U is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. How are things in Seattle, Mark? 00:00:37 - Speaker 1: Going all right. We got the cherry blossoms this week in Seattle, which is exciting, and it’s a sign that we’re turning into the strong half of the Seattle weather calendar in the summer here. 00:00:47 - Speaker 2: Very nice, yeah, we’re seeing just a little bit of flowers starting to peek out on the trees. Here in Berlin, although it’s always an experience where you see the first flowers kind of try to come out when it seems like it might be warm enough on those first sunny days in March, and then inevitably it turns really cold again and they all die. Yeah. So you see this thing where there’s the pioneers that are trying to break through, and then eventually the weather turns and it comes into full bloom, which is absolutely excellent for those that like colorful flower rich environment, like me, probably pretty bad for those with allergies, I’m imagining. 00:01:23 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. All right, so I’m excited to do an episode, Adam, about learning from games. Now, games, gaming, the gaming ecosystem, something that’s come up on a lot of previous podcasts. We’ve mentioned it here and there, but I thought it would be a good time to do a proper episode, collecting all of the things that we’ve learned and gleaned from that industry. 00:01:45 - Speaker 2: Yeah, we mentioned in passing lots of times. I think we talked about it last time with Rasmus Anderson. It was a big part of our conversation with Andy Works, and he’s since published a great article essentially on exactly this topic called Serious Play. I’ll link in the show notes, of course, talking about his journey of playing a lot of games when he was younger, then eventually becoming, I don’t know, an adult with responsibilities and, you know, you don’t have As much time for that sort of thing anymore, and then rediscovering really rich uh world of of games that exist now, both the big budget stuff and the indie games, and also what we can learn from that, why these are important as artistic, as cultural, and certainly as inspiration for design. So Mark, when you’ve been inclined to reference games in connection with news, productivity, software tools for thought, it seems like they don’t have much in common, right? The productivity world is very focused on, well, being productive, which is almost the opposite of what you think of games are for, which is entertainment. So why is there a connection? Why are these two things so relevant to each other? 00:02:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, that’s kind of the question of the podcast, isn’t it? Maybe we can start by motivating a little bit because I think we’re kind of sleeping on games as an industry. It’s something that in the typical world of Silicon Valley kind of flies under the radar for a variety of reasons, but in fact, games are a huge deal. It’s an enormous industry. They’re extremely influential in terms of the amount of time that people spend on them and the culture, and as we’ll see, I think there’s a lot of technology, products, social things that games have figured out. I think there’s a lot to learn there. 00:03:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, one comparison you can make there is Hollywood, right? Films, TV, and I think it’s well understood, or most people would say, yeah, of course, Hollywood and films broadly have this huge impact on our culture. It’s this really big industry. The celebrities from that movie stars are lionized in our world and in our culture, and everything from patterns of speech to social change has happened often through seeing things like, I don’t know, gay couples on TV and movies. I think that helped pave the way for a broader acceptance and legal change of that. And so, that seems fairly clear, but games maybe, as you say, we’re sleeping on them, they fly under the radar, they’re seen for some reason as less influential or less important, but of course, if you look at something like just the dollars or the total kind of money that goes into the industry, it’s actually larger than Hollywood, much larger than films, um, and maybe on par with maybe something like professional sports. So, this is something that is ongoing, already has had huge cultural impacts, and I think that’s even more so as new generations rise up. 00:04:35 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the professional sports analogy is really interesting and apt. For me personally, I kind of grew up watching sports. That was one of the things that I did. You watched American football and baseball primarily, but when I was an adult, it basically became illegal to do so. It’s actually very hard to watch American football if you don’t have like the satellite dish, you have to buy the package and, you know, I have. Apartment or how do you even get a dish, you know, it’s a whole mess. And likewise with baseball, it was actually quite hard to buy a subscription to watch baseball. I tried, it was not fruitful. So one of the reasons that I ended up getting more into this community of games is that it’s actually just much more accessible. So Adam, I’m curious to hear a little bit about your story and how you ended up there too. 00:05:13 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think mine is typical in some senses that I played games as a kid and they had a really big impact on my life, and this was particularly true when for a while we lived in a pretty rural area and basically there was not a lot of other kids around and I’d go like get up to trouble at the river behind our house or whatever, but at some point, did manage to get access to a computer and that was certainly when I learned to program, but that was actually largely motivated by thinking I want to make my own games because I played these games and I had these really powerful and mind expanding experiences and I thought I want to do this too. And I dreamed of growing up to go into the game industry. In fact, I did exactly that, basically dropped out of college to work in my first game company, and went from there to working at some other relatively high profile companies, and after a few years, I got disillusioned. And essentially that was because sort of the tools and practices were so bad. This is post hoc. At the time I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I saw these really talented people working these crazy long hours, 60 and 80 hour weeks, and death marches to ship products and what have you, and maybe somewhat. Ironically, or maybe that’s not quite the right word for it, but there’s an interesting thing here where that’s part of what got me interested in tools, creative process, and I thought, OK, I love the output of this. I love games, or at least games as an artistic medium, I think can be really excellent, but that at some point the big budgets and the complex technology that went into it. And some dynamics of the industry just meant that the process of making them was kind of terrible. Now, this was the late 90s, I think a lot has changed since then, including the indie game revolution, but interestingly enough, that was my path. One way you could put it, or I could postdoc describe it is that the developer experience for game developers in the late 90s was terrible, and that’s one of the things that got me interested in developer tools, but also the creative process generally. So, Roku was about developing. Experience and great tools and a smooth process and of course Muse is a tool for thought and on that dimension, but they all kind of feed into that. So the bad experience I had in the game industry pursuing what was my childhood dream in fact led into what turned out to be the uniting theme for my career. 00:07:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, interesting. So you originally sort of came at it from the developer experience as well as the user experience side, and I came at it more from the user experience side and I’ve since been learning more about the engineering side as I’ve explored the world of technology. 00:07:45 - Speaker 2: Interesting. You came in from a perspective of eSports as a replacement for sports, sort of. What were some of your first experiences or first games or first things you, I’m not even sure what you call a tournament, an e-sports tournament. What was it that was the seminal thing that opened you to this world? 00:08:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s funny. The beginning is sort of the present. So one of the games that I had played when I was much younger, like 20 years ago, it’s called Age of Empires 2. This is a real-time strategy game where you have a little civilization that you collect resources for and you use it to build armies and take over the world and so forth. And this is something I had played when I was a kid in the 90s, as one does, and had kind of forgotten about it. But then a few years ago, I saw that the game had basically been revived by this new sort of social technology around games that includes things like YouTube, Discord, pro tournaments, Twitch, all. These things to make it more like a professional sports ecosystem or community. And I sort of dialed back into that, it was such a fun game. And sure enough, there was this incredible vibrant community and ecosystem around it. And based on that, I started poking around more in the world of gaming and e-sports in general. And I saw more of that pattern. And then I looked into some of these more popular games. That’s kind of a really niche game. There’s very popular games like Counter Strike, which is another one that I played when I was a kid, and that is now a huge eSport. That’s a game where you have like a million people watching the big tournaments. It’s the real deal. There’s many professional players and teams, people do it basically for a living, and there’s an incredible amount of social energy around it as well as people just playing it for fun, of course. 00:09:18 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the competitive aspect is super interesting because I personally much prefer weird indie games that are more exploratory or puzzle games. You take it at your own pace, something like, I don’t know, Fez or Papers Please or recently been playing a lot of Babas you. So these really competitive games, particularly. I guess I can appreciate them, but maybe I’m just not a very competitive person, but I agree that the social aspect that comes with it, which includes these huge tournaments, which I have some insight into, there’s a great YouTube channel, Kora Gaming. Basically is by an insider of this competitive world of, I don’t know, Street Fighter and StarCraft and all these kinds of tournaments. And I also read a great book called Playing to Win by David Serlin, where I think he was a pretty high ranking maybe Street Fighter player, if I’m not mistaken, and he kind of goes and breaks down the elements that competitive games have their own special flavor because in the end, the thing that’s interesting about it is The other players and they can forever evolve, and that’s why games like chess and poker, for example, to take two, even though the rules haven’t changed in, I don’t know, decades or even hundreds of years, the game remains interesting and evolves because I think the meta game they call it, Playin talks about this, and Sirlin puts games like StarCraft which are still played professionally in these tournaments 20 years later, maybe like the Age of Empires you mentioned. Some of these Street Fighter games and so on, and that in fact is a sign of a truly good competitive game, that the game doesn’t need updates, it doesn’t need new content to stay interesting because what keeps it interesting is the other players. 00:11:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I do think that’s a big part of it. Games that are competitive in the classic sense where like you’re a competitor and you’re competing against someone that can be interesting for a long time, as you were saying, as the meta evolves. There’s also this whole other layer which gets to the sort of professional sports analogy where the reason these games have become really huge isn’t because people personally want to compete competitively. In the same way that American football isn’t huge because you want to be a world class football player, is because you want to be cheering for a team or a personality that you believe in, you want to kind of get into the play calling, you know, and understand that it’s basically a substrate for having a social dynamic. And people, they just like the competitiveness, not necessarily in all cases to compete themselves, although there are some people do. 00:11:46 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s fair. And I think there’s a few elements there again, looking at the sports. Example, which, while that was never a big part of my family life growing up, sounds like the way that it was for you, I’ve actually gotten more into European football since living in Germany because it is such a huge thing, particularly when the World Cup came around a few years ago. I mean, when a World Cup game is on, particularly when Germany is playing in, the streets are silent. There is nobody out, but you actually hear everyone’s TVs on or kind of Like in sync, but with like slight delays from the speed of sound, travel, and even like convenience stores will set up a TV they’ll just basically drag a TV out onto their front stoop essentially and set it up so you can walk by. So it’s this very unifying experience and actually a lot of fun, even though this particular sport of these teams are not something I follow a lot. That social element, that unifying element is, let’s say something I appreciate more now. Yeah. I feel also with sports, and this goes for e-sports as well, there is something about maybe something like the Olympics, which is maybe less directly competitive in terms of a lot of the sports they show, but it’s something about seeing humans kind of performing at their very best, like the very best at doing a kind of impressive thing. And people who have trained their whole life, and we’ve chosen the very best people in the world and put them on the spotlight to do this, and I think there’s something similar and it’s a different thing when you watch these, I don’t know, amazing StarCraft players do what they do and you watch them sitting there. It doesn’t look like much, right? They’re barely moving their wrist. to flick the mouse around, but if you know how the game works and you’re drawn in intellectually and you see what’s happening on the screen, and then of course you have the announcer voiceovers that help you understand the significance of what they’re doing and why this is interesting and the cheering of the crowd and yeah it’s quite interesting. 00:13:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s interesting you mentioned that. I think one of the reasons the Olympics works so well is that there are very universal athletic acts, running, jumping, swimming. It’s something that anyone can relate to. And so when you see someone doing it at a very high level, you can say, oh, I kind of understand what that would take and why it’s so impressive. And yeah, if you’re watching a game that you’ve never played before, it’s probably not going to be super interesting. But the reality is people are growing up on games now, and it’s becoming a huge part of people’s lives, and so a lot more people are in a position to appreciate and engage with these communities. 00:14:06 - Speaker 2: Now when it comes to the things that the productivity software…

Full show notes at the publisher

https://museapp.com/podcast/transcripts/29-thinking-in-probabilities/ Oct 05, 2023

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Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I can really empathize with it because even in my own sort of maths degree, I really struggled with terminology and notation. And I think a big problem in kind of maths education generally is that there’s a lot of focus on notation and terminology, and you kind of miss the forest for the trees. 00:00:25 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins, joined today by my colleague Mark McGranaghan. 00:00:39 - Speaker 2: Hey, Adam, and our guest Tamir Abdul of Kazul. 00:00:43 - Speaker 1: Hey guys, how’s it going? 00:00:44 - Speaker 2: And tamer, I understand you’re enjoying London Springs so far. 00:00:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I actually went outdoors for the first time in, I don’t know, 6 months or something. Yeah, I I’d forgotten just how nice it is to sit on the grass in the sun, just chatting with friends about nothing in particular. Yeah, it was amazing. What an experience. 00:01:03 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the ability to go out and enjoy, we’ve had sort of triple threat here in my household because we’ve had one, the lockdown, which has been pretty severe, of course, for the last 6 months or so. 2, we had a pretty serious winter. In fact, it was snowing today, and 3, I’ve got a, a young child at home, so all of those things mean that I basically barely leave the house. Happily I do have a dog, so I have to go out for walks on that. If it wasn’t for that, I would never see the outside, I think. Yeah, that’s pretty rough. Well, Tamara, maybe you can tell our audience a little bit about your background, including your podcast and the product you’re working on now. 00:01:41 - Speaker 1: Awesome. So I’m Taymor. I’m one of the co-founders of a company called Causal. We’re building a spreadsheet just for number crunching. So anything involving numbers, we want causal to be the way to do that. On the side, I have a podcast with my brother where we just catch up once a week and chat about whatever’s on our mind. And my background is mostly in maths, so I studied maths at university, and specialized in statistics and machine learning and that kind of stuff. 00:02:06 - Speaker 2: And what sorts of things do people use your product for? Is this a total replacement for a spreadsheet or just a subset of that? 00:02:13 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so it’s really just a subset of that. We can sort of think of spreadsheets as something like causal, our products, plus something like Air Table. So Air Table is kind of taking Over all the non-numerical stuff you might do in a spreadsheet. So making lists of things, managing processes, you know, internal tools and that kind of stuff. And we want causal to be used for anything involving numbers. So any time you need to sort of write formulas that do calculations or visualize data, that kind of stuff is really what causal is about. 00:02:42 - Speaker 2: And I certainly think that one of the main uses for spreadsheets for me in my business life, I guess, as well as helping others, is this modeling, often financial modeling, where you’re just trying to understand, cause of course, money is the lifeblood of a business, but how you earn money because that proves you’re providing value to people, as well as just not running out the money in the bank so that your business doesn’t die, and spreadsheets as a what if tool to understand. Both what might happen in the future, but in many cases it’s just the viability of your business model. One example I remember is I had a friend who was starting a retro kind of 1980s arcade, and they really wanted to run the games off of quarters, because that gives that authentic 80s feel, and then I’m saying, well, OK, but if you look at the inflation since the 1980s, a quarter isn’t what it used to be. This is a US dollar quarter, of course. So we actually modeled all that out and plugged in a bunch of what if values and basically figured out that under no reasonable, we’re just taking guesstimates for how many games an hour someone’s gonna play, how long they’re going to spend in the arcade, that sort of thing, but basically nothing we modeled showed that it would be viable to stay in business with all the costs. And eventually did settle on a model which was more like a flat rate, you pay $10 or $12 or something when you come in the front door, which ends up both feeling maybe more fair, more fun for the patrons, but also is actually viable. And I think it’s maybe an example of where having ranges, which we were talking about a little bit earlier, where necessarily know what exactly each patron is going to spend on drinks or quarters they’re going to put in or how many games they’re going to play an hour or whatever, but you can plug in reasonable ranges and from that you can infer maybe it ends up being like a Drake’s equation kind of thing in that scenario where you can figure out what’s viable and what isn’t. 00:04:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think this idea of ranges is really powerful. And I sort of, personally, whenever I’m giving an estimate for something, I get really anxious that my estimate is gonna be wrong. And it just gives me a lot of comfort in providing a range, because then I, I know that it’s probably right, rather than sort of precisely wrong. And so I find that even when just sort of communicating day to day, if someone asks me for an estimate of something, if I give a single number, then for the next 5 minutes, I’ll be like, thinking through it in my head of like, Oh, maybe that was wrong. Whereas if I I had a range, like, yeah, I think it’s between 5 and 10, then I sort of have the peace of mind of knowing that I haven’t sort of been too inaccurate, I guess. 00:05:06 - Speaker 2: And I think that’s also a way to train yourself to give estimates. I’ve run into this with a lot of folks who, exactly as you said, don’t feel comfortable giving an estimate because they feel like, well, I don’t know, but you can always kind of start with, OK, you know, can you guess the price of product X in a supermarket, or can you Guess the weight of this and maybe you can’t do that or you feel like you don’t, but you can come up with a number that is so low that it’s clearly outside the bottom of the range. You come up with another number that’s clearly so high it’s outside of the top of the range. All right, so now you’re working on it. Now let’s narrow this window in. 00:05:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s one of my favorite tactics is a strong word, but one of my favorite things is, if I’m like talking to a friend, and, yeah, exactly like you described, I think if you ask someone to try and quantify something that they’re not used to quantifying, then they’ll probably just say, Oh, I don’t know, I, I could possibly put a number on that. But then if you ask them, Well, is it more than 10? Is it less than 500, you know, you can actually get to a pretty good range. And it is actually helpful to know that range, rather than just put your hands up and say that it’s unquantifiable. 00:06:08 - Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, maybe that brings us to our topic for today, which is thinking and probabilities, and I thought it was really interesting that you mentioned this as kind of a founding idea for you and then maybe in some ways you moved away from it in the product or maybe just in the marketing. But tell us what it means to think in probabilities. 00:06:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. So the sort of origin story for causal, it kind of comes from some work I did as a data scientist in a previous job. I was working for a property tech company where, essentially, the company was placing big bets on houses. And so, in typical fashion, we had a bunch of spreadsheet financial models that would forecast the company’s cash flow, and some pretty big decisions were made on the back of these models, like how many deals can we do every month, how many people can we hire, so on. And one of the really important things for this company was understanding the risk that we were taking on in each deal. If we were placing a big bet on a house, the house might be worth a lot more than what we thought it’d be worth, or it might be worth a lot less. And actually understanding how those would affect our bottom line was really important. And, you know, in spreadsheets, Google Sheets, in this instance, we had to do a bunch of work around. and hacks to try and get at this idea of essentially a probability distribution for how much a house would be worth. And there’s various kinds of ways to try and approximate that in a spreadsheet. But essentially, trying to sort of get at this idea of probability added so much complexity to these spreadsheets that they became unmaintainable. No one really understood how they worked. It was very hard to actually iterate on them. And so that was kind of my first exposure to this problem of how do you crunch numbers when some of them are uncertain? How do you build probabilistic models to try and understand the world? And our starting point for causal, and, and sort of our original mission was kind of to bring probability to the masses, to build a tool that makes it so easy to work with probability and uncertainty and so on, that it becomes sort of the standard way that people sort of think numerically. Does that kind of make sense? 00:07:59 - Speaker 2: Yeah, to me it leads into the question of how much is it a tools gap that the average intelligent educated, let’s say knowledge worker that has a reason to want to be able to think in probabilities or model uncertainty numerically, how much is it that the tools make it tricky like you described with spreadsheets, and how much is it more a matter of It’s very hard for humans to think this way, even intelligent, educated people, it doesn’t come naturally unless you’ve studied math or made this your career or your passion in life that you’ve sort of struggled to apply this approach. 00:08:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s a really good question and it’s hard to know which side leads to which. An example that I often think of is this idea of having a line of best fit for some data set. It’s quite common, even sort of newspapers, magazines, to see like a 2D chart with a bunch of data points, and there’s some kind of straight line drawn through these data points to kind of extrapolate some kind of trend and tell some kind of story. And if we think about what does that actually mean? I think most people, if they look at a graph like that, they will understand immediately what the graph is trying to say. The graph will typically be trying to say that as this one thing increases, this other thing increases as well, or as this one thing increases, this other thing decreases, without a particularly maths-y background, you can read a chart like that and you understand what’s going on. I think the really cool thing about the line of best fits that is now just sort of super common and everyone gets it. Is that very few people, unless you’ve sort of studied maths or maybe computer science, very few people will be able to tell you how you’d arrive in that line of best fit. And the best part is, they don’t need to be able to tell you that. They don’t need to know that behind the scenes, you have to invert a matrix in order to, like, figure out this line or anything like that. And I think in that sense, just visualizing something in the right way is kind of a powerful tool to unlock intuition that we already had. And so, in the example of line of best fit, I, I can describe to you some effects, like, As you get closer to the center of London, property prices go up. You know, I can describe that to you. You understand what that means in your head. And if I showed that to you on a chart, you’d immediately kind of get what I’m trying to communicate. And so, I think the probability stuff might be similar, where so far, we haven’t had the line of best fit moment for probability. We haven’t found the sort of killer tool or killer sort of visualization that anyone can sort of look at and understand. I do think probability is just really unintuitive in general as well. But again, it’s hard to say whether it’s unintuitive because we haven’t had some really basic tools like just being able to visualize it, or whether it’s sort of inherently unintuitive for humans. So I studied a lot of probability and statistics in my degree. And so, after graduating, I kind of felt like I had a good handle on this stuff. But it was after actually facing a lot of these problems involving how do you account for uncertainty in models and things like that. I kind of realized that studying the theory of probability and, you know, being able to prove certain theorems and things like that is actually almost a completely separate task from having the right intuition about these things. And so, I think there’s a really common example that Naseem Taleb is a big fan of, which is that you wouldn’t want to cross a river that is 4 ft deep on average. And, yeah, obviously, if it’s 4 ft deep on average, it might be 8 ft deep in one particular part and you might drown. And so I think he often talks about the dangers of working with averages. I think another kind of Illustrative example, sort of to do with a buffet. If you imagine, you know, you’re putting together a buffet and there’s 10 dishes in the buffet, and each dish takes on average, about an hour to prepare, and the whole buffet is ready once all 10 dishes are ready. So each dish has an average time of 1 hour. And if you were trying to think about, you know, what is the average time for the whole buffet to be ready, it’s tempting to think that. 00:11:50 - Speaker 2: Each dish is ready in an hour on average, and so the whole buffet will be ready in 1 hour on average, but the two, the two answers you would jump to to there is either 10 hours because it’s sequential, or 1 hour because it’s all parallel. 00:11:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. So actually, even in the parallel case, it turns out that the average time for the buffet to be ready is actually a lot more than 1 hour and. This is sort of like the most basic example of where average outcomes don’t always come from sort of average inputs, essentially. But I think even after studying statistics at a university level, that would be the kind of thing that I wouldn’t immediately spot. And now having sort of spent a lot of time thinking about this and kind of building a product around this concept of probability. Any time I hear the word average, an alarm bell basically goes off in my head as to like, OK, what are like the sort of 3 or 4 different traps I can fall into when thinking about this problem through the lens of averages. 00:12:37 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I agree. I tend to think there are two big hurdles people have to overcome. The first is recognizing that you’re in a probabilistic situation, which is almost all the time that you can’t use a point estimate, you can’t use an average, you need to understand the distributions and the samplings. And the second is, what is the correct formula basically to use or how exactly do you mathematically navigate this probabilistic situation? And in my experience, most people miss the first step. They go to a point estimate and then it’s already over before it started, you’re not even wrong, right? You’re in flat land. Your answer has the wrong shape. And so I think there’s a lot of value in having tools that Help you navigate the mathematics once you’re over the first step, but perhaps even more so, tools, stories, experiences, histories that help people be more likely to raise the probabilistic flag, like warning, we’re entering probabilistic territory, that alarm bell should be going off almost all the time. And so I’m very interested in things that wi…

Full show notes at the publisher

https://museapp.com/podcast/transcripts/3-read-the-fabulous-manual/ Oct 05, 2023

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Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: What I believe, which is that a product that comes with the manual implies it has depth, that it fits together with being a professional tool, where probably the things you want to do with it are things that require skill and take time to learn, even separately from the tool itself. Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Use a software for your iPad that helps you with ideation and problem solving. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse, the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins. I’m here today with my colleague, Mark McGranaghan. And Mark, how are things today? 00:00:42 - Speaker 2: Doing all right, thanks, Adam. How are you? 00:00:44 - Speaker 1: Doing well, we just had uh the spring weather break here in Berlin, so even though we’re still on home lockdown, uh, going out to enjoy the flowers in bloom and trees, uh, in starting to turn green and the kids out, uh, families out and taking my dog out for a walk. It’s uh it’s a nice break after the the long winter. So I’m very excited about our topic today, and that is manuals. So we just finished, uh, really should say you and Leonard just finished the Muse interface handbook. Put a link to that in the show notes. And I think this is a, a lovely piece of work that sort of shows the command vocabulary gestures that you can, uh, you can use with the Muse application. But the path that we took to get here is maybe an interesting one. I want to tell that story a little bit. When the team started talking about whether we needed some kind of manual or handbook or user’s guide or something like that, it really caused me to go and start reflecting a lot on what I thought makes a good manual. One experience for me that really stuck in my mind was this experience of getting a rocket espresso machine. Do you know these devices? 00:01:49 - Speaker 2: I think I’ve maybe seen it at your place or I know of it, yeah. 00:01:53 - Speaker 1: I think I got this machine around the same time as I also got some other kitchen appliances. Maybe there was like um like a slow cooker, rice cooker thing, and there was a stark contrast where the, the slow cooker came with this. Thin black and white tiny print thing that was like in 8 languages and I had to hunt through to find the English and even then it was. I don’t know, pages of boilerplate about, you know, plugging it into the right socket and don’t take it to the bathtub with you and so on, and just getting to the information I wanted, which was how to use the device to cook things, uh, was quite difficult. The rocket machine by comparison, has this lovely, uh, manual that’s sort of this a full color, it’s bound and the right on the cover it says something along the lines of how to use your machine and and make beautiful coffee. And describing what I want to accomplish as a user and it’s, it’s a quite rich technical manual that covers a lot of, has a lot of depth and certainly I think it has the safety warnings and whatever in the back somewhere, but it really was this inspiring thing that gave me enthusiasm and excitement to uh get using this product versus such a stark contrast to the basically the very sad, uh, manuals that come with uh other kinds of kitchen appliances. So that was, that was a powerful experience for me. What for you Mark makes a good manual? 00:03:16 - Speaker 2: Well, I think your example points to a few things. One is the sense of like impute that you get from actually first seeing the manual. You infer the quality of the product and the experience that you should expect from what you see in the manual. So it’s a very dull, poorly designed, uninspired manual. You might expect the same thing in the product reasonably, whereas if it’s a very, you know, well done, well designed, uh, well thought out, um, piece of work, you might again expect the same thing on the product side. Two products that I have some experience with here. One is go by example, um, which is. On the edge of being a manual, it’s kind of a website, you know, this is the site for learning the Go programming language, uh, but the idea there was to have a very example-based approach to learning. Uh, the Go programming language instead of a very abstract word-based approach. So here you go to the site, it’s basically a series of, of lightly annotated example programs so you can see just exactly how to do it. It’s a show don’t tell situation, which I think is by the way similar to the espresso machine manual you mentioned. You can imagine trying to work an espresso machine just on the basis of text. It’s like pull this lever, then depress that knob and put more water in here. It’s like what does that even mean, right? It’s so much better when you can actually see it illustrated. 00:04:30 - Speaker 1: So some examples of prior art, I think we collected we’re thinking about this, um, included uh things that we’ve worked on, of course. Go by example is a good one. for me, the, um, the early Hiroku documentation, which I think was just a little static website that had, I don’t know, a dozen pages on it, each one of which was describing how to do. Particular thing with the platform, very simple, but easy to easy to navigate. Nowadays, uh, the product has this huge dev center that is, you know, fits the sort of complexity and and quantity of capabilities that exists in that product. So sometimes maybe the the earlier products because they can have such simple manuals, uh, that can be that can be more fun. When I was looking for prior art on, um, manuals, maybe more currently, particularly around the iOS and particularly iPad apps, I looked at Ulysses, a working copy has a pretty nice one that’s sort of embedded in the, like the, the settings menu, but you can also go to his website. Uh, Goodotes has some interesting documentation with some nice kind of animations and and visuals. Um, and then Procreate was a really interesting one because they have this really beautifully made, um, so Procreates a sort of a professional art application. And fitting to that product, they have this really beautifully made, I think you can get it as an iBook, but it almost unfolds more like a presentation or something, something like that. So I think it fits the the visual style and the the beauty that you would expect from an art product. 00:05:56 - Speaker 2: Uh, another example that that I had thought about was the stripe API docs. And again, there’s this very example based practical approach where they give you, they literally give you commands that if you paste into your terminal, will execute completely the uh API endpoint in question. And for me, that’s always a huge thing with documentation. What is the specific series of actions that I need to undertake to get the result that I want, like enumerate step. 00:06:22 - Speaker 1: Yeah, instructions I think are a underrated thing. Format is huge, and I, I think that almost always you want multiple formats. So for example, yeah, the Unix man pages for those that aren’t familiar, it’s basically the Unix is a command line driven environment so you type type commands. And you can type man, short for manual space, a command that you are interested in, and it will basically show you the documentation for that. So it’s very in line in, in, it’s right in the environment where you want it. Um, and I think some of the folks some of the examples we went to look at, um, had a version of that as well. So I think the, you know, the, the working copy users’ guide, you can look at it in the app, but you can also download it as a PDF, but you can also go view it on the web. 00:07:09 - Speaker 2: One other format that was actually an inspiration for me here was YouTube. YouTube has become incredibly important for uh transmitting tacit knowledge on the web. There’s actually an article we can link to this, uh, in the show notes, um, but video allows you to Um, understand all the implicit and subtle, you know, physical movements, um, you know, mental models people have in their head when they’re telling you how to do something. So for things like, you know, cooking or woodworking or playing a game, these are quite hard to explain like in text, even with diagrams, um, and having the, the video there is super helpful and um I think we’re just gonna see more and more uh things moving to video and YouTube because it’s such a powerful medium. 00:07:49 - Speaker 1: How did people figure out how to do like DIY things around the house before YouTube existed? I mean, YouTube didn’t exist for a lot of my life, and sometime I figured it, I figured it out, but I honestly can’t remember what I did back then. Yeah, it’s an incredible repository for, as you said, tacit knowledge and things that certainly things that cannot be conveyed well in the abstract. Nature of just uh written prose. One thing we talked about when we were thinking about the manual as well is the, let’s call it the bottom up versus the top down. And I think the uh the bottom up was more what you see when you view an individual man page, when you Google something and see a stack overflow, you’re looking for a solution to some specific problem in the moment, and you don’t want to see all the documentation, you just want your specific nugget of information. But I think another, uh, maybe underappreciated role that manuals can serve, they or they serve for me is they provide this overview. So we spent a good bit of time trying to figure out what the right table of contents would be, because there your information hierarchy or your taxonomy of how you’re sorting things out. Uh, offers a chance to give an overview of what is this product and what does it do. So I imagine someone, for example, might go to the Muse handbook and look at that and get a sense for what actually is this thing, what are the, what, what are its capabilities in a very practical nuts and bolts sense. 00:09:16 - Speaker 2: This actually points to two things that I think are really important in manuals. One is if the manual is well done, it, it provides that comprehensive. Uh, enumeration of things that the tool can do. So you can go to the manual and you can read it and then you know all the things, which sounds simple or obvious, but so many tools because there’s so many entry points to the functionality, you know, menus, hot keys, shortcuts, you kind of don’t know if you actually know everything yet and you’re always being surprised like, oh, this is a new, you know, button I didn’t know about before. Um, and I really like the feeling of I now. You know, I know Kung Fu, you know, like from the Matrix, uh, but the, the other thing is this idea of reference versus narrative docs which I think is similar to what you were describing. Uh, so references like there’s a, a specific. Thing you want to do, you know, I want to move a card, but that that often needs to be situated in a broader workflow, a broader, you know, use case motivation, and so often you see documentation complement that uh the the reference with a more vertical slice and narrative of here’s how you do a X in this tool and it kind of touches many of the specific things that would be covered in more detail in the reference docs. Those two types of documentation are potentially especially important with Muse, because yes, there’s a bunch of specific things that you need to know how to do, but there’s also this question of what is Muse for, which isn’t maybe as obvious as other tools like a word processor, like you know you’re going to go write a document in a word processor, whereas Muse is kind of a new type of tool, a new category, so we have some explaining to do on that front. 00:10:43 - Speaker 1: Now, do you think the handbook as it is right now accomplishes that? I felt like the even calling it the interface handbook, we really were more focused on the the nuts and bolts part rather than the broad, like what is this thing and what is it good for? Right? 00:10:56 - Speaker 2: I think right now it’s mostly reference and I could see it um expanding to include more narrative or having a complimentary source of documentation later that covers that. 00:11:06 - Speaker 1: One other memory from my past, uh. Experience working on manuals is how it feeds into product design. I think you, you brought this up when we were first brain storing the the manual. I think of it as almost like a hygiene or it brings a certain coherence when you’re forced, when you write down, even the table of contents can do that. Uh, one experience I had was working on the Hiroku add-on system, and I ended up essentially writing the manual for that in tandem with designing the way that the technical design for how the system worked. And I found it incredibly helpful for sorting through these pretty abstract concepts and the the real unlocker was writing a glossary. So I was trying to take down, I’m like, OK, I’m using all these special words throughout the throughout this documentation. What does each one mean? And I actually found that taking inventory in this way. I realized that I would use one word to mean two different things in two different places or other places. I had several words that referred to the same thing or basically the same thing, and so I forced myself to pare down to a set, a fixed set of con uh concepts, the primitives that really built up the design, and then went through and made sure I only ever used that one term. And that was, that was a much harder job than it it sounded. Um, but I felt like the, the end result was something simpler and more comprehensible. 00:12:29 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I totally agree. I think it’s a super valuable process, especially to get the, the glossary, the words right, and relatedly this idea of mental model, often when you’re having trouble writing clean docs or explaining a product to someone, it’s because you don’t have or it doesn’t exist a good mental model for how the product works. Um, and once you can write a really crisp glossary and a really crisp table of contents indicates that um there’s a, there’s a clean set of gears, you know, behind the clock face that, that, um, dictates how this product works. 00:13:00 - Speaker 1: Mental model is, is huge, particularly when you’re doing something that’s either highly technical product or a highly sophisticated power tool. Or just something that’s relatively new, that doesn’t have a clear, you get the mental model somewhat for free if you go to implement something well known in existing a to do list a word processor, when you’re doing something a little bit category breaking and a little bit new, like what we’re trying to do with Muse, that’s a much we need to develop that mental model fresh. 00:13:29 - Speaker 2: Then also more tactically, just when you go to, you know, basically test out every single thing that you’ve put in the manual, you might be surprised how many weird things you find. Like we found a couple of bugs in the course of doing the muse manual where it kind of basically works, but there was a little hesitation or you need to like do it twice, and that’s the sort of thing that you might be able to gloss over in the course of casual queueing. But once you’re, you know, filming in this case yourself, it becomes very obvious when there’s any sort of glitch. 00:13:55 - Speaker 1: Well, the filming side I’m super interested to hear about because you did some, uh, did some very interesting work on that. Uh, but before we jump forward to that, maybe we could start at the beginning of the story. Uh, I always like to hear war stories about how, uh, product features or product, uh, capabilities get developed. So maybe we can tell the story a little bit of, uh, why this handbook came to be. 00:14:18 - Speaker 2: Well, I feel like we’ve had this challenge for a while of um explaining news to our new users. And we’ve been…

Full show notes at the publisher

https://museapp.com/podcast/transcripts/30-computers-and-creativity/ Oct 05, 2023

Show notes

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think that the lack of interoperability or standardization between digital tools today really it means that all work created within a tool is confined to that tool, and to me that seems very clearly antithetical to creativity and specifically the collaborative aspect of creativity. 00:00:28 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and our guest today, Molly Milky. 00:00:43 - Speaker 1: Hey there. 00:00:45 - Speaker 2: And how was your spring break, Molly? 00:00:47 - Speaker 1: It’s pretty good, not long enough, but it was a lovely little escape in Berkeley, and I worked on a final project for my producing class, which was a pitch on a feature film on the Whole Earth Catalog, which didn’t go over as well as I had hoped, but I’m still fingers crossed that it’ll become something. 00:01:10 - Speaker 2: And the whole Earth Catalog here being the Stewart brand work from what was the 70s or 80s. 00:01:15 - Speaker 1: Confirmed, yes, it was basically a biopic on him and the era of the whole Earth Catalog, and it was very dramatic. 00:01:23 - Speaker 2: Oh, I love that. First of all, I just love biopics. I’m a big fan of like abstract. Act on Netflix or that sort of like kind of maker documentary, but when you throw in like the weird history, I feel like the whole Earth that catalog was sort of, I don’t know, psychedelic culture meets rebel computing or something like that. 00:01:41 - Speaker 1: 100% agree, yes. In a very interesting way that I think would translate really well to film, but we’ll see. 00:01:48 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, let me know where I can sign up to screen that I guess. 00:01:53 - Speaker 1: Amazing, yes, you’ll be the first to know. 00:01:55 - Speaker 3: Wasn’t there actually another film about Stewart Brand in general that came out recently? 00:02:00 - Speaker 1: Yep, Stripe is on it. They made a documentary that’s coming out very soon, actually, I think, and it’s as part of the SF Film Festival currently, and it was more of like looking at his whole life and his impact legacy and also the more recent like environmental stuff he’s been doing, which is much more comprehensive and honestly a much better idea. But I started this project my freshman year, so I’m pretty committed at this point. 00:02:26 - Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think it just shows that there’s a lot of interest in his work. 00:02:30 - Speaker 1: It’s really interesting, like, the deeper you dig, the more you find, and the more like of a web you discover, especially on Wikipedia, in the best way, so. 00:02:39 - Speaker 2: You seem to enjoy some unearthing the history of weird characters here, your collection of computing history, folks. I’ll link that in the show notes here as well. But before we get on to that, I think the folks would love to hear your background. You’re quite early in your career and yet already have a very impressive CV here. You’ve worked at Figma, you’re now at Notion, and you just finished a thesis at UCLA, so I think we all just want to know. What’s your productivity hack? How can we all be as uh as productive as you so early on? 00:03:11 - Speaker 1: Oh God, that’s not. First of all, my little background blurb. My name is Molly. I’m currently a student at UCLA. I studied digital media, and I’m in my last year. I only have a couple more weeks left, which I’m very excited about. 00:03:26 - Speaker 2: Wow, congratulations. 00:03:27 - Speaker 1: I know, so close, yet so far. 00:03:31 - Speaker 2: The senioritis kicked in already? 00:03:32 - Speaker 1: Oh man, yes, it has been very, very present in my life ever since like September of last year. Every single week is like counting down the days, but we’re getting there. And I’m currently designing a notion, and I will be returning to Sigma at the end of the year. And I come from more of a background in visual design and storytelling, specifically filmmaking, and I got my start leading design at a startup in the Bay Area while I was transferring schools, and through that I found product design specifically, and I found that it was like this very unique fusion of the creative and the analytical at the same time, that just really clicked for me. And ever since then I basically was just exploring kind of different industries and company sizes and problem spaces more broadly, and through that and working at startups and Sigma and most recently notion, I found that creative tools were what I was the most like just completely pulled towards and really wanted to just dig deeper and explore what impact they could have. I think that there’s something about making something that enables other people to make other things that is just like incredibly gratifying for me in a way that no other product design projects really touch. And I think more broadly, I’m really interested in the combined power of like design and tech to foster creativity and community across the board, and that was definitely like the inspiration behind this thesis and also like a through line to just things that interest me across the board and in terms of like doing school and work at the same time, I think it’s really just about The space that the pandemic has provided for free time, sadly, I definitely have profited. 00:05:30 - Speaker 2: Uh, so that’s your productivity hack is be doing this all during a massive lockdown that prevents other kinds of fun things that. 00:05:38 - Speaker 1: Exactly, it’s the best one. I highly recommend. No, it’s kind of the worst, and I feel honestly a little bit guilty to have like done so well during such a terrible time, but then at the same time, I’m very grateful. So there we have it. 00:05:55 - Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of that hits on things that speak very much to me, and I think others that I feel like are in our field, however you want to define that, they’re making tools to help others create, which I think is in many ways a harder or more interesting product design problem. It’s one that maybe historically has not been seen as very sexy when you think of, I don’t know, productivity tools, whether it’s a word processor or a video editing tool or something like that. They don’t have the same kind of sleek attention to detail that often more consumer products do. Maybe that’s starting to change now and at least I hope a little bit this concept of a tools for thought field which we talked about with all the way back in our podcast episode with Andy Matuschek about kind of transforming. From the stodgy idea of, I don’t know, word processors have been the same for 25 years and very utilitarian and just the word design doesn’t get associated with them. Maybe that’s starting to change now, which I’m very excited about. 00:06:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I completely agree. And also it’s interesting because I think I’m young enough to have grown up with those tools and like been in Photoshop from a very young age, and there’s something. Definitely about them that is just so intimidating and so difficult to comprehend from somebody who is not like acclimated to the environment and doesn’t understand the principles that they operate on, and I think that that’s slowly changing, but it’s definitely like, it’s still happening, we’re still figuring out the best way to do it cause it is complicated, and they’re offering a lot of different things in the same place. 00:07:27 - Speaker 2: Yeah, one thing about computing in general and creative tools in particular is they’re just so new on a relative time scale. We’re still figuring it all out. There’s some established practices, but when you compare it to a lot of other fields where I don’t know if you’re a woodworker, the best tools for doing woodworking have been slowly refined over the course of hundreds of years, and here in computing we’re still kind of just banging two rocks together to figure out how to make things, so. 00:07:52 - Speaker 1: 100%, yeah, we’re definitely still figuring things out. 00:07:56 - Speaker 2: Have you found there’s any particular, I don’t know, skills or approaches that came from this kind of film visual design background that you talked about that translate well and give you unique insights that maybe some of your colleagues don’t have doing digital product design? 00:08:10 - Speaker 1: Hm, that’s an interesting question. I mean, inherently audio and video software is. Incredibly hard to understand, and I think that it takes a preexisting like knowledge and investment and really being able to go into these tools that are just like an incredibly blank slate, and they offer so much possibility, but where it is is like up to you to really figure out and even understand what you’re looking for. And so I think Having that background in feeling comfortable just tackling these like interfaces that are very unfriendly, honestly, it does help, and I think it also helps me to understand a lot of the principles that some of the other creative tools are just beginning to adopt, and there’s a lot of like efficiency and abstraction work that has been developed and cultivated in Video and audio tools that is just beginning to kind of pop up its head in just more simple, more like consumer everyday creative tools. And I also think that fundamentally having a background in like video is also just like a Background in storytelling, which is applicable everywhere, and I think it’s becoming even more applicable in tools like design tools and writing tools and being able to help foster those stories and also to kind of weave in the story of the tool is kind of an underrated thing. And it’s not the primary concern, but it definitely is a piece of the broader puzzle of getting people to feel comfortable enough to create in the tools. So there’s something interesting there, but it’s definitely still in its nascent form. 00:09:52 - Speaker 3: Molly, it’s interesting that you mentioned growing up with complex tools like Photoshop and that being a help in using other tools in the future. I didn’t grow up on Photoshop, I grew up on Kipics. I remember when I first tried to learn programming, the tools were so foreign and unapproachable that I almost completely bounced off the field. It was like VI, which is an incredible maze and like all the Java server side stuff. It was just completely wild. And it was only because of Ruby on Rails that I found something that I could basically get working and running end to end. And once you go through it a few times, you kind of calibrate on like how terrible things should be when you’re first learning something. But I do think a lot of people just bounce off these complex Pro Tools for a reason like that. 00:10:32 - Speaker 1: 100%. I feel very lucky to have become comfortable in them at a very young age, and that was through like pirating Photoshop and getting gifted a Wacom tablet and just really starting by making really, really rudimentary like digital art and things like that. But it definitely was like the type of thing that I would try to teach my friends and things like that and kind of bring it into other areas, and it was just not adopted. It was like my understanding and knowledge of the tool was something that I definitely took for granted for a very long time. And it definitely has made me think differently too about creative tools across the board of like, wow, if you really invest in like getting people in these tools at a young age and really acclimated and understanding how they work, like there’s a lot of potential there, but it’s not scalable. So like there has to be other approaches other than that, so interesting problem that we’re only beginning to run up into. 00:11:31 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is computers and creativity, which is not at all coincidentally, the name of your thesis which you published recently, and of course I’ll link that in the show notes here, and I recommend everyone go read it. Not only is it great content, but a beautiful presentation that really takes good advantage of sort of the web as an article format. So naturally folks can go read it, but maybe for those that haven’t yet, just to prime the discussion here, maybe you want to give us a brief summary of its contents. 00:12:01 - Speaker 1: Most definitely, yeah, so my thesis is really about how can digital creative tools best augment human creativity and collaboration. And it’s really looking at the potential of creative tools as co-creators with human beings and examining kind of returning to the original vision of creative tools and how we can extract some of the things that were realized and some of them that weren’t and kind of analyze that for the present of creative tools and to kind of contextualize that with an observation, from my vantage point, I really think that the power of tools lies in their ability to Amplify human action or thought versus the power of human beings is really about our ability to think creatively. And so if that’s true, then why do computers often ask us to act as almost execution machines ourselves to create something when that’s like very uniquely the computer’s strong suit. So the paper delves into a lot of different areas and kind of the history and analyzing the present, but The main point here and like the TLDR that I kind of reach is that to foster optimal human innovation, digital creative tools really need to be interoperable or basically talk to each other. They need to be moldable or customizable to different phases of the creative process. They need to be efficient abstracted, which is similar to moldable. They basically just need to Accommodate more or less complexity at different stages, and lastly, they just need to be community driven so that people can be inspired and get help when they’re creating. So that is the very abbreviated version of my very long blog post, but I’d love to dig deeper into all of that. 00:13:52 - Speaker 2: Yeah, all of that resonates very much with stuff we’d love to talk about here and things Mark and I spent a lot of time talking about. Yeah, I guess maybe to dig in a little bit on, for example, that first section where you look back at what you called the original vision or or sort of the history. And folks who’ve been banging around in the tool space for some time will certainly recognize a lot of this, Engelbart and K and Hypercard and Flash, and Dynabook and so on, but I think it’s one of the nicer collections of summarizing all that, that isn’t, I don’t know, a super long book, so it’s a nice way to get up to speed on that. Now, it is interesting with Sort of look at this history, which I think is often presented as kind of yeah, there was these amazing visionaries who saw the potential for computers and creativity, sort of laid out a vision way back in what seems like just the Stone Ages to us, the 1960s, the 1970s, and then in some ways we lost our way and we ended up with, I don’t know, social media and Kind of lock down appliance like smartphones and in fact there’s this glorious world of I don’t know, small talk and dying a book and mother of all demos style stuff that we still need to build or we haven’t built or something like that. Do you see it as like that’s an unfulfilled vision or the flip side could be, OK, well, they had some cool ideas, some of those worked out, practiced, some of them didn’t. The reason. We don’t have everything there is that maybe some of it wasn’t practical, and I’m never fully sure how to think about the kind of lionization that we do some of these past figures. 00:15:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I feel the same way. I think that there’s a lot of tension and just basically more analysis that needs to be done there. I think that it’s very easy t…

Full show notes at the publisher

https://museapp.com/podcast/transcripts/31-social-media/ Oct 05, 2023

Show notes

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I do think there’s a distinction between velocity and virality that’s important to make, right? Like a good book can go viral, a podcast can go viral, it just will go viral slowly, be a slow spread, and I think that’s actually kind of a goal is to have potentially like a low velocity, a high virality. 00:00:21 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse, the company, and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and our guest, Tobias Rose Stockwell. Hey there. And Tobias, Mark and I just recently did an episode on video games and how Mark’s thesis that video games are where technologies kind of emerge first and later they make their way to productivity and enterprise software and that sort of thing, and I feel like our meeting, which was in an online game, a text-based. They called them back then in the 90s was a good example of this. We knew each other virtually before we ever met in person for, I don’t know, a year or more. And nowadays we take for granted that you meet people and even have great friendships, I think in, you know, your Slack channels or online conferences or colleagues you’ve only ever met through video calls, but I feel like that was quite unique for the time. 00:01:22 - Speaker 1: Truly, truly, I remember your characters on the mud, you had to. An amazing automation system in place for your characters, you just, yeah, you crushed that game. 00:01:32 - Speaker 2: That’s right, I totally forgot the mud world because it was all tech space, almost kind of had a Unix style in that sense, you would type commands and you would see these descriptions of what was happening with the action was very scriptable because you could make what were called triggers where you would essentially say, OK, if when you see the word you When you see someone’s name react in this way, when you see this happening, you could cause it to trigger another command. People would do in some cases very sophisticated scripting. I used a thing called Tintin. I think I was pretty simple with it, so I’m glad to hear it seems so impressive, but I think that did probably influence a lot of my thinking on kind of end user programming, personal scripting world of things. 00:02:12 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it was super impressive. Like this guy knows what he’s doing on here. 00:02:15 - Speaker 2: And Tobias, maybe you can tell us a bit about your background, what you’ve been doing kind of in the post mud time and then leading you up to what you’re working on now, which connects to our topic today. 00:02:25 - Speaker 1: Absolutely. Well, thanks for having me, guys. I really love what it is you’re working on and I always appreciate your Analytical and pragmatic perspectives on the world, understanding things in a more precise way. You know, we’ve known each other for quite a long time. I feel kind of honored that you have known me through several phases of my life, different chapters of my professional endeavor which have brought me here. But when I was really quite young, I went and lived and worked in Cambodia for ages of about 23 onwards for about 6.5 years. I lived and worked on the ground in Cambodia. Crazy wild story for how I got there, but essentially met a monk when I was traveling through Asia, who was looking for help in rebuilding this irrigation system. It had been destroyed during the Civil War there, got sucked into this project that I thought would take maybe 1 year, I ended up staying there for 6+ years, rebuilding this big reservoir that affected farmers and helped them rebuild after this very, very problematic time. And just was very, very interested in what I could do to most, help people figure out how to improve their own lives, and ended up rebuilding this irrigation system, getting interested in scale, interested in the motivations behind helping people help others more effectively. Which ended up, once I finished the project in Cambodia, I ended up coming back to Silicon Valley, where I grew up and started working on various projects to help people connect more effectively to humanitarian causes, and this was between 2009 and 2012, and it brought me to the world of online advocacy and really this is the earliest days of social media at scale, and I was part of this cohort of designers and technologists and Developers and documentarians that were really doing their best to try to motivate people to capture altruistic action from the largest possible audience, right? There was this promise around these tools that was very kind of intoxicating at the time, this kind of inherent goodness that could come from connecting humanity. And there was this thesis, this broader thesis, I think that was implicit at that moment, which is, you know, if you can connect the world, like we can solve the problems of the world, right? If you can just make people feel, if you can make people feel the poor people in India, the people that are struggling in Southeast Asia, if you can really just connect people to the feeling effectively, then you’re gonna come much closer to solving those problems, and that optimism was very real at that time. And it bled not just into the advocacy world, but I think it was very much a part of Silicon Valley at that time too. So I worked on a bunch of campaigns that were really trying to capture virality and maximize human attention and get people involved with causes, get people to feel, and that was its own very special era. I worked on a few campaigns that reached millions of people, it was very exciting time, and the tools enabled that in this very special way, and I was part of this cohort, you know, I’ve known. People similar to you have known many of the same people that were early at these companies that believed that these tools were fundamentally good for the world and, you know, in many ways they are, but I think that, you know, as we’re saying, there are questions about some of their byproducts. So fast forward a few years, I was working in New York doing design and management consulting, basically helping the executive teams of very large media organization that kind of storied in traditional journalistic institution that you would know if I named it, that was their executive team as the bottom was falling out of their business and they were trying to figure out how to Make money in this new media environment, and I was watching them as an institution begin to make decisions that reminded me fundamentally of types of attention capture tools that we had used. And the years previously, and they were making decisions that were very much based on trying to utilize this new media environment that many of my friends had built in such a way that I think we would recognize today as problematic, but at that moment in time we didn’t. They were really starting to change the editorial tenor of the stories that they were making, of the tools they were using to capture attention, and it was changing the editorial bent of stories of content and pushing it towards the extreme. And this was in 2014, 2015, you know, just the years leading up to, I think our great awakening to some of the problems associated with the stuff that came in 2016, but they were really fundamentally changing the tenor and the content of stories to capture more attention using these tools and these strategies. 00:07:16 - Speaker 2: This is what maybe nowadays we talk about is the classic clickbait titles and yeah, emotional activation that’s designed to in a very short time just get you riled up or activate some more primal part of your brain, and maybe that ties to your nonprofit work as well, which is also about emotional activation. But here you have this media environment where they have a very brief time to capture. Your attention and they’re just basically motivated to optimize for these headlines that push these buttons and activate you emotionally, even if that’s not sort of good journalism or really a healthy information ecosystem. 00:07:50 - Speaker 1: Definitely, yeah, and it’s not just headlines. The headlines are the most visible things. The stuff that tends to be a little bit more pernicious is the editorial decisions that are made around stories to cover like what to cover, right? Journalism is this kind of important function. I see it as having three different fundamental pieces to it. One is the basic verification of facts, right? It’s like, did something happen? Did the event happen, did it not happen, right? The next layer up is selective facts, like which facts are actually important for us to pay attention to in the world, right? And the top one is really like why does this matter? It’s editorialization, like why is this important for us to pay attention to? And what I felt like I was watching in real time was that the selective interpretation of facts that the sourcing pool that editors and journalists were using to start trying to kind of find nuggets of stories, they started to trend towards the outrageous, they were finding the stuff that would make people the most mad, right? You might see this in a headline and a story in which the headline will be, people are angry about X, right? You said, well, people are angry about X, wow, this is important, I should read why they. angry about X and then you look at what they’re actually sourcing for the quote unquote people that are angry about X, and it will be a Twitter user, maybe two, that have, you know, some 20 followers that a journalist was able to kind of go in and find they kind of spun a story out of almost nothing online and wrote a whole article about it, which is terrible if you’re you’re trying to get a proportional understanding of what people are actually angry about out there. And that’s just one strategy of many that are now available to every journalistic institution or traditionally journalistic institution. 00:09:36 - Speaker 2: For me, the first article of yours that I read that I think got a good bit of traction was titled This Is How Your Fear and Outrage are being sold for profit. Where you kind of broke a lot of this down, and I think nowadays as part of the mainstream discussion, especially with something like, for example, this Netflix documentary, the Social dilemma, yeah, I think we have more cultural awareness of this now, but at the time, for me it was a real eye opener, even being someone that was in technology that you were kind of breaking down the mechanisms, just sort of shining a light on exactly how You’re being emotionally activated or even emotionally manipulated and why that’s good for these media companies in this new era, and then you went from there on to a series of other articles including the dark psychology of social networks, which I think was a cover story in The Atlantic with Jonathan Hay, is that right? Getting to write with a high profile author, which is a whole other probably interesting topic to discuss. Your latest article, which is how to stop misinformation before it gets shared, collaboration with Renee Dresta Unwired, which talks a bit about this kind of friction and so to me these paint and you’ve written other stuff, but if you read the three of these, and of course we’ll link them in the show notes, they show a building up of what feels to me like a thesis or a sense of trying to understand or grapple with the societal effects of this new information technology that defines our world now. 00:10:58 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I feel like that’s right. So the second piece you mentioned, the piece with Jonathan Haidt at NYU, he’s a professor of moral psychology, and we did a almost a forensic unpacking of what happened between the years of 2009 and 2012 in terms of the feature sets that were implemented at these various companies, invented then copied, then propagated across our traditional social media kind of ecosystem. And what that did, what these specific features did, and it’s a few features that we very much understand today as being kind of core to our information exchange, but having a simple one click share to send a piece of information out to your entire network. Likes, right, like fundamental likes and visible metrics associated with that content. And then the ability to algorithmically sort of feed. There’s kind of three pieces of the puzzle have dramatically changed the types of information that we are now seeing on a regular basis. And like each one of these features in themselves are great. I appreciate both the ability to reach a massive audience. I appreciate the signal that comes from knowing whether or not people are liking a thing. And I appreciate the ability to curate the crazy massive stream of information that’s not coming my way, but each one of them has kind of conditional failure modes that I think we need to understand and reckon with because Having access to what’s essentially kind of the brain stem of humanity now, right? If anyone can put something out there and anyone can make something go viral, there are tendencies within the system now towards what Daniel Conman would call System one, right? System one thinking being this emotional, reactive, impulsive, kind of instantaneous, fast thinking. Right, which is one of these partitions in our brains, and the other being System 2, which is this more reflective, deliberative, slower processing and thinking, that the entirety of the architecture of the internet in its current form, it’s built for maximum speed and morality, it’s orienting towards system one. And that I think can be seen in so many institutions and so many changes and so much of the zeitgeist of our exchange now is in this kind of emotional space. 00:13:27 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that’s a great tee up not only for our topic today, which is the promise and peril of social media, but also what the muse tie-in is because a lot of what we talk about on this podcast is product design, but it tends to be more tools for thought, productivity, kind of more private things versus these public sphere, you know, political and social discussions. But I think there is, when you talk about that System 1, System 2 brain, a big part of what we want to see Muse do or part of what our mission with our product and the company is, is to help us all activate our system two brains more reliably. Then when we realize there’s something important we need to think about whether it’s in life, work, social issues, what have you. that there’s a way to kind of remove yourself from that energy and those outrage circles or even just the heightened emotional, more primal state and go to a more thoughtful, reflective, slower thinking because we believe at least as complex as the world is today, you sort of need that in order to really make good decisions. 00:14:30 - Speaker 3: Yeah, in addition to the System one versus System 2 access, I think there’s an axis of de novo ideas versus remixed ideas, and I think basically all good ideas are social, they’re remixed, they’re transmitted from other people and developed that way. And obviously, social media is an incredibly powerful technology potentially for facilitating that. And so we use the product right now, it’s quite single player and it’s focused on developing content. You bring in content and you build from there, but I think if you look at the broader process of thinking and developing good ideas and coming to useful conclusions, the social ecosystem is so important. 00:15:09 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I have my own, I think there’s a lot of creative people do. Twitter is certainly my social media of choice. I’ve heard it described as sort of the social network for ideas, and if you’re a person that’s, you know, looking to seed ideas in your work in your life, I think Twitter is the righ…

Full show notes at the publisher

https://museapp.com/podcast/transcripts/32-pricing/ Oct 05, 2023

Show notes

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Pricing is uniquely susceptible to getting gridlocked. Everyone has opinions about pricing, as they can and should. It tends to be an emotional topic. There usually is not a team or a person whose full time job it is to do pricing, unlike product design or product engineering, and it often takes more effort than you think or realize. 00:00:25 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product. It’s about Muse, the company, and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins. I’m here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, and my colleague Leonard Zaburski. Hi. And Leonard, you are a longtime member of the Muse team, you are the design powerhouse behind all the lovely things that people I think are familiar with, but it’s your first time on the podcast here, so maybe you could just quickly tell us about your background, what was your journey that brought you to Muse. 00:01:00 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I started about 2 years ago with MS and I actually came from studying interface design in Potsdam near Berlin here and just had done some freelancing, basically found out that wasn’t really for me and was looking for something else. So I saw that I can switch design memo you posted about news. And yeah, we kind of started working together and sort of just worked on going from a prototype into a real product. 00:01:26 - Speaker 2: Yeah, if I’m not mistaken, maybe Mark originally found you through two works you published. One is Desktop Neo, which is sort of a rethinking of desktop operating systems for kind of more modern productivity, which obviously is quite on point for us. Then you have another done one called the Cloudfall, which I think is a bit more about consumer data, how apps could potentially in a hypothetical world kind of give users more control over their data and privacy while also giving you a lot of the benefits of the aggregation. I’ll link to both of those in the show notes. 00:02:01 - Speaker 1: The other side of the origin story is whenever I’m working on a hard problem, I like to search for the prior art on it to see what other people have done and to learn from that. And so back in the early days of Muse, when we were thinking about the core design problems, I went into DuckDuckGo and typed like direct manipulation touch interface, and one of the very best things I saw was the work Mener had done like, oh man, we got to email this guy and see if we can get him to come work with us and one thing led to another. 00:02:27 - Speaker 2: That’s right, I think it was actually really good timing. You had just read the Ink & Switch piece on the Muse Studio for ideas at that point, still very much a research prototype, we were still thinking about even whether to try to commercialize it, so it was maybe hot on your mind, so the timing was very good. 00:02:44 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I was actually really surprised after I published both of those essays, like how much feedback you can get and how well it actually works to basically publish something where you’re working on exactly the thing you’re interested in, which maybe, you know, isn’t something that a lot of people are interested in, but sort of the more niche it is, the more feedback you get from the people that also care about the same sort of stuff. And so it actually works out really well to find sort of the people you want to work with. 00:03:11 - Speaker 2: Exactly right. Find your tribe by that weird thing that only you and 20 other people in the world care about, and if you publish that and put it on the internet, you can all kind of find each other. So our topic today is pricing, and this is a big one for a lot of reasons. So Muse just launched new pricing, we kind of call it pricing V2 internally, and just really briefly, you know, I’ll link the new pricing page and we’re gonna write a memo on it, that sort of thing, but basically we’re going from having one price, which was $100 a year, to two tiers of membership, a pro plan that remains $100 but then kind of a starter plan that’s $40 and then you can also pay for those on a monthly basis, so you can potentially get started for $4 a month. And we’ll talk a little bit more about our journey there, but I think for me one of the most important framings on this is that pricing is incredibly important. It’s really important to your business. The stakes are very high, right, the right price and you can make a successful business, the wrong price either too low or too high, and you can basically fail. And furthermore, in my experience on this, because I’ve been involved in a number of teams setting prices for products, there’s no real playbook. I feel like almost any other type of product development, business work, particularly in the startup space. Marketing, sales, engineering, design, there are playbooks and best practices and lots of material that you can find. There’s a few books and things on how to price your sass product or how to price your hourly rates as a consultant, but I found them pretty unsatisfying and it feels like a really just kind of. And frontier and no one really knows how to do it, but it’s critically important to your business and it’s really important to your customers, obviously. So I think that makes it a pretty rich topic and why I’m also really pleased we did manage to get the second iteration of pricing out because I’ve been on many teams that have done it and it’s hard, it’s hard because the stakes are high. 00:05:05 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and the context for Muse is that we were in a relatively unexplored part of the pricing IDMAs. So if we go back to pricing V1, this is back in the early days of MUS, we had this aspiration to create a professional grade software product for. The iPad and in order to do that, it would require a lot of development work and therefore we need to fund the business reasonably and so if you kind of do the math on this stuff, we realize that you realistically need a professional price for the business to work out and for us to be able to produce and maintain the software where professional prices caught on the order of $100 a year or $10 a month. 00:05:45 - Speaker 2: And I did some search on the priority there, it’s remarkably consistent, whether you look at something like Microsoft Office back when it was sold in a box, you know, it was $300 and you’d kind of need to buy a major new version about every 3 years, whether you go forward to today with SAS subscriptions, Photoshop, that sort of thing. Some things are higher, some things are lower, but that’s quite commonly, no matter how they package, it ends up being around that amount, again, for professional software, which is typically on the desktop or on the web. 00:06:14 - Speaker 1: Right, and that’s where the first big challenge came for us. There’s very well established precedent for pricing professional and especially enterprise products in the SAS model. This is where your company uses ocean or whatever, and every seat in this app cost, I don’t know what notion is, but they’re almost all $10 + or minus $5 a month. I would bet notion is too. And the software is distributed in the usual fast model. Now, for product reasons, we really want this to be an iPad native app and a pricing challenge there is that of course you need to sell that through the app store then and pricing the app store for professional product. has historically been almost nonexistent. There are almost no products sold to the app store with a professional price. It’s much more dominated by consumer pricing, which might be free, it might be ad-based, or it might be consumption based, like a free to play game or a dating app or something. So a big question for us, a big risk for the business was can we actually deliver a professionally priced product for the iPad through the App Store. So we decided very early on to confront that question because it was a big risk and basically to try and see if it worked. And so that led us to pricing V1 which briefly was, there was one option, it was a one year membership for $99 or $99.99. 00:07:31 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and for the record, I’m not a big fan of the 99 cent trailing thingies. I know why psychologically that. Yeah, $399 seems like less than $4 but that’s not a choice because we sell through the app store, that’s imposed upon us by their system, so we end up with $99.99 dollars, but I tend to, you know, just refer to it as $100 when I am speaking informally. 00:07:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, there you go. So we had this one membership option for one year for $100 and we wanted to see to what extent that would land with the market. 00:08:01 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I remember when we first turned on sort of the paid product, which was very, I don’t know, nerve-wracking, exciting, but also nerve wracking, both because one we knew we were taking kind of a bold position to charge sort of a desktop product price for an iPad app. Of course I believe the iPad can and should have great software. It’s an incredible piece of hardware and it seems a shame to me that there aren’t more really good professional tools for it. And so that’s part of our kind of whole hypothesis with this business. But yeah, we went to turn on the pricing, which was a little more than a year ago because we just had our first renewals come up and, you know, it really was this kind of bold experiment. We didn’t even have a monthly option, for example, and that was partially for simplicity, but it was partially to really see, OK, like if we really do this litmus test, does someone believe either the software today or more plausibly kind of the concept of what they think it could do for them is something they would pay this price for. And I remember turning it on and I thought that was very plausible that we would just get 0 people making a purchase, and pretty quickly we got our first few. I think our first few were kind of friends and family or investors or something like that just showing their support, which I appreciate and, you know, making sure our payment flow works and everything, but it wasn’t long after we turned it on that we got our first purchase from someone we didn’t even know who they were, they had never contacted support, you know, they just made a purchase and I ended up, you know, writing to some of those early people and basically kind of Not too pointedly, but kind of saying like, why did you buy this? Just to see if what they conceived, you know, what they thought they were buying or what was in their mind matched what we thought we were offering, but that was very promising. So even though early on, we’re basically still in the beta phase and we had a few users anyways, or pretty small number of active users. The fact that some of them wanted to purchase, and they wanted to purchase at this kind of unforgiving price, that didn’t even have the monthly option or whatever, that was a validation, that, yeah, we can do something in this range. 00:10:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I remember sort of prepping the team on what we should expect and look for, which was we’re really trying to get a non-zero number of non-affiliated customers to buy. So it’s like excluding friends and family and investors, people who show up and believe in the software enough to pay in $100 and I say some small number because regardless of what price you charge, like if we charged 99 cents. A lot of people would say it’s too expensive. You’re always going to have a bunch of people saying that. What you really need when you’re early on is, is there some non-zero evidence this has traction and then as you go on, you need to worry more about conversion rates and so on and so forth, and we’re starting to do more of that, but it was really, can we get some initial believers and I think we did. 00:10:39 - Speaker 2: And as a product person or just speaking to kind of the product management discipline generally, will you pay or actual proof that they will pay is one of the main ways you kind of seek validation for your product market fit hypothesis, because just liking something or being enthusiastic about it or thinking it’s cool or even using it, these are all good, but enthusiasm alone. There is an indicator, but it’s not enough. There’s something really, the rubber meets the road, or it really puts a point on it to say, OK, yeah, you like this, but enough to part with your hard earned cash for it, and that’s really an important moment in those early days, it’s less about, can you make enough money and just will people pay at all, because that’s an indicator that you’ve created something of value. 00:11:27 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think that was also a huge motivation for the whole team to go from people saying, OK, this is nice, and you know, we did use the tests and people liked it, but it’s a different level of people actually start paying for the app, you know, then you’re actually working on a product and not on a research prototyping thing anymore. 00:11:46 - Speaker 2: Oh, I agree, yeah, I totally felt like a moment of growing up, maturing, things getting real, and also on the support side right now when someone writes in and we have like a little kind of plugin in our system where we can see if they’re a paying customer or not, and if they are, you know, of course we tend to give them priority support, particularly if they have a problem, and it wasn’t right away, but I remember the first day we had essentially an angry customer where something wasn’t working the way they wanted and Yeah, they were upset because they had parted with money for this and again, it’s just a very different dynamic when you’re in this business transaction. They might like your podcast or your cool vibe or your nice design article or whatever, but at the end, now they’re using your product to solve a real problem they have. In their personal life or their professional life or whatever, and if it’s not doing what they expected or what they want it to do, they might get upset and then you have an obligation to them and it’s just very different from, check out my cool research prototype or even my MVP that I’m letting you use for free. So yeah, once we got that initial data of people would pay and they would pay this professional price, that was a good learning, but then from there, having been active for a year now and especially after we launched, there was kind of the steady trickle of beta users converting, but the launch was where, you know, the graph kind of started to change shape. In a really nice way and we started to see, OK, there really is a business here, but in the meantime, you know, we knew this was just our first stab at pricing. We knew it was never going to be the end state and so we over the course of this year, and particularly post launch when the numbers became, you can start to see patterns when the numbers are bigger. I think we learned quite a few things and that’s what kind of motivated our let’s do a pricing V2 roll in the things we’ve learned because I think price is just like product you have to iterate on it to improve it. It’s hard to do for those previous mentioned reasons, the stakes. High, it’s emotional. People hate price changes if you have to do that, but I also think it’s critically important because the price being comfortable or accessible, having to be a fit for what people want is crucial, and you just won’t get there without iteration and experimentation. 00:13:47 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so we did notice some patterns with this V1 pricing. There were, first of all, a friend of people who were happy to pay it, so that was good, stayed 0.0, and there were not surprisingly, a lot of people who were unwilling to pay the $100 a year price. Now we expected most of that, of course. So you gotta drill in a little bit. In part…

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