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An End, and a Beginning

museapp.com

1–10 of 17 posts

Re: An End, and a Beginning

#2
It sounds like the Gumroad story.

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

Re: An End, and a Beginning

#3
As an academic researcher, I really like the idea of Muse. I see it as an organized workspace to read and annotate a bunch of semi-related PDF files. Here's hoping the core idea of the product can thrive with the incoming team.

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

Re: An End, and a Beginning

#4
>Longtime listeners of our podcast will know that we didn’t want to go fully into the world of venture-funded startups, since we believed that would create incentives that might steer us away from these ideals and core mission.

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

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

Re: An End, and a Beginning

#5
> In that time our team has built a one-of-a-kind thinking tool and the world’s first large-scale local-first sync system.

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

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

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

Re: An End, and a Beginning

#6

>Longtime listeners of our podcast will know that we didn’t want to go fully into the world of venture-funded startups, since we believed that would create incentives that might steer us away from these ideals and core mission. I don't listen to the podcast, but it sounds like they did end up taking the VC money, and that crashed the business? You can pretend you only have "one foot in" all you want, but once you tak…

[deleted]

Re: An End, and a Beginning

#7
Bummer, they have always been (and I think will continue to be) an amazing resource for companies pushing the boundaries of productivity software.

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

Re: An End, and a Beginning

#9
post #2

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

Agree. I love the vision (and their podcast) but when I tried to use it in my day to day, it fell short and got the feeling that they were focused on the wrong features for me (I.e. implementing cool and interesting features and forgetting about the boring but necessary ones).

Re: An End, and a Beginning

#10
post #2

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

Did you tell them about your issue and did they respond?
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