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00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Titles of books are probably one of the best sources of inspiration for messaging. Book covers are so inspiring to me because it’s a visual and a title and the title’s so short and it captures the entire thesis of the book.

00:00:22 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague, Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. Joined today by Hilary Maloney. Hi. And Hillary, we on the Muse team often like to work from interesting, inspiring nature locations with sometimes limited internet connectivity. Hui in particular is famous for this, at least on our team. I understand that while you were working with us recently on a project, you got to do a little work in the less connected parts of California.

00:01:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I spent a lot of my time climbing and traveling around California in a camper van and got to do quite a bit of this project, traveling down in Bishop and I’d work in the mornings out of the van and then kind of go about my day. So it’s really cool to work, you know, flexibly with this team and see that you guys have that as part of your working style.

00:01:24 - Speaker 2: Now, how do you fit together your day kind of interleaving, obviously these very different activities of going out into, I guess bouldering is the, the official term for it. Yeah, exactly. Sort of going out and doing that, which I’m just gonna assume in my head that it’s like this documentary Free Solo that you look exactly like that guy climbing up the side of the mountain there in Yosemite, but do you do that kind of like you like to work early and then do the physical stuff later or the inverse? How do you put it together?

00:01:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m definitely a morning person, so I like to get up really early, especially when I’m camping, you know, if you’ve ever been camping, you naturally wake up at like 5 a.m. And so I like to get a few hours of work in the morning when my brain is fresh and then kind of go about my day and being really physical and active, I think is almost part of my process. We can talk about that more, but I think, you know, being in your body is so important to doing creative work and having ideas. And so yeah, I tend to kind of start in the morning and then that physical experience is really important for me.

00:02:32 - Speaker 2: Yeah, same here, and I think I didn’t realize that and I don’t know, my twenties maybe when I was, you know, get my career started and was more about being at the computer and being focused, but later, yeah, that in your body, as well as maybe almost paint that as the inverse, which is actually getting out of your head, which is when you do very intellectual work all the time and you’re almost unaware of your body, almost to the detriment of your physical health. But if you go do something particularly that’s really demanding, whether it’s something like bouldering, for me, a really intensive hike, for example, with a lot of elevation change or run, anything like that, it sort of forces you to leave the higher plane of your mind and go to a more primal state, but I think that actually is better for when you return to your mind, somehow your ideas and your creativity has rearranged itself. I don’t know, it’s like, there’s something to it there.

00:03:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. I feel very seen by that. It’s kind of a necessary part of the life, you know, and doing hard complex work, and I’m definitely drawn to, as you described, those very intense experiences as well. Even sometimes walking isn’t enough. I need to run or surf or climb or something that’s like very physically demanding, and you’re exactly right. It’s really about getting out of your mind as much as it is getting into your body.

00:03:56 - Speaker 2: And tell us about your background and in particular, maybe even how you would label what you do. I think I’ve heard you refer to yourself as a strategist. Tell us what you do and how you came to do that.

00:04:08 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I’m a brand strategist and researcher. My background is really in kind of classical brand marketing and advertising. So I’ve spent a lot of my career working in advertising agencies, but I also really love working with startups, so I do a lot of side projects as well.

And I really think of myself as a marketing generalist. Maybe you guys feel this in software, but I think a lot of fields are becoming super super specialized and there’s routes you kind of take to specialize in your career and I’ve tried to stay really broad, so I do quite a lot of of marketing work and like to do messaging, which we’re going to talk about, but I also do a lot of advertising and different skills within the discipline.

Yeah, so how did I start in marketing? I actually studied journalism and that just got me really interested in storytelling, but found pretty early on, I liked applying that to brands, and I like being at the intersection of communication and really business and business strategy and kind of the why behind it.

00:05:14 - Speaker 2: Now, is this a, you tried your hand at, I don’t know, when I think of journalism, I maybe I’m thinking of investigative journalism, but going out into the field, researching a story and then writing. You know, a medium form piece about that. And did you try that and find it didn’t work for you and then you somehow stumbled into this brand thing or was it just more like, I don’t know, there’s certainly probably more commercial opportunity, not journalism is not known these days for being like a growth industry in particular.

00:05:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. For me, it was in school.

I was in a pretty good journalism program and we did a lot of field work as part of our program. I studied photojournalism specifically, so I was doing a lot of photo stories and reporting and coming back into, we had critiques, almost like art school style critiques with our photojournalism program and My professor just recognized in my work that I was drawn to telling stories about businesses in our community and in particular in a documentary style journalism class, I was producing a lot of work that was like going behind these businesses and telling their stories, and my professor actually kind of pulled me aside and he was like, I think you need to go into more of like an advertising path with your kind of natural. Interests. So actually in school, I made that pivot and started taking some marketing and advertising classes and then started working in the marketing field at a startup actually is my first job.

00:06:46 - Speaker 2: Anything we’ve heard of?

00:06:48 - Speaker 1: Probably not. It was called Parlour. It was an interior design app, so actually kind of interesting. I’ve had this red thread in my experience of creative tools and creative communities, but it was a workflow and e-commerce app for interior designers, so very specific, but we made it into beta and then we just didn’t find enough scale kind of in the right amount of time. But it was a really, really fun marketing experience and a really fun brand to build. So it was really exciting and, you know, you learn a lot in startups and not finding market fit, and I definitely learned a lot. So it’s a fun fun place to start my career for sure.

00:07:31 - Speaker 2: Well, that’s good you took the positive lesson from that. I feel you could take the negative one, which is, boy, these startups are unstable and uncertain, and it kind of sucks to pour a bunch of creative energy into a thing that ultimately falls flat in the marketplace, but it seems you took it more as learning experience and just a chance to try something that’s kind of high risk, but high risk means sometimes it doesn’t work out in the end.

00:07:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure.

00:07:55 - Speaker 2: So I’m very pleased to say that Muse 2.0 is out. We launched a couple of days ago and I’ll link the launch memo in the show notes. You can read that for all the goodies, MacAs, sync, text blocks, etc.

Now, as part of that, we have an all new website, and if you go look at the homepage, you can already see we’re talking about the product quite differently, the Muse 2 product quite differently to how we talked about Muse one. So that naturally leads to our topic today, which is messaging. Now the project you did with us, Hillary, was working on our messaging. And where we landed is sort of 3 parts.

The first is dive into big ideas. So this is our brand messaging, it’s aspirational, it’s why you might want to use the product without telling you what it is. And then we have two more product level descriptions. One is a very short one, that’s tool for deep work, and then there’s a slightly longer one, which is flexible boards for note taking, whiteboarding, and connecting the dots. And we’ll try to use those on our website, but also on our App Store page and our Twitter bio. You even heard it in the podcast intro, especially anytime someone, especially new comes across our product or company and they just want to know really briefly, what are these folks about, what is this product about? So congratulations Hillary on the successful result.

00:09:11 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m super happy with where we landed, and it’s exciting to start seeing it coming to life across the site and different places that we’re using that marketing language.

00:09:22 - Speaker 2: So if we go to the definitional element here, tell us maybe for someone who’s a designer, engineer, founder, someone who’s in the tech world but maybe doesn’t necessarily know what that term means.

00:09:35 - Speaker 1: I define messaging as a system of communication that’s rooted in strategy. So, you know, it sounds like it might be limited to just like copywriting or headlines or that kind of thing.

I think the most important thing is that it has a strong point of view and that it’s maybe rooted in a moment in time for your business. So maybe you’re thinking about a particular audience that’s critical to your growth kind of right now.

A new product is a very, you know, common reason why you would revisit your messaging and really thinking about your positioning relative to the category. So there’s a lot of that research and context that goes into creating that system of messaging.

And I think that’s something Adam, you and I spoke about pretty early on when you were kind of running into this problem of how do we articulate news in this really simple way. The solution is really to create a system of brand, product, taglines, just longer descriptions that you can use, so it’s much more than kind of one line, it’s that system and the reason behind it.

00:10:47 - Speaker 2: And one of the exercises we did in the kind of early part of the project was to look at some comparable products, either, yeah, competitors or pseudo competitors, but others that are just in the creative tools space or the sorts of products that people who also use Muse or might use Muse would also use. And that was illuminating to me and talking about that point in time element you mentioned that I think is important, which is, you gave the example of notion. And I think their website a couple of years ago said something like, your team’s source of truth, and I remember when I saw that, that really clicked for me, that resonated. I said, ah, OK, this is like a modern team wiki, it’s a place to put all your kind of internal documentation about your company. OK, I got it. But I think at that point in their existence, they were targeting people like me, basically startup people at small and medium sized companies. Now, you pointed out and looking at their current messaging and you had some screenshots of their website, you’re guessing, paraphrasing here, correct me if I’m wrong, but from the outside it seems like they’ve transitioned to trying to message to the enterprise. They’re moving to these larger companies because they basically have completely owned the startup market. Everyone knows what notion is and uses it, they don’t need to convince anyone through. Website. So now this new category that they’re expanding to, which is these larger, more kind of traditional or conservative companies, and they need different messaging. And so for me, I look at the notion’s website now and the stuff they say there doesn’t speak to me at all. I’m like why do they are messaging worse, but it’s not worse, it’s just different for a new audience. Is that the right interpretation?

00:12:22 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, and I think they have right now a line around for every team, and so when I see that, I can see that their strategy is really about moving beyond technical teams in the organization.

And if I had to guess, Notion might be experiencing a ton of love for the product among just technical teams where they have a really strong brand, and now they need to build that same sort of traction within more teams in the organization so that there is that enterprise value.

That’s just my total assumption based on the messaging, but I do tend to do that like you said, you know, in our discovery process, we Looked at a lot of different companies in the space and at this point in my career, I kind of go through the world just interpreting strategies and problems brands are trying to solve based on their commercial or some kind of ad that I see or something, so. Yeah.

00:13:24 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I also appreciated this idea of identifying a point in time for the messaging, because I feel like one of the challenges we had before was it just felt so daunting to think about the messaging from Us, which is this product that we aspire to be working on for many years, and we have huge ambitions for, and how do you summarize that all in one word or even one sentence. But this project, I feel like we’ve cut scope, as Adam would say, when in doubt cut scope and say, OK, for this product and this launch, what’s the message that we want to communicate to these new users? And that seems much more doable.

00:13:55 - Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe to that point in time element, while we were less strategic perhaps about choosing kind of our muse 1. X messaging. So there we identified that we’re a tool for thought, and we have this second level message, deep thinking doesn’t happen in front of a computer.

And so that was kind of the core, and then we also described the product as a spatial canvas, that’s kind of the product description, and then the more aspirational, the category is tool for thought.

And I think that did work really well for us at a point in time, which was that term was maybe on the rise, particularly among a particular niche audience of people, and because we were early on, that worked really well, but I look at it now and I go, OK, well, we want to be a little more accessible, and so our website is kind of like, if you don’t know exactly what is a tool for thought, If you’re not one of those very small, you know, number of people on that inside club, it doesn’t really give you a lot of information, it sort of pushes you away.

And again, I think that’s fine when you’re early on and you need to build a smaller audience, and it’s OK if it’s sort of niche, and so one of the goals for this project was to be slightly more accessible.

Now, it’s not mainstream by any sense, I don’t think news would ever be that, but we wanted to go a step further into making it comprehensible. You don’t necessarily need to know who Doug Engelbart is in order to get benefit from use as one example. I think that’ll still always be our core community. We certainly will use tool for Though in a lot of contexts, including in describing this podcast, and so on, but it’s a chance to, and so if you think of that point in time and the problem that we’re trying to solve, it is, how do we take what we think is a great product and make it a little bit more accessible while still staying true to what we’re all about. So Hillary, I mentioned earlier, this kind of brand or aspirational message versus, you know, what is your product, what category you were in practically, what does it do? You talked about that quite a bit and the difference between the brand message and the product message as we work together. How do you think about that, broadly?

00:16:01 - Speaker 1: So brand messaging is really about creating a feeling or an emotional pull toward your brand and product is much more functional, leaning into the features and benefits of using the product.

And as companies get really big, even, you know, like Fortune 100 type companies which I tend to work on more in my full-time job, brand gets really far away from product where in many cases it’s not even rooted in the product.

That happens in categories where products are really commodities, so that doesn’t happen as much in tech, but a good example of this if you think about candy. A lot of candy is the same. You’re not going to really talk about the benefits of the product. It’s sweet. Exactly. Even that, like, you know, gummy worm commercials that are just about like crazy, you know, fun, these brands tend to create a mood or some kind of character, something that just helps it be relevant to people and just be liked, and then there’s not really anything they could say about the product that’s compelling.

00:17:14 - Speaker 2: You know, in our brand episode we talked about Coca-Cola, maybe as one of the purest brands they’ve invested for, I don’t know, over a century now, I think in associating with Americana and Santa Claus and friends and family and good vibes and I don’t know, support the war effort during World War 2, yeah, happiness, but it’s sugar water in the end, and yeah, it’s got a certain flavor to it, but you know, it’s sort of the ultimate commodity, but they built this incredible brand around that. They don’t need to spend a lot of time talking about. This is a beverage you can drink that tastes sweet and also has caffeine in it.

00:17:49 - Speaker 1: Exactly. So I kind of come to tech with this extremely broad lens on brands, and I think this category requires a lot more respect for product communication than you typically see in like marketing. So I tend to be among my like marketing community, a little bit of an outsider on that, like when I get the chance to work on, you know, more tech brands like I’ve worked on Dropbox in the past and we transfer in many cases in a more traditional agency setting, you know, I’m the one asking like, what does the product do and how do we turn that into something. So I think when I started this Muse project, We want to, of course, have brand messaging because Muse has a really strong brand, but I think just coming into where you guys are as a product, there’s so much education to do on just what the product is that it was like fairly clear to me that that was where we needed to start. And where we landed and kind of the messaging hierarchy, and that’s really, I think, what can be helpful is how do you think about brand and product messaging relative to one another, which one should you lead with? And we landed with. big ideas as the lead message on the website, but there’s so much more focus, you know, if you think of the total kind of share of messaging in the hierarchy that we landed with, there’s a lot of product messaging there and product education there. And then as people go deeper, they get into those, you know, what are the principles behind the product, who’s the team, what’s your background and the research perspective, and that starts to really build a lot of that more emotional pull to muse. So it’s definitely both. It’s just like how do you get into the details of working out.

Again, your point in time as a brand and what’s the most important thing you need to do. And I think for us, it’s a little bit of category, creation, right? Like this is kind of a new kind of product and also just education. So we definitely think over the course of the project started going more into focusing on product communication, but I’d be curious, Adam, what you thought about this too because I know this is something we debated quite a bit.

00:20:10 - Speaker 2: We did, and coming back to those comparables, again, one of the early pieces of kind of research you did was just looking at, you know, I gave you a list of what I thought of as being, again, competitor is the wrong word for it, but sort of tools that are in our sphere somehow, because they are again, other ones that people who are customers and users use, they’re just ones we like, we just think they are a good team or have good brand or whatever.

So one example of a smaller team we talked about a bit was My Mind. So if you look at their website, they are very heavy on the brand messaging, right, which is, I think the opposite of most technical products, particularly apps, you know, if you go look at Bear notes or Obsidian or one of these many kind of text oriented note taking tools that really lead with, here’s what this thing is and what you can do and here’s a screenshot. And then the brand stuff, you know, what’s our manifesto tends to come later. Whereas my mind really leads very heavily with a visual style, with a, you know, reclaim your mind, and here’s all the things we’re sort of fighting against in the world, and you have to really scroll quite a bit before you find out what actually is this thing? What, what do I use it for, what platforms even run on? And it was kind of nice to have that as a bracketing thing. Here’s a very extreme investment in brand, that’s a technical, you know, productivity software tool that’s in our kind of world, and then we had others that were on the other extreme, which again tends to be most, but I think especially a lot of iOS apps that are especially if it’s just made by a small, you know, one or two developers where they don’t have some big highfalutin thing, they’re just like, hey, here’s an app that Lets you do X and then here’s a screenshot, and hope you like it, click here to download it. And so having that spectrum.

And I think for us, one of the things we were trying to incorporate into this project is what we’ve learned over the last several years of trying to explain.

This weird product. And one of the things I’ve learned is that we’ve tried lots of different things we can kind of put on a website or on an app store page or whatever, and none of it quite seems to capture it well, and maybe it’s because we haven’t quite found the right words. Some of it is that we’re trying to do something that’s pretty new, and so therefore, there isn’t just a brief summary, but I do think a big part of it is what you ended up calling the brand messaging. Which is, we know that someone who, for example, listens to a couple of episodes of the podcast first and then tries the product, is much more likely to find success, not because we explain in any way how the product works, it’s more that you know how we’re thinking about it. And what our values are, what our culture is, and sort of if you’re drawn to that or you just like it, but you have it in your mind, and then you go to use the product, you know this is something different. There’s a different set of values that go into it, and so you’re not likely to bring the same preconceived notions that you might expect from another, I don’t know, iPad app. So with that kind of top of mind for me, I came in and said, and you started to talk about this difference, and so my perspective was maybe we should lead with the brand messaging. Maybe, you know, it doesn’t necessarily need to be pages and pages’ worth, but maybe that first above the fold thing should really be about. Here’s how we think about having good ideas. Independent of the product we’re building, and then you read that, and if it resonates with you, you scroll a little further and then we explain, by the way, we have this product, and I think we explored some of those ideas, but you ultimately were on the side of, actually, we really should lead with the product messaging and the brand stuff goes a little later.

00:23:41 - Speaker 1: I think one other great example to think about is Apple as a brand, you know, we talked about Coke and I think sometimes these big brands that we all have so much experience with can help us just add a little more context to these very esoteric ideas of, you know, product and brand, and I think Apple is one that we might assume really leads with a lot of brand messaging, right, because they just have such a strong brand, we’ve actually combed through. All of their marketing, especially their website, but even their marketing commercials, their events, all of these things, most of what they actually say is about the product. And that’s something I’ve started talking a lot with my team of strategists at work is Apple is really a product marketer, and it’s really interesting when you look at that in detail, because the way that they actually express all these brand ideas that we have extremely strong associations with like creativity, right, design. Those things are all implicit. They’re in the style of everything they do, the actual design of their products, right? They never really say those words, and I think that that really gets into strategy and brand, even messaging kind of can push you toward how do we express this implicitly, right? And not everything needs to be in explicit terms. So that’s something that I think we started to talk about actually at the end of this project. That is really important for people to think about as they think about how do they want to express all of these things, right, about you as a company, when your audience has so little time, a lot of it needs to come through in that more implicit communication style.

00:25:31 - Speaker 3: Yeah, Hillary, it’s a very astute observation. I’m scrolling through Apple.com now and it’s just completely about products and they actually get very detailed, you know, they’re bragging about their chips and their cameras and their batteries and everything, and there’s nothing about design even though of course the design is beautiful.

00:25:46 - Speaker 1: Right. Yeah, design is one of those things, right? You can’t really say I’m good at design and have someone trust that, you have to demonstrate that your design is excellent, you know, right.

00:25:58 - Speaker 2: Yeah. Thinking about Apple’s kind of marketing and brand and whatever also makes me think of their pretty famous.

I think Steve Jobs led campaign Think Different, and that would be pure brand marketing, right? It’s doesn’t show their product at all. It shows these.

Great thinkers from history, but many of whom were maybe counter to the status quo of their time, and coming back to your point in time thing, that wouldn’t work for Apple now because they are the computing monopoly, but back when they were the very small David to the Microsoft Intel PC Goliath, that was great messaging.

It basically said, being not in the majority being one of this kind of smaller group is something desirable. You stand apart. You don’t stand apart by using an iPhone these days, so that messaging would not work for them now.

00:26:54 - Speaker 1: Right, exactly, that’s when they were kind of they had this challenger brand strategy and another good example more recently that I think just is a great example of what we’re saying here is that campaign they did behind the Mac. And the only thing they said was behind the Mac, and then the actual imagery was what communicated like this is something people use for certain kinds of work, but they never, you know, described it in any more detail than that. So, yeah, another recent example. They definitely do a lot of brand marketing for sure. It’s just something that I think we don’t always really realize is how much product they talk about because their brand is so strong.

00:27:38 - Speaker 2: So I think one thing you learned working with us is we’re very about creative process. I’d love to dig in and see how creative people do what they do, and you had a pretty kind of specific process that we went through together. Tell us broadly what that is.

00:27:52 - Speaker 1: For this project, we had 4 phases. So we started with discovery and then we did a phase of strategy work and that involved what do we want our positioning to be. We talked about our persona, our kind of this inspiring ideal customer that could help us think about the messaging that would resonate with them. Then we actually went into the writing and then finally we did some user testing at the end.

I think this process for me really reflects my approach as a strategist, maybe would be different for someone who’s primarily a writer that also has some strategy process. So, you know, actually thinking about it now, maybe it’s a bit. Scientific. I like to really have a lot of research and discovery that allows me to say, here are a few possible ways in or hypotheses, and even ultimately, we had, I think, 3 different versions of the messaging that we put into testing with new customers and we wanted to validate that it kind of landed on their ears in the same way that it did on ours, and that testing is, you know, really important and something I’ve just learned. In my career and come to really value in the process.

00:29:10 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I really appreciated the structure that you introduced for this project.

Again, with marketing, it’s so easy, I think, to sit down and start typing stuff, you know, like tool for thought, big ideas, you know, HTML mockups, and I really appreciate that we started with, OK, first, let’s like understand reality with discovery, and then it was defining the problem, what are we trying to do here? And then it was coming up with multiple options and you can’t actually have a design decision unless you’re choosing among multiple options and then we picked one and validated with testing. So, I thought that was a great strategy.

And on the discovery front, one thing that I really enjoyed was the industry survey that you did. We’ve alluded to it a little bit, but I think that would actually be worth talking about in and of itself, just because I think it’ll be interesting to our listeners who are in this space.

00:29:54 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s right.

So I guess that first discovery phase was really immersing yourself in our world, which included listening to a bunch of the podcasts and reading all the memos and so on, but also kind of, you know, maybe snooping around our Twitter sphere and all that sort of thing.

And I think one reason that was useful actually was. You’re an outside perspective, but you also do know creative tools, as you said, you’ve worked on things like Dropbox and we transfer and so on. So you know the space very broadly, but the niche tools for thought, community, all that stuff was basically new to you, so you had fresh eyes, so there was quite a bit of time where you were doing that. But then, yeah, you kind of went on from there to this, basically came up with some sort of slide decks and documents for us that tried to roll up how you saw. The industry we were in and the customers that we could choose to try to address and what order we might want to go after them. And I think one piece of this was, Mark, are you thinking of the two axis grid here? Yeah. You know, maybe you want to describe that for the listeners, of course, visual thinking things doesn’t translate super well to a podcast.

00:31:01 - Speaker 1: I’d be curious actually, Mark, to hear what you recall now and what has landed with you and then I can go into a little bit more of the process behind that.

00:31:11 - Speaker 3: Well I think one of the axes was individual versus team.

And that makes a lot of sense to me, because we’ve long identified since before we started the company, that there was this critical pull over time towards teams because of how software pricing works, is something we talked about in the podcast a lot.

And I think there are different ways we might have cut the other axis, but it was something like early stage, late stage, creative process, you know, informal versus formal, that sort of thing. I’m not sure actually what we ended up with. OK, we’ve pulled it up here. How close was I? Yes, personal and teams and knowledge management versus creative process, which I think is sort of the flip of that of what I just described.

00:31:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so this is what we call in strategy, like a 4 box and we use these for all kinds of things, but this in particular we used for the category landscape. So we wanted to look at, you know, here we’re looking at, I think, call it 25 brands and we looked at quite a few. This is just kind of a good number to get a general lay of the land.

00:32:17 - Speaker 2: Just to give a feel for that, that’s sort of notion, air table, it’s things like Rome and Kraft, it also includes something like Mirro, fig jam, so, these are all probably not necessarily our listener knows every one of these, but they’ll probably be familiar to a lot of folks who are in our sphere.

00:32:35 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. So we kind of first created that list of, you know, all of these brands in the category or maybe slightly adjacent to it, to understand. We looked at all of these brands in a lot of detail, really going through their websites, and it kind of goes back to what we were speaking about with Apple, right? With notion, you might have a sense of notions brand or messaging.

It’s really important to actually take that step and go through their site and say, oh, they’re not actually saying what I expected them to be saying. And so that’s a really important part of the process and not making assumptions based on your own experience with the product or your history with the product.

So, I went through websites of all of these brands and then saw kind of what naturally are the axes that emerge, and what are the kind of themes that we’re seeing across their messaging.

And so the big thing that I found and Mark, to your point, this is really Because of a natural dynamic in the category around pricing, personal versus team is kind of the most apparent one. And then maybe the less obvious one was that some products really position themselves for what we’re calling knowledge management, and a lot of them even say that explicitly.

I think knowledge management or second brain, this kind of language is a little bit of a niche, but definitely growing, and we all have talked a lot about that.

And then the other side, and I think what we got a lot more interested in for ourselves was. These tools that are really more for like just a day of work, you know, your creative process and helping you dive into a really rich hour of thinking. And that was a lot more interesting and that started to present a white space that we could have some messaging that would be more unique and ultimately, I think dive into big ideas really does that. Right? That’s so different from messaging that’s like, organize your notes forever. You know, we don’t really want to say anything like that.

00:34:39 - Speaker 2: For sure. That was a big insight, I think, which is it’s very easy to naturally align ourselves with, again, the Romes and obsidians and crafts of the world, or even some of these more nichey products like Devon Think that I take a lot of inspiration from, or my mind as we mentioned earlier, but even though some of those are fairly recent. I think Evernote is a mainstay in this space. They’ve been around quite a while now. It is all about remembering.

Like Evernote’s logo is an elephant, which is, or, you know, we’re supposed to have long memories or whatever. And yeah, I think Obsidian has a similar thing, what do they say, like, notes you’ll pass on to your grandkids or something like that. It’s all about this longevity.

And that you create this big knowledge base and you keep it over time, and the fact you can still find and pull up a note you wrote 5 years ago is the argument, and that really is the opposite of how people use Muse and where we think the value is, which is really about this active thinking, this point in time, it’s your desk, it’s where you make a mess for the thing you’re doing right now. And you know, I like to have and I think many of our users and customers like to have their boards as a kind of artifact or almost a memento of your thinking, but the thinking you did a couple of years ago, it’s just interesting for historical reasons, it’s not an active part of what you’re doing. And so when you look at that, you say, well, we, especially with our messaging around tool for thought. But also I think just generally people would naturally kind of put us in that sphere, but that gives you totally the wrong idea. We’re not about organizing, we’re not about long haul, long term, we’re about that active thinking that in a way is almost a little more transient.

00:36:21 - Speaker 3: I also just love, by the way, this as a general intellectual technique. We’ve talked about it on the podcast before where you generate a list of items and then you come up with two axes for them. So you get 4 boxes or maybe 9 boxes, and then you see which boxes are blank, and you sort of suppose that there must be interesting things you could do there. And sure enough, we have this literal white space for muse positioning, where in this creative process and personal square we suppose that you should be able to have a really great products. So I just find that a useful technique in general.

00:36:50 - Speaker 1: One other thing that we did in that discovery phase, and maybe it’s worth mentioning kind of my process there is really to look at what’s sometimes in the strategy world we call the four Cs.

So the company, and Adam you mentioned, I had my own kind of podcast binge of metause and reading all the memos.

The competitors, so we just described that in the category, which is closely related to competitors, but it’s more of that broader picture.

And then the fourth one is the customer and there I did a lot of, you know, reading customer feedback and quotes and tweets and kind of pulling them out there.

And in fact, one of the words that emerged that people use a lot naturally to talk about news is flexible. And flexible is a word that kind of made it all the way through our process into the final user facing copy in the end. So, a lot of things from that discovery phase informed ultimately the messaging.

00:37:55 - Speaker 2: And maybe we can speak to that, what was it, the 2nd or 3rd C, I guess the 3rd C which is category, because this is one we’ve perpetually struggled with, which is I think it’s really important to put yourself in a category because it’s how people know right off the bat what you are, and then you can go from there to differentiation, but everything we’ve sort of ever tried has just been wrong, and to some degree it’s maybe we need to kind of create a category which is sort of digital ideation tools.

Traditionally, people do their kind of thinking, externalizing their thinking on sketchbooks and whiteboards and things, and so doing that through computing tools is relatively new. There isn’t a very established category for that.

And we did end up with, yeah, you mentioned the flexible boards, which is part of what I was thinking with this, so this longer description of the product, which is flexible boards for note taking, whiteboarding, and connecting the dots.

The last one’s interesting, we can come back to that, but the other two actually kind of imply category, right? Note taking is, and I’ve got mixed feelings about that for various reasons, because, you know, when you think of note taking, you can think of a lot of different things, many of which don’t necessarily give you an accurate.

Picture, but it is the closest thing to a category that we fit a well established category that most people would know that we fit into. And I think whiteboarding, either that’s putting us in a category of physical whiteboards, but I think also it sort of works because we do have this emerging category of mirro, Millanote, fig jam, mural, basically digital whiteboarding, and especially collaborative whiteboarding has become a thing in the last couple of years, and that was not the case, you know, a year and a half ago when we were coming up with the Muse one messaging. So yeah, tell me about how you generally think about category, and then how you thought about trying to help us solve that problem.

00:39:44 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it was very apparent to me when I started working on this project that Muse is creating a new category or it’s part of a few brands who are creating a new category of product. And I think that’s why messaging has been challenging because there are a lot of things you need to do. You need to tell people what world are you even in, you know, like, where am I?

00:40:10 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Is this a hat? Right, a restaurant, exactly. Is it a hotel?

00:40:17 - Speaker 1: Yes, so where am I? You know, what is this? What makes it different or when should I use it? Is it for me? There are a lot of questions to answer, and I think something that’s really exciting is the category is becoming a little more established. You mentioned a lot of products and we’ve, even as we were continuing to work on this project, we would see new things launching and new sites that we were kind of sharing with each other as a team and I love seeing more kind of competitors, so to speak, because it starts to alleviate how much work you need to do to describe to people what this category is.

00:40:56 - Speaker 2: So that’s part of this concept of positioning which I think Mark and I talked about in the episode, which is you’re positioning yourself relative to other things that people may already know.

So there’s a bunch of companies that are doing a roughly similar thing. Actually, we even talked about this with Puran who’s doing kind of spatial canvas type thing that in many ways is Similar to Muse in terms of category or in terms of like what the product is, and he’s got the same, yeah, messaging challenges. How do you explain what this thing is, but it’s almost like the more of these kind of open canvases for thinking exist, then the more likely someone is to have stumbled across one or two of them.

And then the more likely it is that they can, oh, it’s one of these, it’s kind of their mindset, and then you can go from there to, OK, so what makes your special or different. Exactly. And that’s like a way easier problem than let me explain to you from scratch a thing that you don’t know what it is or why it needs to exist or whether it’s something you’re interested in.

00:41:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. And I think the spatial canvas category is kind of formalizing and taking shape, and I think that’s a really good thing for Muse, and the note taking whiteboarding and connecting the dots, the intention there isn’t so much to say like that’s our category as it is to say like, hey, if you’re a person that has these needs, this is what you can do with Muse and note taking and whiteboarding are more kind of Approachable and familiar ways people might understand this need that they’re starting to observe, you know, as they shift to working more virtually or just needing to be more organized and having tools that support that part of their process, they might start to understand that need through words like that. And that’s again something we just saw in reading how people talk about news.

00:42:49 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think part of what works about it is that if you read note taking and you immediately think, so this is a competitor to Apple notes, you know, that’s probably not quite right, but at least it does tell you again, kind of what corner of the universe you’re in at least, and then you read whiteboarding and that might also lead you to think, OK, this is a competitor with, you know, one of these more collaborative oriented.

Whiteboards like a fig jam or a mural, and that’s also not quite right, but you put those two things together and you’re kind of, you know, in the right county, I guess, um, and then you can go from there into the details, and hopefully the details actually will help you narrow in, but you hopefully start from a place that, again, is roughly in the ballpark, I guess.

00:43:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:43:33 - Speaker 2: Mixing my metaphors here.

00:43:35 - Speaker 1: To me, something in that description that alluded to the powerful text features was important. I think that is a differentiator for Muse. It’s not just something where you can kind of like scatter around cards and look at them, right? You can do some pretty powerful things with text too, and I thought that was important to represent in the high level description of the product.

00:44:01 - Speaker 2: And connect the dots is an interesting one as well, because that’s probably one of the most frequent phrases we hear from customers when they talk about how they use Muse, which is, yeah, I guess it implies this.

You sort of lay everything out and you’re trying to find the pattern, and you’re trying to find the people often jokingly refer to the, is it always sunny in Philadelphia meme with the like serial killer board thing with like yarn connecting, whatever. It’s kind of the Hollywood version of this, but it’s a literal connecting of the dots when you see this sort of thing, which is like some kind of thing that’s up on a wall, that has all the things you know, and you’re trying to put the pieces together to solve the case, it’s usually how it is. So, for whatever reason, that’s a phrase that people use a lot. So, our hope at least would be that we put that right on the front page of the website, and again, it’s not that that’s going to completely 100% tell you what this thing is, or whether it’s for you, or whether you would want it, but if connecting the dots in your work sounds like a thing you would like to be able to do, or there’s a thing you do do, or there’s something you need to do, now, you know, we’re narrowing in on the right kind of person for this product. The last piece I think is worth uh mentioning there, we sort of diverted from the creative process a little bit, but I was interested to pursue this all the way. So we spoke about dive into big ideas, we spoke about the flexible boards, then we have tool for deep work. Now, how’s that different from a tool for thought and what caused you to think that that would be a good sort of medium length or short descriptor for the product?

00:45:39 - Speaker 1: Deep work is an expression that kind of came to me, you know, and I, I really liked that it was something that already exists in culture, but to me deep work also, we’re using it to describe the product, but It has kind of like an emotional appeal to me. I think that’s, you know, in Cal Newport’s book, why the title is so salient and actually just as an aside, I think titles of books are probably one of the best kind of sources of inspiration for messaging.

There was actually a moment in the