· Alexandr Wang, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: We've said millions, yeah. [00:00:00] S0: Well, millions could be hundreds of millions. That's also millions. So you're just not adding the beginning to that. I want to go into, you've been kind of going, and I mean this in a loving way, unhinged on X. So can you talk about your, is this marketing strategy? What is going on? I feel like there's a distinct difference in your public tweeting since Muse launch. What are you doing? [00:00:00] S1: There's a few pieces of what's happening here. [00:00:00] S0: This has got to be more fun than Scale AI, when you were building Scale AI. It has to be. We're going to talk about that later, but it has to be.
· David Senra, Alexandr Wang
[00:00:00] S0: This has got to be more fun than Scale AI, when you were building Scale AI. It has to be. We're going to talk about that later, but it has to be. [00:00:00] S1: The past few weeks have been some of my most fun building, yeah, certainly in my career. And I think there's a few things happening. So one is, it felt important that we figured out a way to make Muse break through. It's a pretty torrential, going back to this, it's this torrential stream of updates. For most people, they're just constantly being bombarded with new AI products and startups and releases and things and models, and here's another model, and here's another product, and here's another feature, and it's just this torrential stream. We had actually large meetings where we talked about this as a team, and it was like, "We need to break through." And obviously, Meta, we have lots of distribution. We can make sure everyone knows about it, but that's not enough to make it break through in an interesting cultural or fascinating way for the world to kind of pay attention to. I separately in my life have happened to have met and become friends with memers, and I have these, I affectionately call them my schizo friends, but people who literally they spend all their day thinking about memes and the internet and understanding that. [00:00:00] S0: I have people that are obsessed with Muse, and they're also obsessed with your X feed, and they're convinced that you have like a hundred Muses coming up with memes to meme Muse. [00:00:00] S1: No, they-
· Alexandr Wang, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: No, they- [00:00:00] S0: Looks like you just have a collection of schizophrenic friends that are terminally online. [00:00:00] S1: The X feed, just for what it's worth, is literally every one of those tweets I write. There were quite a period where it was really hard for me to pay attention in meetings because I would just think of a meme, and I'd be like, "Oh God, I have to get this out." And it was moments of inspiration. I was trying to have dinner with one of my coworkers, and then during the dinner I was like, "Wait, wait, I figured it out," and then I posted a different meme. I almost felt like I was an engineer solving bugs again because it was like you could tell when something was going to click. But yeah, so one thing is we wanted to break through. Another thing that I just thought was important is, how do we make Meta cool again? Because for whatever reason, despite having these incredible pieces of cultural software, like Instagram and Facebook historically, Meta was not cool for a while. And so, wanted to make Meta cool and interesting and kind of funny. And then the unhingedness was something that happened kind of naturally over time. When Muse first came out, I was just mostly focused on promoting all the interesting use cases that I saw. I was retweeting tens of interesting use cases that I saw of people using Muse. And then at some point, it was because I was just tweeting so much, there were a few tweets where I was just didn't think that much about it and just said, "Fuck it, post." And then some of those tweets did really well.
· Alexandr Wang, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: The X feed, just for what it's worth, is literally every one of those tweets I write. There were quite a period where it was really hard for me to pay attention in meetings because I would just think of a meme, and I'd be like, "Oh God, I have to get this out." And it was moments of inspiration. I was trying to have dinner with one of my coworkers, and then during the dinner I was like, "Wait, wait, I figured it out," and then I posted a different meme. I almost felt like I was an engineer solving bugs again because it was like you could tell when something was going to click. But yeah, so one thing is we wanted to break through. Another thing that I just thought was important is, how do we make Meta cool again? Because for whatever reason, despite having these incredible pieces of cultural software, like Instagram and Facebook historically, Meta was not cool for a while. And so, wanted to make Meta cool and interesting and kind of funny. And then the unhingedness was something that happened kind of naturally over time. When Muse first came out, I was just mostly focused on promoting all the interesting use cases that I saw. I was retweeting tens of interesting use cases that I saw of people using Muse. And then at some point, it was because I was just tweeting so much, there were a few tweets where I was just didn't think that much about it and just said, "Fuck it, post." And then some of those tweets did really well. [00:00:00] S0: Have you seen this time spent thinking about it and then banger? Have you seen that graph?
· David Senra, Alexandr Wang
[00:00:00] S0: Have you seen this time spent thinking about it and then banger? Have you seen that graph? [00:00:00] S1: I haven't seen, but I agree with that. Some of these things I didn't spend that much time on, I tweeted them. I didn't even check my phone for a few hours, and I was like, "Oh, wow, that one went really well." And then I kind of remembered something about the internet, which it wasn't super intentional, but I remembered the internet rewards risk, and it rewards surprise and things that people don't expect. And so then I just kind of went off. A lot of my coworkers, I think, were somewhat surprised at something that Nat said for the whole week when I was posting all the memes. He was like, "I thought we would learn..." He said this in a bunch of meetings. He was like, "I thought we were going to learn a lot about Muse users and how people were using Muse, but actually, we're just learning a lot about Alex's mind." It was a lot of fun. I felt like I was drawing on all of my internet knowledge for years and years and years to pull into those moments. And I think it actually, I don't know, we don't have the tracking and it's hard to tell, but I actually think it actually genuinely made an impact on growth, which is kind of hilarious.
· Alexandr Wang, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: I haven't seen, but I agree with that. Some of these things I didn't spend that much time on, I tweeted them. I didn't even check my phone for a few hours, and I was like, "Oh, wow, that one went really well." And then I kind of remembered something about the internet, which it wasn't super intentional, but I remembered the internet rewards risk, and it rewards surprise and things that people don't expect. And so then I just kind of went off. A lot of my coworkers, I think, were somewhat surprised at something that Nat said for the whole week when I was posting all the memes. He was like, "I thought we would learn..." He said this in a bunch of meetings. He was like, "I thought we were going to learn a lot about Muse users and how people were using Muse, but actually, we're just learning a lot about Alex's mind." It was a lot of fun. I felt like I was drawing on all of my internet knowledge for years and years and years to pull into those moments. And I think it actually, I don't know, we don't have the tracking and it's hard to tell, but I actually think it actually genuinely made an impact on growth, which is kind of hilarious. [00:00:00] S0: I definitely think it did. I can't stop hearing about it. So, and all the people I'm hearing about it from also downloaded the app and are now using it. Go back to what you were saying, though. It's like, "Hey, we have distribution, but that doesn't mean that we can make something that people are going to come back to and actually sticky." So, how did you do this with Muse?