· 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?
· David Senra, Alexandr Wang
[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? [00:00:00] S1: I think it was like, how do we make this breakthrough as a product? And I think there were a few parts of that. But I think one is, how do you get people to match the experience? Like, how do you get someone to a wow moment with a product as early as possible? And this product, I think, naturally lends itself to that because I think it's AI, it can do a lot. If someone has never used an AI agent, there is a lot that it can do that will surprise you. So that, I think, was a big part of it. I think another part of it was like, how do you harness all of those stories of people having these wow moments and use those to help make the product sing and make the product fly? [00:00:00] S0: How are you using the stories, though? Because you guys aren't running ads for Muse, are you? [00:00:00] S1: We ran a few ads. I mean, honestly, I think at first it was just the fact that I would retweet so many of them. [00:00:00] S0: Yeah. [00:00:00] S1: Anytime I saw someone do something interesting about Muse, I was like, "Quote tweet."
· Alexandr Wang, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: Anytime I saw someone do something interesting about Muse, I was like, "Quote tweet." [00:00:00] S0: I couldn't understand why both Anthropic and OpenAI's ads are so bad, because remember, Anthropic was doing this huge outdoor campaign, and it's all about them. And same thing with ChatGPT. It's like they'd have the icon, which I don't even think people recognize that as a logo, and they'd just say Codex, and it'd just be two people sitting at a desk. I'm like, "What the fuck does this mean?" Where it's like, you have all these use cases. All you have to do, your ad is to show the benefit of your product. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: That's it. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: You have millions of them. Run those ads. It's so elementary that it's interesting that people make this mistake over and over again. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, I think one thing that we came back to a lot in both building Muse as well as just building stuff in general at Meta was just like, why would someone care?