· Alexandr Wang, David Senra
[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? [00:00:00] S0: They don't care about you or your company. Everybody's self-interested. There's this very old book. It's called "Scientific Advertising." It was written in the early 1900s. It was so valuable that the guy that made the most money as an advertising agency founder in the 1920s and '30s, it was written by this guy named Claude Hopkins, who was this best copywriter. He's like, "These are all the ideas of how I'm making this money. I'm putting this manuscript in a safe for 20 years." Right? But essentially, it's not about advertising. It's about human nature, which doesn't change. And his whole point was just like, your ads are about you. Your ads are about your product. Your ads are like, "Hey, I have this thing. Buy." People don't care about that. They're self-interested. And all you have to do is just do the trick of what this does for you, and you just lead with that. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: And there's people that took those ideas that were written in the early 1900s and went on to build massive companies, advertising agency founders- [00:00:00] S1: Totally [00:00:00] S0: ... in the '50s, '60s, '70s, and even to this day.
· David Senra, Alexandr Wang
[00:00:00] S0: ... in the '50s, '60s, '70s, and even to this day. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, 100%. I think there were a few insights, let's say. First is, most people in the world, they don't give a shit about OpenAI or the research or these other companies or the research, or even us or our research or whatever. They care about what it can do for them. We had this gift of the mascot, which was the little jolly guy. I remember the tweet where I realized, I was like, "Oh, wow, this has mileage." Because basically I was driving into work, and while I was on the way, I generated a version of the guy holding a briefcase, and I tweeted, "MFW I go to work on Monday." I remember thinking, this is one of my best tweets in a while. And then I kind of realized, you can put him into a lot of situations. One thing I kind of realized as we were going through that process was like, how do you create surprising moments that are very different from any other marketing that you've seen of a product? I don't really remember the last time someone leaned into racy memes to market a product. I don't actually know if it's been done before, but I kind of realized, oh wow, this is a thing that we can do with this little guy. And that's something that is interesting. That's something that drives intrigue to the average person. [00:00:00] S0: Okay, but that might get them, raise awareness, might even get them to download the app. But then how do you get them to stay engaged once the app is on their phone?
· David Senra, Alexandr Wang
[00:00:00] S0: Okay, but that might get them, raise awareness, might even get them to download the app. But then how do you get them to stay engaged once the app is on their phone? [00:00:00] S1: There's a cycle that people who really love the app, and we, even back in February, had, which is you try to give it a little thing, and it does it. And you're like, "Oh, wow, it did that." And then you try to give it something a little bit more, and then it does it. And you're like, "Oh, wow, it can do that?" It could do that first thing, it could do the second thing, and then you give it a little bit bigger of a problem. And it's kind of this trust fall almost that you have with an AI agent, which is at first you don't really trust it, but you're kind of intrigued, so you're going to give it a little nibble, and then you give it something a little bigger and something a little bigger and something a little bigger. Certainly, when I talk to college students or whatever, some of the ways that people use AI, it's like a full trust fall. They just are recording voice notes and brain dumping to the AI, and they send it, and they just trust the AI to organize all the thoughts and give them clear plans and clear things to do, et cetera. I think for the successful users of Muse, it really is like getting them onto this trust fall process of using it for slightly bigger and bigger and bigger things, and then having it work every one of those times.
· David Senra
[00:00:00] S0: I found one of my all-time favorite quotes when I was reading the book "Zero to One." The quote says, "The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas." That is exactly what AppLovin has done with their advertising platform. AppLovin connects you with over a billion potential new customers in mobile games. AppLovin allows you to capture undivided attention. AppLovin ads are full-screen videos that are watched for an average of 35 seconds. That is retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water. And you can launch on AppLovin in minutes. You set the goal, and AppLovin achieves it. No complex setup, no expertise needed. And AppLovin scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers. Other businesses have seen immediate results, scaled to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day, and increased their revenue by millions. So you want to get started quickly before all of your competitors are on AppLovin. And you can do that by going to applovin.com. That's applovin.com. I wonder how much of this is actually driven by word of mouth. So obviously, talking to you, I was going to have to download the app no matter what. But what really piqued my interest is a friend of mine who sent me screenshots of how he was using Muse. So, when you download the app, it doesn't really tell you like too much of like what you can do. It's kind of like open-ended, like a open text box. But a friend of mine who's running like a 100 billion dollar company, he left his ID on a Flexjet, and then he went through and he's just like, "Well, I want to..." He was telling Muse, "I don't want to be involved in this process at all. You have to figure out how to get the ID. Go pick up the ID. This is where it's at, and then this is where I'm at, and then figure out all the steps along the way." And then arranged the courier, went there, got through his security in his office somehow, and got upstairs to his office. And it was like, "Holy shit, this is the best marketing." It's just three or four screenshots of Muse going back and forth and him saying, "I don't want to be involved. You have to do everything," and then figuring it out on the way.
· Alexandr Wang, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: Yeah, no, this is actually one of the things about... I don't know how int- it was like somewhat intentional, but definitely modern product marketing is very screenshot-driven. I think to have a modern consumer product, it has to work on the screenshot. The screenshot has to fly, so to speak, either through group chats or word of mouth or online. And I think that's been a big part of it. This wasn't intentional or engineered, but I think the fact that we had the little guy in the screenshot was a big deal. Because I think having Jolly or whoever your Muse is in the screenshot immediately communicates this is a Muse screenshot. It's just like the best marketing you could possibly have. [00:00:00] S0: So are you on your Muse all day long? What is your own personal usage? [00:00:00] S1: I mostly set up a lot of workflows using it, and then I guess my meetings a lot of the time. So in practice, I think in my job, quote-unquote, I'm supposed to pay attention and be pretty present and interact with people. I set up a bunch of workflows and kind of treat it as like a second brain. [00:00:00] S0: Yeah, you said that in the post that you wrote, and it was really short, and I think I saw last time it was five and a half million views so far. But you said, I love how you described Muse, like, "Well, if everyone had a second mind beyond their own."
· David Senra, Alexandr Wang
[00:00:00] S0: Yeah, you said that in the post that you wrote, and it was really short, and I think I saw last time it was five and a half million views so far. But you said, I love how you described Muse, like, "Well, if everyone had a second mind beyond their own." [00:00:00] S1: I think this is, philosophically speaking, one of the most interesting questions about what does it mean to be human when you have powerful AI, and what is that relationship like, and how exactly does that look? And different people have different takes on what exactly that looks like. I think the sort of fear case is obviously that AI is above us and that we're just sort of doing what they do, and there's other worlds where that relationship is different. [00:00:00] S0: Before you go on, what is your own personal view of that?