How memes and unhinged posting helped Muse break through

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 26:05

   is this like marketing strategy? Like what is going on? Like I feel like there's a distinct difference in your public tweeting since Muse launch. What are you doing? There's a few pieces of what's happening here. This has got to be more fun than Scale AI when you were building Scale AI. It has to be. We'll talk about that later, but it has to be. The past few weeks have been some of my most fun building, like yeah, certainly my career.

2. 26:27

   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 like torrential, going back to this, like it's torrential stream of updates. Like for most people, there's just so, they're just like constantly being like, like kind of 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.

3. 26:54

   And it's just like this torrential stream. We had actually meeting, large meetings where we talked about this as a team. It was like, we need to break through. And obviously like meta, we have lots of distribution. Like we can make sure everyone knows about it, but that's not enough to like make it break through in an interesting cultural or fascinating way for the world to kind of like, you know, pay attention to.

4. 27:16

   I separately in my life have happened to have met and become friends with like memers. and I have these, I affectionately call them my schizo-friends, but people who like, literally they spend all their day thinking about memes and the internet and understanding that. 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 100 Muses coming up with memes to meme Muse.

5. 27:49

   No, you just have a collection of schizophrenic friends that are terminally online. The X-Feed, just for what it's worth, is like literally every one of those tweets I write, there were like a few, quite a period where I was, it was like really hard for me to pay attention to meetings because I would just like think of a meme and I'd be like, oh God, I have to get this out. And I would like, it was like moments of inspiration.

6. 28:10

   There was like, I was with one of my, like I was trying to have like 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. It was like, it was almost, I almost felt like I was like an engineer solving bugs again, because it was like, you know, you could tell when something was going to click. But yeah, so one thing is we wanted to break through. Another thing that like, I just thought was important is like, how do we make meta cool again? Because like, for whatever reason, despite having like, 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 like funny. And then the unhingedness was something that happened kind of like

7. 28:59

   naturally over time. When Muse first came out, I was just like mostly focused on promoting all the interesting use cases that I saw. I was like retweeting like tens of interesting use cases that I saw of people using Muse. And then at some point it was like, because I was just like tweeting so much, there were like a few tweets where I was just like, didn't think that much about it and just a fuck it post.

8. 29:22

   And then some of those tweets like did really well. Have you seen this like time spent thinking about it and then banger? Have you seen that? I haven't seen it, but I agree with that. That's like, I just, some of these I didn't spend that much time on. I like 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 like remembered something about the internet, which I, it wasn't super intentional, but I remembered like the internet rewards risk and it rewards like surprise and like things that like people don't expect.

9. 29:50

   And so then I just kind of like 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 on the memes. He was like, you know, I thought we would learn. He said this like in a bunch of meetings. He was like, I thought we were going to learn a lot about, you know, Muse users and like how people were using Muse. But actually, like, we're just learning a lot about Alex's mind.

10. 30:16

    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 genuinely made an impact on growth, which is kind of hilarious. I definitely think it did. I can't stop hearing about it.