Customer support is sometimes an afterthought for tech product companies, but it can be one of the most important parts of user experience. Mark and Adam discuss using support as a type of user interview; how to balance long-term product vision with listening to customers; and support reputations of companies like Zappos, IBM, and Comcast. Plus: the value of transparency vs why airlines conceal flight delays. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Safe mode Zappos: Deliver WOW Through Service Front Zendesk triage IBM’s legendary customer service First Republic Speakeasy Comcast cares traceroute, line test credit card authorization and capture Flighty Heroku incident reponse and status page pager rotation Oren Teich ARPU, Google’s ARPU

Your career is more than just a way to earn a living—it's a foundation for leading the kind of life you want. Shawn joins Mark and Adam to talk about navigating the non-linear course of a career; whether to correct weaknesses vs investing in strengths; salary negotiation; brag documents; and how to create luck. Plus: the Spinal Tap scale for rating software engineers. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Shawn Wang @swyx Temporal VBA, Haskell Fullstack Academy Two Sigma, Netlify rough notes on what’s missing in serverless Build in public, Personal brand Learn In Public zero-sum Elasticsearch, Typesense cron job Descript The Coding Career Handbook “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward” Maslow’s hierarchy of needs Never Split The Difference a leak in your poker game brag documents, Julia Evans recency bias Adam’s pitch to Berlin startups in 2014 How to Create Luck luck surface area closed-form solution indie games, Braid So Good They Can’t Ignore You lifestyle design Kevin Kwok, P/E ratio, gravitas as a P/E ratio 10x developer Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat and their coding productivity “these go to eleven”

If you’ve built a great product, a launch is how the world can find out about it. Adam and Mark discuss the anatomy of a product launches, including creating a “moment” in your social graph; why you should decouple product releases from your marketing launch; and mechanics like waitlists, feature flags, and press. Plus: how sharing your work with the world strengthens your team identity. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Muse for Mac Product Hunt How they launched it: Mailchimp soft launch waitlists gradual rollouts and feature flags press embargo TechCrunch, Gigaom, The Verge Heroku Postgres Ubuntu release cycle Heroku Cedar How to Launch on Product Hunt

Meeting potential collaborators online is easier when you represent yourself through a personal brand. Brian Lovin is a designer at GitHub, a podcaster at Design Details, and a prolific online maker. He joins Mark and Adam to talk about personal websites; the pros and cons of cold contact over the internet; whether follower counts matter; and how the Twitter algorithm can push back against your personal growth. Plus: the tension between thoughtfulness and daring. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Brian Lovin @brian_lovin Design Details /r/battlestations GitHub mobile apps Mark and Adam on Design Details Spectrum Buffer Security checklist more readable Hacker News How my website works On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog Metamuse episode on brand Prof. Dr. Style “I respond to every thoughtful note” how to email busy people fortune cookie tweets Staff Design alt accounts Facebook’s policy on real names dark matter Staff Engineer Brian’s design critiques App Dissection

What’s the best way for a solo entrepreneur to market their product? Pirijan is creating Kinopio, a spatial canvas on the web, and he publishes new features as screenshots or short demo videos on Twitter. He talks with Mark and Adam about how personality and building-in-public are a unique advantage of small teams; PC Magazine versus YouTube influencers; and why the struggle of building a business is best shared in realtime. Plus: choosing a tool based on vibes. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Pirijan @pketh Kinopio Gleason’s boxing gym The Endless Summer (surf documentary) “everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth” Fog Creek / Glitch Joel Spolsky Copilot, Kiln Wasabi Metamuse episode on urban design text blocks beta HandBrake teaching hospitals pave the cowpath Indie Hackers and revenue sharing example moonlighting The Making of Prince of Persia posturing MKBHD

The great works of human civilization can last for centuries—but software often decays in just a tiny fraction of that time. How much should this concern us in this increasingly-digital age? And as software creators, what can we do about it? Adam and Mark discuss the durability of papyrus vs CD-Rs vs the cloud; open-source Quake and remix culture; flat file formats; and digital preservation efforts like The Internet Archive and MAME. Plus: sometimes you just have to draw the rest of the owl. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Cesna 172 ForeFlight iPad aviation kneeboards The Long Now Foundation and Clock Buy it for life Metamuse episode on pricing Internet Archive CD-R MAME arcade game ROMs DOOM and Quake as open source Text Mode Quake II and DOOM on a pregnancy test Python 2 and 3 farmers fighting to repair and modify their tractors How To Draw an Owl Ship of Theseus CalDAV SQLite long-term support TIFF extensible file format Cambria data lenses the Lindy effect Arc browser, Not Boring Apps

Rich text editing is a foundational interaction in productivity software. Slim joins Mark and Adam to explain how rich text is more than just bold and italics for prose, but also includes math equations, diagrams, slideshows, and sheet music. Their discussion includes WYSIWYG versus markup languages for end users; how block-based editors change our understanding of rich text; and why Pandoc is Slim’s favorite piece of software. Plus: how to choose the best wagon in Oregon Trail. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Slim “Sarah” Lim @sliminality UC Berkeley, Notion, Ink & Switch 14" vs 16" MacBook Pro The Oregon Trail, 5th Edition Khan Academy R&D group with Andy Matuschak Ply, Slim’s CSS inspector Bert Bos (co-creator of CSS) Notion’s inline equation editor Peritext Further Research is Needed Welcome to Night Vale structured editors Lisp and S-Expressions Pandoc CommonMark, ReMarkdown Beamer, reveal.js AsciiDoc Eternals Overleaf stan Association for Computing Machinery ACM switch to HTML from PDF as archival format MathML MathJax, KaTeX MathOverflow Jonathan Aldrich Bear Finale, MuseScore Graphviz, Mermaid, Svgbob Sketch-n-Sketch

Designing tools for creators is harder than consumer software, but also potentially more rewarding. David leads design at Webflow, and he joins Adam and Mark to talk about mental models, opinionated versus open-ended tools, and being true to the materials. Plus: why complexity is unfairly villainized in design. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes David Hoang @davidhoang Webflow Seeing Spaces low-fidelity wireframes One Medical Quartz Composer Black Pixel SwiftUI no-code tools Heroku citizen developer journey map The Big Bed Civilization built on Webflow Metamuse episode with Weiwei Xu GeoCities Metamuse episode with Maggie Appleton Dreamweaver Web3 RSS mental models Xcode’s Auto Layout vs Figma’s auto layout position: absolute the box model flexbox JavaScript minification Jobs to be Done paradox of choice Webflow’s No-Code Conf OpenDoc, ActiveX Rake task Yahoo! Pipes low floor, high ceiling Obsidian React Native eject Instagram Stories Universe BASIC sprite Glitch original vision for the read-write web Beaker Browser

Ink & Switch is a research lab inspired by Bells Labs and Xerox PARC. Peter is lab director, and he joins Adam and Mark to discuss DARPA-hard problems; the Ink & Switch academic-meets-web essay format; and how an independent research lab can fund itself through a spinout flywheel. Plus: Mendel and his peas, Thoreau and his ants, and the Arrakis attitude of the knife. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Peter van Hardenberg @pvh Ink & Switch hydroponic gardening computer vision knight’s movement in chess efficient frontier Peritext Dynamicland Seinfeld calendar Zettelkasten rich text Metamuse episode with Geoffrey Litt Metamuse episode with Linus Lee “Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife […] It’s complete because it’s ended here.” DARPA Richard Hamming National Science Foundation prime number theorum Ben Reinhardt on innovation orgs Bell Labs list of inventions flywheel Gregor Mendel’s experiments with pea plants “It’s not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about?” DARPA autonomous vehicles contest and prize DARPA hard Gordon Brander pre-infusion Yjs the Hollywood model Martin Kleppmann Code for America no plan survives first contact with the enemy “pencils down” peer review citation

With Muse for Mac on the horizon, the team convenes to discuss the merits of native apps versus web technologies like Electron. Discussion points include the conflict between brand identity and apps that feel true to the OS; “proudly native” apps like Sketch and Nova; and the lost art of designing using system components. Plus: the business case for and against building native apps, and why great native apps tend to come from smaller companies. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes The road to Muse 2 Electron DMG file URL widgets GTK /usr the JVM and write once, run anywhere Java servlet, Flash React Native, Cordova transpiler browser quirks siren’s song Audacity Flutter Things principle of least surprise Twitter on iOS non-native share sheet Material Design Google’s iOS apps retiring custom widgets WeChat Microsoft antitrust case in the late 90s how the web broke Microsoft’s monopoly Steve Jobs visiting Xerox PARC Alto, Lisa, Macintosh Metamuse episode with Weiwei Xu V for Wikipedia Twitter’s custom typeface, Chirp ScreenFlow, Sketch, Nova Sketch’s proud-to-be-native article WebAssembly in Figma Sublime Text Finda’s 16ms goal Microsoft CEO deemphasizing the Windows business Obsidian, Superhuman, Linear 1Password’s switch to Electron and subsequent outcry video games and colorblind mode Game Maker’s Toolkit — Designing for Disability