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Meta Muse's big week: #1 on the App Store, then blocked by Amazon · Now Shipping: A Mind the Product podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: If you've been fighting that internal objection that your own users aren't ready to trust an agent with something real, that objection is starting to get weaker every single time Muse adds another million downloads.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Consumer products are sort of doing the change management for you right now, whether you ask them to or not.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: So here is my question to you.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Where is your checkout moment?
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Where are people already trying to do the thing right now that you could just let your product finish for them automatically instead of making them dig for a feature to do it themselves?
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: Now, today's episode is all about Muse.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't a repeat episode.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: I know just two weeks ago we covered the launch of Muse, but since then, things have gotten pretty crazy.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: It became the most downloaded app in the country.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: It picked a fight with Amazon, and almost by accident, it answered a question that I posed to you back in August.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: So let's get right into it.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now, first a quick recap for anybody who missed that episode or needs a refresher.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: On September 8th, Meta launched Muse, a personal AI agent.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: And Meta's pitch was very specific.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Muse isn't meant to be a chat bot that you talk to, it's an agent that you hand things off to to draft the email or book the flight or buy the concert tickets before they sell out.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: It runs inside its own dedicated virtual machine in Meta's cloud.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: So it's your agent with your data walled off from everybody else's.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Now there's a separate system inside that virtual machine called Sentinel, and its entire job is to decide what Muse is allowed to touch.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: You can watch its browser window while it works, you control what apps it has access to, and before it spends your money or sends a message as you, it has to come back to you and ask first.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: Meta even brought in Moxie Marlin Spike, love the name.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: He's the guy who built the popular encrypted messaging app Signal.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: And Marlin Spike is to work on the privacy side of things.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now we spent a full episode on the safety questions about Muse two weeks ago, so I'm not gonna go into that too much.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: What I do want to spend time on is what's happened ever since it launched, because in about two weeks, Muse went from interesting product launch to one of the biggest product stories of the entire year.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: Now let's start with the raw numbers.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Third-party analytics firm Aptopia has been tracking this closely, and depending on which day you checked the count, Muse has pulled somewhere north of 900,000 downloads in the US alone in the first 10 days, on its way to something like 2.8 million globally in the first 12 days.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Now in the US App Store, it is now the number one app.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: And for some perspective, over a matched 12-day window, Aptopia had Muse at 1.8 million iOS downloads in North America against 1.3 million when ChatGPT launched back in 2023.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: Now, same goes for daily active users as well.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: Muse is actually seeing more daily active users than ChatGPT did, but I want to pump the brakes here.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: This is an apples to oranges kind of a thing.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: When ChatGPT launched, you know, the normal people out there, the non-tech people, my parents, you know, friends, they had no idea what AI was at the time.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we all knew, but most people didn't.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: This is different, right?
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like everybody is using AI.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: My dad uses ChatGPT, so it's not as if it's starting off at the very same step.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, that's just the download side of things.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: There's way more to this story.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: On September 21st, Shopify CEO Toby Lutka posted this on X, and I'll read it exactly as he wrote it.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: We are excited to announce that we're partnering deeply with Muse to enable agentic checkout with Shopi on all Shopify stores, offering people an easy and delightful way to shop and check out with Muse.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this is a huge deal.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Every Shopify store with Shopi built directly into Muse's checkout flow.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: Now, Wall Street, they love the news.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: At the time of the recording, Shopify stock has shot up by 11%.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's just in like a week or so.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: Now, one day later, September 22nd, Instacart signed on too.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: Same deal, pretty much.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: Muse can now go shop your groceries and check out through Instacart's own infrastructure without you even opening the Instacart app.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: So in the span of just two days, two of the biggest names in e-commerce handed Muse the keys to their checkout flow.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: That is a huge deal.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's Amazon, which looked at the exact same moment and they did the opposite.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: This past Sunday night, Amazon shut Muse out of its store entirely.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: So if you try to get Muse to buy something on Amazon right now, you actually get a pop-up.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: It says continued access by an unauthorized agent violates Amazon's condition of use, to which our customers have agreed.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: Now, Amazon spokesperson basically said, Hey, look, Meta never told Amazon that Muse would be browsing the store.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: The agent doesn't identify itself while it's there.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: And Amazon says it appears to capture and store customer credentials and pull account and order history without their knowledge.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: Now, Meta's response, at least the version that they gave publicly before this blowup, is that Muse has no visibility into people's passwords or payment methods, and credentials go into secure storage so Muse can use them without actually seeing them.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now, sounds like there's an unresolved dispute here about what's happening under the hood, but I don't think the technical dispute is really what this is all about.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: Forbes ran the number that I think explains it very well.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: Amazon's sponsored ads business pulls in$68 billion a year.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's 10% of the entire company's revenue.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: That whole business depends on you scrolling past a shelf of products online, seeing the ones that Amazon got paid to put in front of you.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: An agent that goes straight to the thing matching what you asked for and checks out, they skip that shelf completely.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: If you block the agent, none of that revenue is at risk.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: Now, it's not to say Amazon and Meta can't figure things out here, but this isn't a one-off thing from Amazon.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: They've sued perplexity over a similar shopping agent.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: They've restricted bots from OpenAI and Google too.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: Muse is sort of just the next one on their block list.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: So you've got Shopify and Instacart racing to open the door, Amazon bolting their door shut over the exact same product in the exact same week.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: An AI agent standoff, so to speak.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I want to bring you back to something that we talked about back in August before Muse ever even launched.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: A few weeks back, we covered a post from Josh Miller, co-founder of the browser company.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now, his point was simple.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: For all the money, all the models, all the hype, most people outside of tech still aren't using AI agents.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: They're using Chat GPT, sure.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes maybe a little too much, right?
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: But they haven't had their ChatGPT moment for a gentic AI yet.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: They haven't had that moment where they handed a goal off to something and trusted that thing to do the multi-step work without watching every single step.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: Now, at that time, I gave you a couple reasons that I thought this gap existed.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: One was a design and trust problem.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: Agents ask more of a person than a chat box does.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: You have to actually articulate a goal, hand off the execution, and trust something you can't fully see to get it right.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: I also talked about it being a distribution problem.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody's forcing regular consumers to adopt this the way, say, an IT department forces a company to roll something out.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: Your mom's not going to go download an agent app and figure out how to use it all on her own.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: At least nobody's forcing her to, right?
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: But if your boss told you there was a company mandate to use agents, you're doing it.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: You have no choice.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: I think what happened this week is the distribution half of that answer starting to be solved in real time.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: Muse is starting to show up inside of checkout flows that people were already using with Instacart and Shopify, right at the exact moment they were ready to buy something.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's the forcing function that Josh was describing.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a company mandating it from the top down, but even the product simply being where people already are is a part of solving that distribution.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when it comes to trust, well, maybe the trust problem isn't fully solved yet, right?
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, MetaZone internal testers were finding real issues with this thing days before it shipped, but the download numbers and the fact that two major platforms have handed over their checkout flow within just 48 hours of each other.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe this trust issue isn't such a big issue.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: So what does this mean for you as a product person?
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think a few things.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: First, pay attention to where adoption is coming from.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: Muse isn't winning by being a better standalone app that people have to go out and seek and learn.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: It does have a standalone app and it's an awesome one.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the UX is spot on, it's easy to use, easy to adopt, but it's not the only thing that Muse focused on when it comes to distribution.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: Muse is getting invited into places that people already are right at the moment they were trying to do something.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're building anything agentic and you're picturing it as its own destination, its own app, its own dashboard, ask yourself if that's even needed.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, Muse does have its own app and it's a great one, but the bigger win might be getting invited inside of somebody else's checkout flow or inbox or somebody else's existing habit, whatever that habit might be.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: Second thing, don't assume every platform welcomes this the way Shopify and Instacart would.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, for every Shopify and Instacart, you have Amazon, right?
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: If your product needs to plug into somebody else's platform to actually work, figure out now what kind of platform you're dealing with.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, some doors will open like Shopify's, but some will slam shut like Amazon's.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: And which one you get probably has less to do with how good your agent is and more to do with whether the platform on the other side makes its money from the exact friction you're trying to remove.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: Now, finally, this might matter a lot, especially if you're not building a consumer product, right?
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: Let's say you're building for the enterprise, for internal tools, for B2B software.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: Pay attention anyway.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: For every person downloading Muse and letting it book a flight or check out a grocery order without watching every step, they're practicing something.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: The specific skill of handing a gold a software and trusting it to do multi-step work on its own.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: Now, that skill doesn't stay in some shopping app.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: People bring it to work on Monday.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: If you've been fighting that internal objection that your own users aren't ready to trust an agent with something real, that objection is starting to get weaker every single time Muse adds another million downloads.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: Consumer products are sort of doing the change management for you right now, whether you ask them to or not.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: So here is my question to you.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: Where is your checkout moment?
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: Where are people already trying to do the thing right now that you could just let your product finish for them automatically instead of making them dig for a feature to do it themselves?
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: And are there places outside of your product where people are already trying to do this same thing that maybe, just maybe, you could go and show up inside instead of waiting for them to come to you?
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: All right, that's going to do it for this week's episode of Now Shipping.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: If you found this valuable, please subscribe, tell a friend once again for the team at Mind the Product.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: My name is Mike Belcito, and this is Now Shipping.