New York-based startup Muze is rethinking mobile messaging. While today's messaging apps have expanded over the years to include support for sharing photos and videos, voice messages, reactions, and more, Muze has completely redesigned the traditional messaging experience as a blank canvas, allowing for interactions. more creative. The company's new mobile app on iOS allows users to add text, pin photos and GIFs, zoom in and out on content, and even draw on the messaging canvas itself using different pen sizes and colors, among other things.
The end result looks nothing like your standard messaging conversation, where back and forth chat bubbles are interspersed with occasional photos, videos, or links. Instead, a chat in Muze feels like some kind of collaborative art project - a collage of ideas, a meme board, or maybe a sketch pad, depending on how you use the app.
Despite offering a hodgepodge of new features, Muze itself is simple to use and easy enough to use.
After signing up for an account on Muze and possibly syncing your contacts, you are first presented with what otherwise appears to be a fairly typical messaging interface. There is a text box for typing and buttons that allow you to quickly access your iPhone's camera or your phone's photo gallery to add media files to your chat.
On the right, you'll also notice a pen icon - the first visual hint that Muze might be doing things differently.
But as you delve into the features, you realize that Muze offers more ways to interact. For example, when you tap the photo gallery icon, you'll find that Muze doesn't just offer access to your media - you can also search for photos, add GIFs from Giphy, or grab one of dozens of custom stickers. These include stickers that let you frame text, react to messages and decorate the screen, as well as a series of emoji mashups, such as a begging emoji surrounded by hearts, which makes the "But I'm Shy" symbol with the his fingers (it's a TikTok thing). TikTok's favorite Eye Mouth Eye emoji set is also glued onto a yellow smiley with open arms and feet.
When you tap the text box to start typing, you are presented with other expanded Muze features. From here, you can tap the buttons to change the font, text color or alignment, or turn on the highlight color (the color of the "bubble").
When you are ready to enter text, you can drag and drop the chat bubble anywhere on the screen, or make it larger or smaller. You can paste it on top of an image and so on.
The pen, meanwhile, allows you to draw on anything on the screen - not just the blank canvas itself, but also over text, images, stickers, or whatever else you used to decorate your chat.
There is only a slight learning curve in the app. For example, when you tap the pen icon from the main chat screen, you may want to draw under the current chat in an empty area of the canvas. But if you try to scroll down, you end up drawing on the screen, much to your surprise. To actually draw under existing chat, you need to tap in the text box first, then tap a different pen icon that appears in the gray iOS toolbar. Of course, kids who can handle complex tweaks to TikTok won't have a problem with these kinds of quirks.
The app also has some other modern features, such as the ability to change the app icon from one of the many it includes, for example. It also gives you the ability to create app themes not only in light or dark colors, as is now common, but also in shades such as millennial pink, mint green, dark teal, forest green, purple and the blue.
Together, its feature set offers an app that has a lot of appeal to young people, which makes sense, as Muze itself was designed by younger people used to communicating online with memes, GIFs, and other creative content. Currently, Muze co-founders include Douglas Witte, Willem Simons and Grant Davis. Fenner Stevens is the CEO of Muze.
Although new to the market, Muze has already attracted the interest of investors. According to filings filed by Crunchbase and SEC from 2019-2020, Muze has raised approximately $ 7 million in external capital, including equity and debt. In his AngelList profile, Muze supporters include Sequoia Capital, Tribe Capital, Maveron, True Ventures, Grand Central Tech, Village Global, and Hiten Shah. We include a handful of other minor funds and angels have supported Muze as well.
Muze's team declined to be interviewed about their plans for the business in the future, but confirmed funding. The app is available on the App Store as a free download.
