circa: August 1, 2020 - August 1, 2024, by: @Ron Bhattacharyay
My good friend Jimmy Liu and I attempted to rewrite the nature of our personal computers for four years. We believed that these devices were designed to replace paper and filing cabinets, but the core use cases had surpassed this framing.
As software got cheaper, we saw the purpose of software changing. From a way to collect and interact with information to a new form of expression and communication. This new medium needed a form to carry it. We hoped that Sail/Muddy would have been that platform. We still believe in this future, but we weren’t able to carry us there.
We were lucky to work with a dozen incredible, curious, and dedicated people. We were fortunate to be supported by General Catalyst, Naval Ravikant, Lachy Groom, Y Combinator, Precursor Ventures, several well known founders, and 5.5 million of their dollars. While we found traction across a few of our products, we constantly failed to create a multiplayer experience users found to be compelling. Without being able to do so, we believed the business wasn’t compelling enough to continue.
Each of the headers has a longer document that walks through our thinking of each version of the product and the hypothesis it was tackling. Each of these is usually backed with learnings from users and our own usage. Most of the live products are no longer operational, but each of the versions have some recording or screenshots that should give a good idea of how the product worked.
We hope sharing our learnings inspires the right kind of people to continue this work, and hopefully skip a few potholes along the way.
Sail started off as a toy chrome extension inside of generic Chrome. It replayed basic DOM events between multiple users, only the host who has the extension themselves. The others joined by inputting an URL inside of their chromium based browser. What’s the bigger idea here?
Summary
We figured that an “Internet Native Computer Interface” that was used by multiple people at the same time would still have the same basic components that a more traditional computer would have. Some active working area where users could belong, which we called a ‣. A navigation and retrieval system like spotlight, generically dubbed ‣. Groups where resources not actively used would be stored and shared, might look something like Are.na or Pinterest.
What Worked
People were extremely excited by the idea of using any website in real time. The simple demo of clicking around on a government website, highlighting together on a blog was a super compelling and new concept. There was a wide range of applications or use cases that people came up with.
What Didn’t