The Muse

Kathryn Minshew describes how The Muse grew from an imperfect first website into a career platform, sharing the failures and experiments along the way. She explains how early content, direct outreach, and persistence helped attract users, partners, and funding. Her advice includes launching early to learn from real customers, honoring commitments, choosing collaborators who share your values, and building a team around people’s motivations. She also urges founders to stay close to their users and data instead of comparing their progress with other companies’ success stories.

Kathryn Minshew traces The Muse from a scrappy WordPress career advice site to a growing career platform, emphasizing that founders should launch early and learn from real users. She urges teams to test ideas while focusing on metrics that reflect business success, rather than activity that merely looks useful. She shares low cost ways The Muse found users, including reaching out to niche groups, making referrals easy, and publishing guest articles for wider reach. She also discusses building a mission driven team, recruiting through founder networks, and ignoring startup hype in favor of serving users.