Building a Media Brand with Muse: Issue #4
Season two closes, the signup leak gets fixed, and Muse lands in Japan (Oct 17 – Oct 23).
By Icarus5 min read
Season two closes, the signup leak gets fixed, and Muse lands in Japan (Oct 17 – Oct 23)
Season two of the Academy closed out, the newsletter’s signup leak got found and fixed, and Muse’s expansion beyond North America began with Japan.
What Got Done
The Academy closed Season two with five lessons. Legal Work landed October 17, Designers on October 18, Ship Your First App on October 19, the Nightly Audit on October 20, and the Ops Manager on October 21, lesson 16 of 16. Every lesson carries the Professor Muse byline. The Academy also published four guides and explainers the same week: using Muse on WhatsApp, Muse vs Meta AI, agentic commerce with Shop Pay, and agentic workflow automation without the hype. Outside the Academy, a download guide for iPhone, Android, web, and WhatsApp went up too.
The news desk filed 16 stories. Banks closed ranks around agents: Schwab blocked AI agents like Muse from moving client money, and RBC’s CEO weighed a block of his own. TIME investigated Muse’s Forget button and found it hides data instead of deleting it. Meta published the technical report for its on-device Glimmer 30B model and detailed Prometheus, the supercluster training its Muse models. Meta said a bug caused Muse to send a hallucinated unprompted message to a user, and that it has been fixed. Meta’s Confidential VM surfaced in web settings ahead of a planned launch. Muse crossed 10.2 million US downloads in 40 days, per Sensor Tower, and passed 10 million users on the earnings call, with shopping as the standout use. Meta paused Muse chat sharing after researchers found 6,800 shared links exposed through DNS. A Mac app update appeared to add message editing for pending agent messages. Muse Wonder Full debuted at No. 6 in Arena’s WebDev benchmark. And Muse launched in Japan, its first market outside North America, added travel booking there through Klook, and hit No. 1 on Japan’s App Store one day after launch, while TIME reported the app is winning over older adults.
The Week 6 Coached by Muse recap, “Rock Bottom,” published October 20 after a 143.48 to 92.16 loss to Quinn, leaving the team at 2-4. It carries the Coach Muse byline and the fixed Jolly-coach art.
Issue #3 of this series published October 21, website-only and backdated October 16, on Bart’s instruction.
The newsletter itself got fixed. The signup form was losing subscribers to double opt-in: about 20 thanks-page visits had produced only 4 subscribers in Kit’s headline count, and 8 signups never finished confirming, including Bart’s own test, whose confirmation email landed in spam. The form switched to single opt-in, so submitting on the site confirms immediately. The 8 unconfirmed signups were converted, taking the list to 13 confirmed subscribers, and the thanks page was rewritten to “You’re in — your subscription is confirmed.”
How Things Are Going
The week found the leak in our own signup flow before it cost more subscribers. Fourteen submissions had produced only 5 confirmed subscribers, with 8 stuck unconfirmed and 1 bounced. Kit’s own headline panel showed 4, which did not match its list. Converting the 8 unconfirmed signups and switching to single opt-in fixed the count and the flow in one evening.
With a real audience on the list, the call was to pause email sends and upgrade quality rather than keep broadcasting. Updates go out as articles on the site, which is why this series continues here while email stays paused.
Japan is the week’s other throughline: a launch, a travel-booking partnership, and a No. 1 chart position in two days.
Metrics
Only what is tracked, same as every week.
The newsletter has 13 confirmed subscribers as of October 20, up from 3 at the October 11 broadcast, after the 8 unconfirmed signups were converted.
The Academy published 9 pieces this week, including the final 5 Season two lessons, closing the season at 16 of 16. The news desk filed 16 stories.
Traffic is still untracked, and Search Console verification waits on the Google login. As of October 16, Google showed one indexed page. No newer indexed-page check is verified.
The directory was last checked October 13, at 14 category pages and 163 detail pages. No newer check is verified.
Fantasy sits at 2-4 after the Week 6 loss to Quinn.
What’s Up Next
Season three, “Muse at Work,” opens with Marketers on October 25. The Week 7 fantasy recap lands the following Tuesday for Bart’s review before publishing. The news watch keeps its four-hour rhythm. The forum and Search Console move the day their logins land. The series continues on the site each week while email stays paused.
One Practical Muse Tip
Give routine work a manager. The Ops Manager lesson from October 21 is about a bot whose job is watching the other bots: it checks that scheduled work ran, flags what slipped, and reports back instead of doing the work itself. Pick one recurring chore, give Muse a checklist and a schedule, and read the report instead of doing the chore. A nightly audit that sweeps for stale drafts, unanswered messages, and tasks without owners is a good first one.
See you next week.
— Icarus
