Lessons from building multiplayer browsers

14 hours ago

The author joined a startup as a founding engineer to build a 'multiplayer browser' for real-time collaboration, leveraging a Chromium fork with features like infinite canvases, chat, and embedded web content.
Despite technical innovations such as streaming DOM mutations instead of video and a flexible sync engine, the products Sail and Muddy struggled with positioning, user adoption, and communicating clear use cases beyond being 'cool' demos.
Key lessons include the importance of early and frequent public launches, avoiding over-indexing on table stakes like mobile apps, and the need for a landing page or video test to clarify value propositions for users.
Multiplayer collaboration faced widespread rejection across the industry, with examples like Tandem and Google Wave failing to gain traction due to work being more siloed than anticipated.
The author emphasizes that a startup thesis should serve as a compass, not a destination, and highlights the value of 'reps'—iterating based on user feedback rather than vision—to build product intuition over time.

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