Notes From the Desk: A Year of Tayu
A short anniversary letter from the desk where Tayu gets made — what we shipped, what we said no to, and what surprised us.
A year ago this month, Tayu went out into the world for the first time — quietly, on Mac, with a small library of 4K nature scenes and a lot of unanswered questions. It has been a year of quietly making desks calmer. This is a short letter from the desk where Tayu gets made, about what we shipped, what we said no to, and what surprised us.
What we shipped
A 4K scene library that grew from a handful at launch to dozens by month nine. Ambient sound, per-scene, normalized in mastering so the volume does not jump between scenes — this one was a year-long quiet obsession of mine. Playlists, schedules, and then Flow mode, which uses AI to pick scenes by weather, season, and time of day. The ability to use a YouTube link as a wallpaper. A free tier that is genuinely free, not a marketing version of free.
None of these arrived in the order we had originally planned. Almost everything that turned out to be the most-used parts of the app — Flow, schedules, ambient sound at the per-scene level — were not in the first sketches. They got built because watching people use Tayu kept pointing at gaps in what we had.
What surprised us
Three things, in roughly the order they happened.
How quickly people stopped switching. We had built Tayu thinking of it as a library — a place to browse and pick. What people actually did was find one scene, leave it on for weeks, and only switch when something in the season changed. The library matters less than the right one to settle into.
How much the audio carried. We almost shipped without ambient sound on the first beta. The argument was that some people would be on calls, some would have their own music, and the sound would be the first thing to get muted. All true. The thing we missed was that for the people who did keep the audio on, the scenes were not the same product. With sound, they were a place. Without it, a screensaver.
How much remote workers used Tayu like a clock. Morning scene, afternoon scene, evening scene — not as a tour through landscapes, but as a visible shape for a day that had stopped having one. Flow mode came out of watching this happen and trying to remove the manual labor of it.
What we said no to
The list is longer than the shipping list, which I have been told is the sign you are doing this right. A few of the bigger ones:
User-uploaded video. The thing most often asked for, and the thing we have most consistently declined to ship. The reason is that the experience of Tayu depends on sound and image being matched at the source, and uncurated user uploads break that contract. We will keep saying no to this until we know how to ship it without making the product worse.
A "productivity score". Several smart people suggested we measure something — focus minutes, switches per hour, deep-work streaks — and surface it as a number. We declined. Tayu is not a productivity product. Adding a score would have changed it into one, and not in a direction either of us wanted.
Audio reactivity, in v1. The kind that makes the trees sway in time to your music. Beautiful, demo-able, and the wrong product for the people Tayu is for. Maybe later, with care.
Mac plus Windows plus iPad plus Linux all at once. Tayu is Mac-first today because doing one platform well, for a small team, is the only way to do any platform well. Windows is in build. iPad and Linux are not promises we are making.
Thank you
For trying it. For sending the long emails. For the screenshots from desks I will never get to see in person — Singapore apartments, Berlin attics, Mexico City balconies, a research vessel somewhere off Iceland. You make the work feel like it has a room of its own.
Year two is in front of us. There are scenes we have been holding back that I think you are going to like, and quieter things underneath the scenes that I am even more excited about. Download Tayu if you have not yet, or open the app you already have, and we will be here making the desk a little less still.
Onward.
— Nono
A calmer live wallpaper for Mac
Tayu pairs 4K nature scenes with ambient sound, YouTube wallpapers, playlists, schedules, and AI scene switching for focused work and small breaks.