1. Website Planet
  2. >
  3. Blog
  4. >
  5. How Piano Marvel Went From Debt To 17k Paying Users: Q/A with CEO Aaron Garner
How Piano Marvel Went From Debt To 17k Paying Users: Q/A with CEO Aaron Garner

How Piano Marvel Went From Debt To 17k Paying Users: Q/A with CEO Aaron Garner

Roberto Popolizio Written by:
They told him there was no market for his idea.

He went ahead and invested $600,000 that he didn’t have in 2008.

Now in 2024, Piano Marvel has over 17,000 active subscribers with a premium account, hundreds of affiliate partners, and a team of 17 developers.

Thanks to Website Planet, I had the chance to interview Aaron Garner, CEO of Piano Marvel, to learn how he was able to build a thriving online platform without any business or software development skills, and how a bunch of tools help him run the entire operations.

P.S. Competition is tough, but that’s good according to Aaron. Read on to learn why.

What’s your story and what made you start Piano Marvel?

I was just a small boy when I was listening to my mom playing the organ. My true love, though, was football, American football, but my mom wanted me to learn to play the violin. She had nine children, and I was chosen as the violinist.

My older brother was the pianist. He was eight years older than me. He would take me on his motorcycle, put me on the back, and I’d strap my violin on my back. We’d go about a half an hour to my violin lesson. I hated the violin, I didn’t want to practice it, I just wanted to play sports.

When I was 10 years old, we got news that my brother had been in a motorcycle accident, and died. My mom went into a depression, and I decided to kind of take up his instrument, the piano with no instruction.

She just didn’t have it in her to teach me, so I just picked it up on my own, and, by the time I went into high school, I was playing some Beethoven sonatas, just on my own… It was really bad. Regardless, I went into a competition where the judge said that I had raw talent, which really meant that I wasn’t very good, but I had potential. We didn’t have any money to take lessons, because my dad was laid off from the steel mill. So the judge said he would go ahead and teach me for whatever we could afford.

This college professor taught me piano and the very next year, I won a competition. I remember thinking, “ Oh, well, maybe this is something I’d be interested in!”

But what I really wanted to do was be a neurosurgeon–I was going to be a doctor. However I was feeling just more and more inclined to music, so I eventually did go into music, and I won the piano competition at the state level for Colorado, plus I got a scholarship to BYU.

When I got to BYU, they asked me to sight-read, and I couldn’t read music well enough. They didn’t renew my scholarship, so I decided to go to another school, and I finished my bachelor’s. Then I started looking for masters and doctorate programs, but most of them wouldn’t accept me because my reading was so bad.

Luckily, I found a school that forgot to ask me to sight-read something, and they gave me a big scholarship there to do my master’s and doctorate. Once I got in I said, “I have a confession… I’m not a very good sight reader.”

They said, “Well, we don’t know how to help you”. Nobody could help and nobody knew what to do by this point. Everybody should be sight-reading really well at the point that I was at, so they didn’t have a program in place to help me.

I started teaching, and during those years I thought there’s got to be a better way to teach students. I was teaching 16 students at a time from 1997 to about 2002. We had CDs, little audio CDs that would play the backing tracks to make these little songs more fun to play, and books and music. I thought, “wouldn’t it be cool if we could combine both of them together, but something that could assess you, so it could tell you which notes you played right, and which ones you did wrong, your rhythms right and wrong, and you could pass off your songs with technology…

What if everything could be built into just one app?”.

At the time, nothing like that existed. I was a poor grad student, but I decided to go looking for a developer, because I thought there was a good market. We found a company who said “No, we don’t know if it’s possible, but it will take you at least $200,000 to just get started.”

$200,000 was way out of my budget as a poor grad student and musician, so I decided to let some big company do it. I waited for about four years, and started looking to see if somebody had done it, but nobody had done it yet. I called up a company in the tech industry for music, and they said they didn’t want any part of it, there was no market for piano music, and for pianists teaching piano.

I got mad, really mad, so I decided to go look again, and this time I found a developer who would get started for $600,000. I told him “All right, I’ll come up with $600,000. Can we start next month?” My wife stared at me, she’s like, “where are we going to get $600,000?!”.

We had a month to come up with $600,000 to get started. I found the money, we went ahead and got started. I didn’t know what I was getting into back then, but right now:
  • We’ve put $13 million into the project.
  • We have 17 full-time developers who are working on the project every day.
  • We’re in hundreds of colleges and universities
  • We’re in 129 countries
One of the cool things is that I teach piano in a studio. This helps me keep thinking of ideas that I want developed to enhance the studio experience and at colleges.

It’s really fun to see the growth and expansion, and how Piano Marvel is very different from any other software in the same niche, because it’s really geared towards educators and education.

A lot of music software is just DIY, but it’s not built by piano teachers or somebody who’s done extensive research and development in pedagogy. For example, when you’re reading music, some people want immediate feedback. But what we found is that, if you give them immediate feedback, their eyes span across the music, and they will probably go backwards.

If you’re getting green and red dots as you go, it ends up making your eye movement go backwards. And when good reading is developed, you’re looking forward. That causes you to actually develop a really bad habit of looking backwards, which can be permanently damaging to your reading.

So we make choices based on good pedagogical practices, that some people just don’t understand the purpose of. That’s one of the most frustrating things for people to understand. We were seeing this through the eyes of a piano teacher.

The journey has been really, really fun, and my mission in life now is to give the world the same feeling I had when I finally started learning my own language.

Can you imagine not being able to read your language? And when you do learn to read, it opens a whole world, even learning a foreign language, it opens a whole new world for you that gives you enjoyment and opportunity, and fulfillment. And so I see music as one of these key pieces that fills our soul. 

When you learn an instrument, it just feels fulfilling, and I want to provide that for more people. The ability to not only play music, but to be able to read it as well.

I still use Piano Marvel every day. And my reading is getting better all the time. I love it. It’s addictive and coming up with the new features. It’s making practicing more effective and more fun. I like that I can learn my big sonatas, and big repertoire pieces, so much faster and it is more enjoyable just because of the tools we’re developing around good practice techniques.

They told you there was no market for Piano Marvel. Did you just have a hunch that there was actually a market?

When cell phones were first made, there was no market for them. People didn’t know they needed it. Someone had a dream and made it happen.

Even though others couldn’t see it, I saw the potential. When we introduced it, not everyone liked the idea. People said, “Why do this? We just want to read from our books like we always have.” Only a few pioneers saw the vision.

I remember going to a conference where music teachers turned up their noses, saying, “We’re professionals, we don’t use technology for teaching.” This was in 2009, way before iPads and smartphones.

Over time, as more people embraced technology, teachers went from saying:

“I would never use that”

to

“I know I need it, but I don’t want to learn it.”

to

“Yes, please teach me more.”

So there really wasn’t a market at that time, but we wanted to create one, because Piano Marvel is something that actually helped people learn faster.

You can use it on various devices like Android phones, iPhones, iPads, computers, and even Chromebooks. Initially, it was limited to PCs and Macs, but we adapted it for Chromebooks, expanding our reach to schools using them.

Currently, we’re working on an Android app. Additionally, we’re invested in a project, over a million dollars worth, for a microphone assessment feature. This means your phone can listen to the piano without plugging in, providing instant feedback.

How is the level of competition now in 2024?

Most apps out there target individuals learning piano on their own, but we are the only ones that focus on educators.

So we don’t have much competition, but more competition will only be good for us.

Why?

Because many users start with those general apps and then they want to get more serious or learn to read music, so they discover us… It’s like a funnel – the more exposure our competitors get, the better for us.

Picture it like a stand-alone restaurant–a restaurant all by itself doesn’t get a lot of people, unless you put it in a street with McDonald’s and a Taco Bell, etc. These streets with all the restaurants–that’s where everybody goes to eat.

Our industry works more or less that way. We need more players in the piano teaching market to create a hub where everyone goes. Just like a cluster of restaurants drawing more people. The more of us there are, the better it is for everyone, and especially for us because we are still unique.

In fact, we’re proud to be the only software allowing you to upload any song, chop it into learning segments, and make it your own.

Because we have so many universities, we cater to the needs of teachers with reports that show what the students’ sight reading scores are and which assignments they’ve completed. We’re also developing more tools that we’re going to be releasing this summer with a grand reveal.

📅 We’re holding a Piano Marvel teachers conference, June 21 and 22, in Salt Lake City, and we hope to have about 300 piano teachers attend that conference. We will reveal three of our biggest new features there, but I can’t tell you now because they’re supposed to be a secret and a surprise for this summer!

How is your clientele split between teachers and students right now?

Students are not our primary focus, but they make up probably 50% of our customers base. They are just people who find us on the internet. That happens because we make it work so well with teachers, that those students who decide to learn on their own realize that Piano Marvel actually works really well for them too!

That’s where it’s good to have the 17 full-time developers–a lot of these tools will benefit both teachers and their students.

What were the challenges of hiring and managing developers as a no-coder yourself?

First, we had to find developers who could speak English since we develop in English. Then, we trained them in music, so we could all speak the same language–the language of music. It was a challenging journey, learning to communicate using our terminology.

Initially, we connected with a company in the music industry and asked if they were interested. As we outgrew them, we moved on, and through their connections, we found new developers. It was mostly word-of-mouth that led us to build our current development team. We’ve had our share of mistakes, learning the hard way, by choosing developers who weren’t as good. But each mistake taught us valuable lessons.

What is the current tech stack running Piano Marvel?

We built our website from scratch using HTML. We added Bootstrap along the way and used Python, C++, C sharp, Swift, and PHP (starting with PHP1 and now PHP3) for different aspects. We’re currently rebuilding our back end. Additionally, we utilize Java and JavaScript.

For payment processing, form creation, social login, and website analytics we use respectively PayPal, Google Forms, Facebook Login, and Google Tag Manager.

Believe it or not, we use Skype everyday for our communication. Skype is one of our main communication tools, because of the way you can use it for video conferencing. We also use some project management tools, but my favorite is still Skype, and of course Google Sheets!

Every year we take some interns from music degrees and music technology. We will give them some marketing, sales, or music-editing tasks. We keep those we find to be really good.

What has worked so far to resell Piano Marvel and increase your audience?

We have several hundred affiliates selling Piano Marvel. We are in schools, bookstores, and music stores. We’re interested in working also with parents, teachers, and anyone else who wants to promote music education.

Trade shows are great to get a lot of contacts, but following up is the hardest part to make them become referrals. They can easily forget about you.

Piano Marvel also hosts regular contests to give students a chance to compete no matter what level they are at in their studies, plus a YouTube channel and a Facebook community.

Rate this Article
4.0 Voted by 2 users
You already voted! Undo
This field is required Maximal length of comment is equal 80000 chars Minimal length of comment is equal 10 chars
Any comments?
Reply
View %s replies
View %s reply
Related posts
Show more related posts
We check all user comments within 48 hours to make sure they are from real people like you. We're glad you found this article useful - we would appreciate it if you let more people know about it.
Popup final window
Share this blog post with friends and co-workers right now:

We check all comments within 48 hours to make sure they're from real users like you. In the meantime, you can share your comment with others to let more people know what you think.

Once a month you will receive interesting, insightful tips, tricks, and advice to improve your website performance and reach your digital marketing goals!

So happy you liked it!

Share it with your friends!

1 1 1

Or review us on 1

3250012
50
5000
74307727