Great Companies: How did you get your idea or concept for the business?
N G Vijay Anand: I used to play Guitar during my college days, but after that playing Guitar took a backseat due to busy corporate life. I started playing Guitar again a few years back. But I found it extremely difficult to get a right tutor and even if I was able to find one, travel and timing was a challenge. These were the pre-pandemic days.
I also enrolled my son for Drums classes in a local music school near my home, but he dropped out in a month. The challenge was one size fits all approach and the music schools were exactly the way they were decades back offering boring group classes. During my discussion with music school owners I learnt attrition of students and tutors were very high.
I also tried the youtube and skype online lessons. In youtube there is a lot of content, but lacks a structured approach and finding a qualified tutor for skype or zoom online lessons were difficult. Based on these personal experiences I felt the market was ripe for disruption and this led to the birth of musicmaster.
Great Companies: What are the various Services provided by Musicmaster
N G Vijay Anand: musicmaster provides live 1 to 1 Online music classes. We provide online music classes for Guitar, Keyboard, Piano, Flute, Violin, Ukulele, Drums, Hindustani, Carnatic & Western vocals. We have so far provided 20000+ hours of online music lessons in 55+ cities globally. Qualified music tutors deliver live music lessons to students through our inhouse video platform or through zoom. We also coach students for music theory and performance grade exams offered by Rockschool, London and Trinity College, London.
Great Companies: What makes Musicmaster different from hundreds of other Music Education Firms?
N G Vijay Anand:
We currently have 75+ music tutors on our platform and all the tutors have formal education either in western or Indian style music. We match students based on language, age, genre, difficulty level and this helps us to get the right student-tutor fit.
We would like to position ourselves as a music-tech play. We have built our own video platform (developed by musicmaster technology team) inbuilt with musician’s tools like Metronome, Guitar tuner, Graphic animations, Shruthi box etc. The idea is to deliver superior customer experience where the students will just miss only the physical presence of the tutor.
Great Companies: What are the struggles and challenges you face?
N G Vijay Anand: Two years back online music education was a niche space. However now it has become competitive with the entry of many well funded start-ups. Being bootstrapped we have to be careful where we have to deploy our scarce resources. The other big challenge is the cost of acquisition of customers is going up as more players are resorting to digital acquisition through social media platforms.
Great Companies: How do you plan to grow in the future? What does 5 years down the line look like for Musicmaster?
N G Vijay Anand: We would want to be the first port of call for anyone who wants to start their music journey or acquire advanced skills. We would like to have 2000+ highly qualified tutors catering to the needs of potential Indian students across the globe.
Great Companies: If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting out, what would it be?
N G Vijay Anand: Keep talking to your customers and involve customers in building your products.