241 Meet the Piano Teacher Who Built a $2M Online School

Joseph Hoffman was halfway through a conducting degree when he started teaching neighbourhood kids piano to pay the bills. He fell in love with it, pivoted his whole career, and eventually moved online with a pretty unconventional idea... give every single lesson away for free.

That decision led to Hoffman Academy reaching over 200,000 students across 115 countries, $2M a year in revenue, and a team of 15 people building one of the most recognised online piano schools in the world.

In this episode Joseph shares how the freemium model actually works in practice, what he's learned about converting free users into paying members, why a 30-day free trial completely flopped for them and what they did instead, and how he's thinking about growing the business in 2026.

Really enjoyed this conversation. Joseph has built something genuinely special and there's a lot here for anyone running or thinking about running a subscription-based online course.

🔗 Check out Hoffman Academy: https://www.HoffmanAcademy.com
🔗 Find Joseph on social media:  @Hoffmanacademy  

#OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing


🤝  Get In Touch
If you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.

Transcript

From Conducting To Teaching Kids

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I actually originally was setting out to become a conductor. I was getting my master's degree in music, in conducting, but to pay my way through grad school, I started teaching local neighborhood kids piano, and I fell in love with it. My original vision was to just have a local school, train some teachers in my method, but the business model of a music school is tough. The profit margins were thin, and so going online was like, huh, is there a way we could scale this more? This was deliberately an attempt to see if we could do a broader business market. Our revenue is about 2 million a year. Right now, we have about 6,000 A subscribers, and then on top of that, we have about 10,000 lifetime membership.

SPEAKER_02 0:43

Hello and welcome to the selling online course industry. It's the winning strategy. Top performance and online course industry. My name is John Edward, and today's guest, Joseph Hoffman. Joseph is a founder of Hoffman Academy and the creator of the Hoffman Method for Piano. He's now a YouTube personality, ODI certified music educator, former faculty member of BYU School of Music, a dedicated and professional life to developing an innovative new piano method along with a host of online tools and games and sources that make learning piano fun. His online piano lessons have reached over 200,000 students across 115 countries, transforming the way that piano education is accessed worldwide. Just if welcome to the show, Matt. Thanks for having me. So who are you helping? Is it mostly beginners? Is it more kids? Like who is who's is it adults? Like who's taking the lessons from you?

SPEAKER_01 1:35

Our core audience is kids, and we have found that, yeah, a lot of beginners. And I've been delighted to see that teens and adults have enjoyed the program as well. But certainly my core audience is elementary age kids. It's really interesting.

SPEAKER_02 1:51

I've interviewed a few people who are teaching piano um on podcasts, including do you know Josh Wright? Uh the name's familiar. He's like a he used to be a um classical pianist uh at a like competitive level. So he travel around the world competing in these competitions. No. He was saying to me, I wasn't winning, but I was in the room. You know, I was like in the room with the best pianists in the world. And he's teaching like how do you play Rekmanov something? I don't know anything about piano, the classical music. But um and then I interviewed someone else the other day who was like really focused on people over 55. Like, how come for you it's like kids? Where did that is that what you used to do? Did you used to teach in person? Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:32

When I was I actually originally was setting out to become a conductor. I was getting my master's degree in music, in conducting, but to pay my way through grad school, I started teaching local neighborhood kids piano, and I fell in love with it and decided to pivot my master's degree more into a piano pedagogy-focused degree. And I don't know what that word means. Pedagogy is just the art of teaching. That's what's often used. If you're um a music major and you want to study teaching music, it's called a pedagogy degree. Pedagogy, okay.

SPEAKER_02 3:04

Yeah. Nice. And so you kind of started from there, and then like, was that did you start making YouTube videos at that point, or was that later?

SPEAKER_01 3:11

Or no, because this was over 20 years ago. I don't think YouTube was even a thing yet. But how old is YouTube? Wait a minute. I don't know. Uh okay. Well, I think maybe maybe right around that time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:24

Oh, it turned 20 on February 14th, 2025. So it's hypothetical.

Building A More Holistic Piano Method

SPEAKER_01 3:30

So yes. But I was definitely not ready at that time to start posting. So I did not know what I was doing. Like, I feel like there was so much trial and error, but I quickly realized I wanted to create my own piano method because in experimenting with different methods, none of them did everything I wanted to do. Having gone through being a music major at the university, I realized I was so behind in certain skills, like my ear skills. I'd been raised with the John Thompson piano method, which a lot of people of my generation were brought up with. And it's very focused on sight reading and learning to read notes from the page, but it didn't train my ear at all. It didn't train me to improvise. And I was meeting people who were jazz trained who could just play circles around me on that front. And I was like, why not have a method that taught all those core skills that the great musicians of the past, like Bach and Mozart, they were not just composers, they were improvisers. And improvisation shouldn't just be something that jazz musicians do. And so I wanted to make a method that was more holistic. And that led me to create my own method, start my own music school. And then the online portion kind of came as a just a wild experiment that I know. I didn't even know that it would be possible to teach kids piano online without interacting one-on-one with them.

SPEAKER_02 4:53

So what's different about the way that you're teaching that allows you to teach improvisation as well as uh sight reading and whatever else is involved?

SPEAKER_01 5:02

It's just getting them started from the beginning. Like the very first song I teach is Hot Cross Buns. And then in lesson number two, I say, okay, now we're gonna mess around with this. You're gonna play Hot Cross Buns and now take those same three notes, and now you make up a melody. And it's not hard when you just start from the beginning and you get them comfortable with experimenting. Just like if you learn French, you don't just want to memorize French poems, you want to learn to speak it spontaneously.

SPEAKER_02 5:30

Turn up at the train station and start reciting.

SPEAKER_01 5:34

Right, yeah. You need to be able to have a spontaneous conversation to consider yourself fluent, and I think music is no different.

SPEAKER_02 5:40

It's one of the things I love in um so I I play bass, and uh when I I I play a lot of um blues rock, and blues rock is very heavy on you can mess around with it a lot, which I love. Yeah, like as long as it's something in something in the scale, something in the arpeggio, it'll and you can try it, right? You don't even have to remember for definite what is the blues minor scale for C, you can just go, well, let me try that sound, and how does that sound? As long as you're hitting certain root notes, everything else you can kind of mess around with a bit. That's improvising, yeah. It's a natural part of your genre, but not classical piano. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's I think when I'd started learning, I was like, oh, I must learn exactly the way everything is written. Right. Because that's the proper way of doing it. And then when I when my teacher told me you're allowed to do this, I was like, oh, okay, okay. Yeah, yeah.

Going Online To Scale Lessons

SPEAKER_01 6:35

This was fun. It's good. Sometimes you just need permission. My piano teacher growing up never even said the word improvise or never even mentioned, like, yeah, you could you could try different notes if you want to. Never even came up. Well, so when did you start on the on uh YouTube? When were you ready for that? My first uh my first experimental video was posted uh in 2010. Oh, okay. So it was a while back. So okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:59

So you had finished Master's at that point, or was that during it?

SPEAKER_01 7:02

Yeah, the master's was done uh maybe like three or four years before that. I'd moved to Portland, Oregon to start my music school. My original vision was to just have a local school, train some teachers in my method. But the business model of a music school is tough. The profit margins were thin. And so going online was like, huh, is there a way we could scale this more?

SPEAKER_02 7:25

Is that what your your starting point with it was when you were going online? Because a lot of people I talked to, the reason I ask a lot of people I talked to, they started posting YouTube videos so that their students could watch them online, and then they just found other people were watching them and it kind of grew from there. But it sounds like you were a little bit more deliberate when you were going online.

SPEAKER_01 7:42

Yeah, though, this was deliberately an attempt to see if we could do a broader business market. In fact, I was very hesitant to tell my local students about this at first. I was kind of keeping it hush-hush because I didn't want to lose students. Like, oh, I could just watch you online for free. You know, I'll drop lessons and just do it this other way. I was I was a little bit nervous about it at first, but eventually I found that it was good marketing for finding new students. And so I eventually started freely telling everyone about it and found that my own students could make even faster progress when they were coming to me live once a week, but then learning more at home. Sometimes they'd come to a lesson like, oh, I already learned this song. I watched you online. I'm like, great, let's go to the next one. We like doubled our progress.

SPEAKER_02 8:30

What was your original plan from a business model point of view? Were you hoping to sell lessons online, or were you hoping to sell online courses at that point when you started?

SPEAKER_01 8:39

In those days, I read a few books and was really enamored with the freemium business model concept, you know, Google and the internet. I mean, it was still kind of the early ish years of figuring out how to do an online business. And I just saw the power of free and how fast you could grow an audience if you gave away at least the core part of your offering for free. That's how Facebook was growing. It was how, you know, all the big companies were growing with this freemium model. So I thought to myself, well, you can't compete. Well, it's hard to compete with free. And so if I just give away all the video content for free, and I can sell the because I created my own method, I had intellectual property in terms of sheet music and downloads that I could sell as one-offs. So I was able to use the marketing angle that imagine going to a piano teacher and them saying, I'm gonna give you free lessons. All you gotta do is pay for the books. And that was my my angle from the start.

SPEAKER_02 9:42

Nice. And what's the what's the model now? Like how much do people get for free? What do they pay for and how much they pay for it?

SPEAKER_01 9:50

Yeah, I've decided to stick with that model largely. The video content is all 100% free. There's no paywall in front of the video content. Uh, and then we have what's called a premium membership. And with premium, you get all of the sheet music. We have music theory worksheets that go along with each unit of study. And then we've also added a library of games. These are online interactive games that help train various music theory skills. And there's a handful of other tools as well, something we call practice sessions, which is basically a guided step-by-step. Hey, play this, then practice this, then try this scale. And after every video lesson, it gives you a curated uh guide to your practicing. That's also part of premium. And how much does the premium cost? Premium is$24 a month.

SPEAKER_02 10:43

Okay. So cheap. And is there a higher tier as well than that? Or is that no just the one tier.

Pricing, Retention, And Lifetime Plans

SPEAKER_01 10:49

Okay, cool. And how long do people tend to stick around? Uh, I would say if you sign up for a monthly plan, on average, or the median users, about eight to nine months. Uh but then we also try and upsell people to a yearly plan, which saves them. You basically get two months for free if you sign up for a yearly. And sometimes that goes on sale where you can save even more. Our yearly people renew at about a 50% renewal rate. So once we get them on a year, sometimes they'll stick around for years. And then we also have a lifetime plan as well.

SPEAKER_02 11:22

One of the things that is great about selling to lessons to kids is the person who's paying wants them to do it sometimes more than the person who's doing it. So it's like I used to see this with um I I used to work doing marketing for um sports clubs, like uh a kickboxing club, for example. So a friend of mine ran a kickboxing club and he was a it was aimed squarely at kids. And he was like, as far as the parents are concerned, it's great because they've got somewhere they go and they drop them off, and then they're not being got to be in charge of them for an hour or whatever it is, you know, and it's like at the end of that, then they'll they'll come and get them afterwards. And I was just like, ah, and I was like, Well, so how long do people stick around? And he was like, Oh, just like from when they're six till when they're sixteen, a lot of them. It's like that's pretty brilliant. Downsides to it, right? But there's that's a that's a massive plus. Okay, so if they're averaging 50%, then it's like okay, it's like maybe 18 months or something like that as the average, or two years, or I can't quite do the maths in my head a bit, but that's great. And what percentage of people do upsell to the to the yearly plan?

SPEAKER_01 12:30

From the monthly, it's our users split about 50-50 between monthly and yearly, correctly.

When SEO Traffic Stops Converting

SPEAKER_02 12:36

Okay, and I know you'd said that one of the things you're working on is how do you get more people to go from the free one to the premium? What's the kind of conversion?

SPEAKER_01 12:45

Uh the conversion has dropped in it it's been interesting. We've uh I have a fabulous SEO expert on our team, and he's succeeded in almost doubling just our our website traffic. But unfortunately, it hasn't necessarily been the the right kind of people because our our premium sign-ups have been about the same as they've always been. And so we're we we've got some questions to figure out around that. Uh historically, so before this big boost, we used to convert 10% of our free users uh into premium users, but now that's down to more like five or six percent. We have we're getting a lot more traffic. We we have a great blog team. I think what's happening is we're getting a lot more adult learners. And when they see that our program is geared for kids, I feel like they're like, ah, maybe this isn't for me. Because we have some blog articles that rank really well, and I think it's a lot of probably adult self-learners who are finding these kind of articles.

SPEAKER_02 13:52

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, one of the things with SEO, and I'm I'm a long way from being an SEO expert, but there's certain very high intent keywords that if you rank well for, they're a perfect fit. Yeah. Right. With the thing that the person is searching for and what it is that you're off-ranked. And then there's lower intent keywords or ones that are aimed at a slightly different audience or something, where you'll get some of the right people, but actually a lot of people are coming in a a bit broader or a bit more top of the funnel and a bit interested in like, oh, I'm just kind of checking it out rather than I am ready, I'm I'm primed, and I'm kind of ready to go. Right. Interesting. How much of your focus is on uh I I know you've got a good sized YouTube channel as well. Like, what's your kind of focus between the different um traffic sources?

SPEAKER_01 14:37

Yeah, very our company's always been mostly focused on organic search. That's always been our number one, been very focused on SEO from day one. I took SEO workshops and really just tried to religiously follow all the advice I was getting on that front. And then number two has been YouTube. YouTube's been a big driver of our traffic as well. Is that YouTube search or is that discovery, or do you know what the kind of mixture is between those? Um, I'm not super familiar with the mix on how people are finding us on YouTube. What's what's next for you? What are you working on in 2026? In 2026, we are working on upgrading some of our core features, how people find our lessons. I'm trying to make it more friendly for adult learners to jump in. We've had a very numerical like unit one, unit two, we go all the way up to unit 18. And so I feel like sometimes people wait, can I jump in at unit 16? So we're trying to make it easier to just browse and search for different content and jump in. Because some of my later lessons are absolutely geared towards any age. It's only like the first couple of units that are very obviously for kids. Uh, so trying to make it a little bit more modern in terms of searchability on our own web app. And then next up is expand my game library. I want to create a new tier that's a games only tier because we're finding this is one of our competitive edges and advantages when I look at our competitors. Most of them don't have these kinds of music theory learning games as part of their learning platform. And so I'd like to lean into that even more. Expand that and make it a games only package for people who maybe don't want to use my piano method, but maybe you're a teacher who already has a method they love, but they want to give their students an opportunity to grow their music theory skills with some fun online games.

Games, Vibe Coding, And Fun Learning

SPEAKER_02 16:35

Nice. I'd uh my my first do you know the term vibe coding? Yes. Yeah, okay. So my first, I should just explain for anybody in the audience who doesn't who isn't familiar with this. So vibe coding is basically um you don't write any code yourself, you just talk to Chat GPT or Cord code or whatever you're using, and it will write all the code for you. So I had my first experience with uh with vibe coding, building a game for learning music. Because I was like, it's a on um on playing bass, you learn instead of sheet music, a lot of times it's with tabs. And so that shows you know, press the third fret on the second string, and you don't know what note each of these actually are. And I was like, this is ridiculous. I can't keep playing this without knowing where all the notes are. And I was like, how can I learn this? I was like, oh, I know that my brain really likes games. I love games. So uh if I play a game of it, I'll become addicted, and then I'll learn it and it'll be very simple. And so I taught I told Chat GPT to write me a game that would test me on where each of the notes were. So, like, okay, play G on the second string, for example. And then I was like, oh, but if it's gonna give me all of them in one go, it'll be overwhelming. So then I got it to like dial it down to just just one note to start with and then add another note in, and another note in. I was like, oh, it suggested making a leaderboard. And I was like, that's a fun idea. So I could try and beat my previous best score for how quickly I could do everything. So well then it needs to add a timer in. And then I was like, oh, I'm getting frustrated because every time that I play the note, I've then got to I know that I've got it right, but I've got to press space to get to the next one. So then I got it to set up the microphone so it was listening to me to play. And I was just like, this is after I'd built all of that, I was like, this is so much fun. This is like no problem at all learning any of this. So I love that you're teaching through games. Was that part of your initial hypothesis from your your um masters when you were first learning, or is that something you've kind of figured out along the way since then?

SPEAKER_01 18:30

I knew I wanted it to be fun. I would get these students who, after six months with some other teacher and their parents brought them to me to try and save them. Like they already wanted to quit after six months. I'm like, whoa, there's something wrong. Because I would see these kids who love music. I knew they license because they'd come in and say, Oh, I heard this song on the radio. And like they didn't want to learn Bach and Mozart. They wanted to learn the music they loved and they wanted to play games and hear stories. And you know, like you said, everyone loves a game. It's you're not unique. We as humans, we want to play. We want to have fun, we want to be entertained. And so why not teach in a fun way? So, yeah, that's always been part of my philosophy. Nice.

Offers, Email Segments, And Better Onboarding

SPEAKER_02 19:15

And so you'd mentioned that you have been like working on how to, or you you want to convert more free users to premium members. Is that something you have been putting uh effort into? Have you been trying different things with that to see kind of what would work, or is that just you've noticed that the percentage has gone down over time?

SPEAKER_01 19:30

Well, absolutely. It I I'm a big believer in experimenting, and so we're always trying new things. Well, we usually would put our yearly membership plans on sale historically, but we've tried something recently where we'll offer 50% off your first three months of a monthly plan. We've tried like 30-day free trials, which I know is pretty common in a lot of industries, uh, especially on the online spaces. And for some reason that did not work very well for us. Like we'd see a little boost, but they then they they would drop uh before the actual payments kicked in. Uh, but doing three months at 50% off actually did seem to work really well. So it's it's a lot of experimenting with different offers. And yeah, we want to keep experimenting. And who are you selling to? Are you selling to the parents? Yes. You have to get the parents on board. Like, how does it work? It's definitely the parents that we're selling to. And that's been tricky with our email. Because maybe 15 to 20% of our audience are adult self-learners. How do we word it? Like if we say your child, and they're like, no, I'm learning for me. So trying to navigate those different audiences, and that's another future plan is to start to segment our email list better. It's double the work to write two different emails, one for adults, one for parents. So part of it is like trying to make the language generic enough, but also some of it's going to be more deliberate segmenting. Ask people when they onboard, we need to do a better job of this as well. Ask them, how are you learning? Are you a piano teacher? Are you an adult learning for yourself, or are you learning with a child in your home? And that will allow us to segment our emails a lot better. Have you started asking that, or is that something you're thinking of doing? Something of thinking of doing. There are other ways we've been able to figure that out, but no, we don't ask that up front. We do ask that if they're a piano teacher. We do have a separate segment for piano teachers, but for just adults learning for themselves, we we don't have that data currently.

SPEAKER_02 21:39

So there's a couple of places that you can you can ask that that gets a high the the highest percentage of responses. What the simplest one is if you have a lead magnet, or maybe when someone creates their free account, the confirmation page after that is the place that you'll get like the highest conversion rate, people are actually telling you. Normally about seventy percent. Depends on exactly how many questions you've got and and how you've got it set up, but like often it's about seventy percent.

SPEAKER_01 22:08

You're saying ask that question on the confirmation page itself. Yeah. So you don't add it before to create extra friction. You want to get them signed up and then ask that very next step. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:20

So um if someone's if you've got a lead magnet and they just they add their name and email, let's say you could have it as a drop-down question on the lead magnet signup page. That would that would also work. And you'd have to test, well, okay, how many less lead magnet signups are we getting because of that? Is it if it's only 10% less, it might be worth it because you've got that important information. But then if you ask, if you leave it exactly as it is and just on the confirmation page, ask that survey, ask those questions, then you'll probably get like 70-ish percent of people will fill it in. It depends that the that page is very valuable uh straight after someone's signed up for something free, because that's the time when they're most likely to then buy something. So you've got to then kind of wait. I don't know what it's used for at the moment, but um if you're currently selling something on that page, then it's like, oh no, maybe leave it. Maybe leave it. I'm having a look now, just trying to sign up for your uh is the is the main thing you have as the getting someone's email address. Is that the sign up for the free um account? That just basically trying out.

SPEAKER_01 23:25

Well, we have two levels. You if if you, for example, uh we have a lot of free resources in our digital store, like charts with like all the piano chords. That's another area where we give a lot away for free, a lot of these reference guides. That just adds you to our email list, but it doesn't create an account. If you want to actually have an account where we'll track your progress through all the video lessons, that's a a separate, even higher layer. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 23:54

Yeah, so let me share screen a sec here and I'll show you. I'll describe if you're just listening to the podcast, I will describe what what we're kind of looking at. So I've gone to basically the um gone to your website and I've clicked to create a free account. And this is what I'm seeing on the confirmation page after I put in my name, email, and password is the the setup the student profile. So if this is like an absolute essential element that you don't want to mess with, fine. But if you if you put this the confirmate the the survey here, you'd get a lot of people telling you, are you an adult learner or are you a uh are you um is are you a parent or whatever questions you might want to might want to ask them?

SPEAKER_01 24:37

And that could feel really natural right here, because if they're a parent, they're gonna set up student profiles differently than if you're just an adult learner. You don't really need student profiles. You are the student. So that could be a really natural place for that.

Upsell Ideas Plus Business Numbers

SPEAKER_02 24:50

Yeah, it could fit in with the same, like it wouldn't be necessarily like a separate type form or something. It would could fit in with your whole flow that you've got set up here. I don't know how easy or difficult that is to change, but that would give you the information and then you'd know um who was which, right from high percentage of people. Yeah, I love that. Um but yeah, you could do the same thing with um off your lead magnet on the from from YouTube, which a lot of times that's not that page isn't used for anything. A lot of people just have it say, Thank you for signing up for this resource, we've emailed it to you, or something like that. Right. If instead of that you either sell something, or in your case, maybe have this the survey that enriches your data, that would work well. If you do an email out to your list asking people for this, the conversion rate if they have to click through and then fill in the survey is is like three to five percent maybe of your list if you're lucky, you know? Yeah, so it won't take you very far. No, this is this is like that makes it tricky. So the sec the thing that you can do there that does increase conversions, does get you more data at that point, is do you know a tool called Write Message? No. It's from a guy called Brennan Dunn. It's a software business. Um, and he's been on the podcast before. He he also sells courses. And it basically is for this purpose. It's to try and allow you to enrich your data in a lot of different places and then use it to personalize your emails or even your website. It can even be that it'll show different headlines on the website or a different testimonial depending on which segment somebody is in. So what they've got is a whole load of little tools to try and make this easier. So, for example, someone clicks a link in the email rather than having to fill in the survey, they just go, This is for me, or I am a parent, or something like that, and it would update their profile in your email marketing system. Or you have like a little pop-up on the homepage that comes up when someone's visiting it, and it knows this person is an email subscriber because of cookies behind the scenes, and then they click the the there's only two questions. I'm I'm wanting to learn myself or I'm a parent, or I'm a teacher. Maybe it's those three, right? Right. And whichever one they they click, that then updates their data and it never shows them that question again. Lots of little things like that. What the conversion rate is on that, I don't know, but they've that's basically their whole shtick. That's their focus is helping you to do that. Um and I know Brennan personally as well. He's really like he's a good guy, it's a good, it's a good quality piece of uh um software, and uh I've heard good things from others but I don't I haven't used it myself. I will check that out. It's called Write Message. WriteMessage, yeah. I think it's writmessage.com. I'm just gonna go check now. Okay, great. Find for anyone who's interested. I'm gonna find what episode Brennan was on. It's a while ago. 49, Brennan Dunn's tips for launching a course. Okay, cool. So we've talked through a little bit about the the way that you've uh been kind of trying to convert people over. Have you got any other ideas for these? You said you want to run more experiments. Have you got ideas for what experiments you might run in the in the next year?

SPEAKER_01 27:57

Yeah, I I'm always trying to get inspiration from other companies. And one thing I was using Duolingo to get ready to for a trip to Mexico that I was taking last year, and I kept noticing every, I don't know, pretty often, annoyingly so. In fact, they would give me this ad to upgrade to Duolingo Plus. And eventually I did actually succumb and you know just to make it away, you know, this yes. And so I was like, huh, I wonder if we should be more annoying. Like once you're in your free plan, let's say you've made that choice. Uh every time they watch a video for free on my website, I could be playing a little 20-second commercial. Yeah. Right. So having a pop-up commercial that just gets inserted in the middle of a flow of one of my video lessons. I know we find ads annoying, but that's a reminder, like, hey, you're getting this for free. Uh, you can upgrade and we can tell them. Like they were telling me all the extra things I would get with Duolingo Plus or whatever they call their upgrade level. Um, super Duolingo, maybe. Anyway, they um yeah, it worked for me. And so that's another experiment I'd like to try is just rolling little um ads in the middle of the video lessons themselves.

SPEAKER_02 29:15

I think one thing that that holds people back from doing that kind of thing sometimes is the worry about being annoying or salesy or whatever. And I think it's it's totally valid, even if you did it as an annoying way, then I think it's totally valid because it's like, well, you're getting this stuff for free, but you, you know, this is so we have the right to tell you about the the the upgrade. But I one thing I've I like is how can you find a way to do it in a way that's helpful, you know, like as in someone finishes a video on a certain thing and it's like, I hope this video about X or you know, you don't want to do a you don't want to do an ad for every single video that you've got in your whole system, but like in an on-x topic or whatever has been useful. If you want more help with it, then we've got we've also got the da-da-da-da available in the premium upgrade. You don't have to say, if you don't want that stuff, that's fine or anything, but you've kind of been playing it as if but if you want this, if you want to know about it, then that might be that might be nice for you. And the best place I've ever seen this was um there was uh uh my my ex uh girlfriend at the time, she was taking a uh marketing course for something, and it was made up of a lot of little mini courses, but it was almost like a choose your own adventure. So there'd be like there's three ways that you now could be, you built this thing. Now there's three ways that you could be promoting it through webinars or through a sales page or through something else. And so at the end of the module about building the thing, she would be talking at the the instructor, would basically be doing the upsell in the paid thing that you've just paid for, but it was at the right at the end and it made total sense. Yeah. It was like, well, you finished that. How are you going to want to do this next thing? Well, the ways to do that are this or this or this. And I've got courses on each of those, so you choose which is right and then go get that. And I was just like, oh, yeah, of course, naturally. And it didn't feel at all aggressive or anything, it felt really helpful and it made a whole load of sales. So then I took that, and then that's something that we do with our clients as well now.

SPEAKER_01 31:13

Yeah, that's I think in my mind that's perfect ideal marketing. When it feels natural, it's like, of course I would want that.

SPEAKER_02 31:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:20

That's the way to do it.

SPEAKER_02 31:21

Yeah. Nice. All right. So if somebody is listening to this and they're like, this is fantastic. I actually would love to go just check out what you're doing, either because they want to learn piano or because they are um just interested in kind of the way you're running things. Where can they go? What's your website?

SPEAKER_01 31:40

What's your YouTube? Our website is HoffmanAcademy.com. And our YouTube is also Hoffman Academy. And that's how you can find us on all the socials. It's our handle is always Hoffman Academy.

SPEAKER_02 31:55

Um, one thing actually I did forget I did want to ask you about. It's like how how big is the business now? Like how big's your team, how many students you got? Um if you're happy, then sharing revenue as well, but that's up to you.

SPEAKER_01 32:06

Sure. Our uh team is about 15 employees. It's a mix of full-time and part-time. We have four full full-time software engineers on our team now working on various website features. Uh, the games take, you know, that's some intense kind of coding work. And uh we have a graphic designer and then curriculum uh designers on our team as well. And uh our revenue is about 2 million a year right now. And uh as far as students on the premium, the paid level plan, that's about we have about 6,000 uh paying subscribers. And then on top of that, we have about 10,000 who have bought Lifetime membership. So when you buy Lifetime now, we're not going to get any more money from you. Uh, but those are users who continue to come to our website and you know, we consider them part of the family as well now for life.

SPEAKER_02 33:05

What do you uh how much do you sell that for?

SPEAKER_01 33:08

When it's not on sale, it goes for$795 US dollars. And we will put that on sale for about$500. Okay, so about like two years worth of uh It is, yes. Okay. Right. Uh depending on yeah, whether whether it's on sale or not. When it's at full price, it's closer to to three years worth. But those are very popular sales. When that goes on sale, we that that's one of our biggest sales of the year. People like the idea of not having to pay a subscription. Where I think everyone has more subscriptions than they want these days. So the Lifetime is a very popular product. I went through my business bank account, I don't know, six months or something ago.

SPEAKER_02 33:54

And just was like, oh, I need to just check if I'm paying for anything that I'm not using. I really was. Oh, it's it's like happened to me just last week too. I was like, wait, what is this charge? I never cancelled that. I found I found uh an an ex-client from the from the agency that had uh we'd signed up for their subscription when we were checking something. And I was like, oh no, I've been paying for guitar lessons that I'm never going, I was never going to take for two years. And I messaged them and thank goodness they they refunded that. Wow. Sometimes I won't even bother to reach out. Maybe I should try. Like sometimes they'll they'll work with you. Yeah, I mean, this is somebody I knew personally, so it's a little difficult to like, you know. But yeah, I I found I was spending at least£600 a month on this. I was like, oh my god, that's so much money. Yeah, like seven grand a year. That's just like not in my bank account. Right. This has been fantastic. I love what you're doing. I think this is absolutely excellent. Thank you. Um, really, really appreciate you coming on today and and sharing your wisdom and your story with everybody. Uh and it's been my pleasure. Thank you so much. Um, as always, thanks so much for listening. Really, really appreciate you guys, and we'll see you next time.