Transcript 085 – Susanna Klein on Playing the Long Game Pt 1

Transcript: 085 – Susanna Klein on Playing the Long Game Pt 1

Transcript for 085 – Susanna Klein on Playing the Long Game Pt 1

 

[00:00:00] Andrea: Hey, it’s Andrea with Music Studio Startup, the podcast about the business of teaching music. Learn from the startup stories of music teachers who are doing incredible things with their studios. Be inspired by creating musicians who are branching out and thriving as entrepreneurs. Be empowered by the insights of experts who will help you grow your own studio.

Let’s get started.

Welcome back, and a huge thank you to everyone who reached out to express their excitement for the podcast returning you all bring so much joy to my work and life. Today is part one of a two part episode. I’m talking to a violinist and entrepreneur with multiple business projects. We talk about communication, rejection, psychology, intellectual property, and how she’s learning and practicing for her own long gain in business.

Here’s my discussion with Susanna. Hi, Susanna. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for being here today. Can you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your background?

[00:01:10] Susanna Klein: Yeah, thanks for having me. It’s great to be here. I am a violinist by trade and I’m a violin professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia.

That’s my day job. My night job besides playing is that I run, uh, a website, a little company called Practisma that makes tools for practicing musicians to make their practice more insightful and delightful.

[00:01:35] Andrea: That’s what I like to say. Insightful and delightful. Yeah. I like that. It’s very clear from everything on your website and your Instagram feed and all those places that you really have a passion for practicing. Can you talk about where that came from?

[00:01:48] Susanna Klein: So I have a passion for practicing makes it sound like I like to practice a lot, and that’s actually not true. I did used to practice a lot now. I practice less but better. I think I have sort of an obsession with practicing. I don’t know that I have a passion for it. I practiced like a fiend when I was younger. And the lessons that I had where practice was at the center of a lesson, like a teacher saying, have you practiced it this way or that way? Or how about we turn it upside down? Or we practiced it this creative way. Those were my favorite lessons, always like in college mm-hmm those lessons made me feel hopeful.

It made me feel like I was talented. That I could do it. That there was a way to find the holy grail as opposed to the lessons that were a little bit more like you should play it this way, but without sort of practice techniques behind them. So I’ve always been kind of in love with great practice, you know, but my sort of obsession with technology in practice using technology in practice and the psychology of practice that came much, much later when I was, you know, started teaching at VCU.

In 2011 was following the basketball team at VCU, which had had this amazing Cinderella run for March madness. And the coach, Shaka Smart, had a minor in psychology. And so he did a lot of psychological work with his players. And I had really been into sports in high school. I was into track and field and on the swim team, all of that really spoke to me.

You know what he was doing. And so I sort of started adopting sports psychology to like the practice room and the teaching environment with my students in 2011. And then that set me down really this kind of fascinating road of wait a minute, the way that we approach our work influences the way that we feel.

Of course, the way that we feel influences the way that we work and all of it influences the way we perceive ourselves or the way we play on stage. So since then I’ve been either, you know, researching or writing or reading, but anything sort of related to deliberate practice, performance of course, and psychology.

[00:04:01] Andrea: Okay. I like it. So it sounds like you were just more interested in the process. More interested in that than the outcome so much, like assuming if you have the process solid the outcome will be what you want it to be or more predictable.

[00:04:13] Susanna Klein: Yes. I mean, I think initially what I was after the outcome, you know, like everybody, how can we mm-hmm, be excellent and, and produce quote, excellent players right in our studios.

But I think after I started working in it for a while, when I realized how unhappy people were and how much shame there was within the student population and I had had you know myself, a lot of shame, I’m not good enough. I’m not talented enough. You know, all these things that I think are pretty common, but I could see it sort of more removed.

Then I was like, whoa, we actually really need to deal with this because people are miserable and that music shouldn’t be making people miserable. It should making them stronger is okay, but not making them miserable. And I think. I think also the excellence sort of the, the controlling stage fright. I do feel like there are a lot of people doing that work and talking about that, how to prepare for performance, how to deal with your nerves, you know, interventions, whether they be breath or meditation or whatever, but I guess I felt like nobody was talking about the psychology of practice. Just practicing, you know, just practicing, just practicing itself, like how you divvy up your practice time actually matters.

Whether you end totally frustrated or on a positive note in a practice session influences the way you, you perceive practice. And meanwhile, I was letting myself get frustrated all the time. That’s that? That was break time for me when I was too frustrated to continue. That was my break.

[00:05:38] Andrea: And then you don’t wanna come back cause your last memory was how frustrated you were.

[00:05:41] Susanna Klein: Exactly. And this is not like a music research thing. This is just a psychology element, right? That we tend to remember experiences in the way that we last ended them. And so that simple trick of leave on a high note sounds dumb in music, but you know, it can be very important. Don’t overstay your welcome.

Right. Don’t go past 50 minutes because we know concentration in all fields, nose dives at 50 minutes. That’s why we get squirrly. We wanna go check our email or do other things. So your concentration isn’t great. You don’t really wanna be there. So why not leave and come back later. Why not honor that because there’s nothing wrong with you.

You’re just being a human being like all other human beings. And so I was really interested in that discussion. How can we make people feel better about their work in the practice room so that they feel better about themselves. And don’t say, well, I must not have it. Or I must not be talented enough or, you know, I’m easily distracted or I, you know, I hear students say a lot. I have this problem. You don’t have a problem. You’re a human being. who, you know, we all have this problem. Like we need to find food, uh, or, you know, this is like part of the human condition we need love. Or I get bored after I practice. That’s right. that’s right. So you need to either entertain yourself when you practice and kind of gamify and make it fun, or you need to be real serious as you are, but then you need to space out your practice so that that boredom doesn’t lead to you checking out and not listening.

But it it’s natural. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re not sick or otherwise deranged you’re perfectly great, you know? So I became interested in that question after working with students, doing successful things and unsuccessful things with them and seeing them just become light and bubbly and say, can we do that again?

That was so fun or, you know, sour grapes. I certainly asked students to do, uh, some pretty draconian things early on in my sort of experiments at the university. Like everybody should record their lesson and listen back to it and take notes and turn them into me. You can imagine that that did not lead to a lot of joy even though it may have led to excellence, but it, it wasn’t a fun way to get there.

[00:08:00] Andrea: That’s a really good point. Yeah. So you became interested in this and you started experimenting with your students. And then at what point did you start developing this into more of a business or research project? How did that start?

[00:08:14] Susanna Klein: It was mostly all research and teaching. There wasn’t really a business component for a long time. So one of the things that I did after the 2011, that sort of inspiration of Shaka Smart and sports psychology is that I had my students at the university start to journal, which is something that athletes, elite athletes anyway, do and a lot of solo athletes and I put prompts in there.

It was active journaling. So I put reflection prompts that they would answer every week and they would keep track of their practice. And then, because I have the same students for four or five or sometimes six years, you know, I would have to change the prompts all the time, because once you have a prompt, it loses its surprise or it’s magic.

 So if you say this week, practice everything backwards. If they see that again, they’re like, oh yeah, yeah. I already know about that. if that makes any sense. So I, I was constantly making these books for my students. And then simultaneously I, I started researching technology. Like we did motion capture with violinists. I do a lot of apps in my studio and did some physiology of violin playing research at CV. That’s the medical campus at VCU. And at some point I was doing a research study about musicians habits, and how they correlate to excellence. That’s what I was looking at, like who made the most progress. And within that, there was technology that I really wanted to develop further in the form of an app. And VCU said, well, you know, you can develop this further, basically, you know, it’s our property since you work for us, that’s how it works at universities. That’s normal, but we will license this back to you. You can have it as long as you want so that you can keep developing this. That’s no problem, but you have to have a separate LLC basically.

Not you. So that’s when I formed a company. And then since I’d been journaling with my students for all those years, first reflection prompts, and then action prompts. And there were quite a few teachers, both at VCU and other universities who were borrowing my books that I always just sent to the printer, you know?

And then a friend of mine said, why don’t you publish. If this is popular and people like it as a workbook, why don’t you publish? Why don’t you make that your very first thing that you do? Because at the time I didn’t really have a lot of money for the technology development that I wanted to do. So I was a little bit stuck with that. Cause coding is really expensive. So that. In essence became my first like little thing. And, and what I did was I just went through years and years of prompts to kind of pick the ones that would work for all musicians, cause I didn’t want it to just be string players, right. You know, and the ones that kind of created a journey and then curated it.

A lot of my students helped me. A lot of former students helped me to figure out, you know, the order of things. And then, I don’t know, a couple months before the pandemic hit my journal came out and then of course, everybody was looking for structure and inspiration, but that’s was total coincidence. You know, I didn’t know that at the time. Yeah. It was very bizarre.

[00:11:13] Andrea: Couldn’t have planned for that. So you formed the company before you had a product. It was just in preparation. And then the original intent was technology. But then other people pointed out you already had a product in here.

[00:11:25] Susanna Klein: Yeah. And I was stuck. I couldn’t, well, one of one part of it was money. I couldn’t find partners for the technology part. So I’m into an app which did finally come out this summer, which, you know, I could talk about later, but also like my long game is like, I really wanna develop some wearables for string players so that we can stop talking in general abstract terms. And more specifically, like you don’t need to engage that muscle. That’s just tension. We don’t need that. Or, you know, slow down your bow. It’s moving this fast. Can you make it slower for them to see it? That’s that’s my, that’s my like long term pie in the sky dream, you know, is to really yeah.

But anyway, yeah, it was, it was just the university essentially. It kind of forced my hand. You have to form a company. If you want to have a shot at developing any of this that you’ve been doing in the research lab. Anyway, the, the journal surprisingly has been like this big thing, you know, and people have really enjoyed it and it’s gotten me a lot of, you know, press and attention and it’s great. It’s been great.

[00:12:24] Andrea: Okay. So let’s describe what the journal is for people who haven’t seen it. And of course we’ll include links and pictures in the show notes and things like that. Okay. But describe what that journal looks like today.

[00:12:33] Susanna Klein: It’s a workbook. It has a little introduction and then it has 16 weeks of sort of guided practice work. In those 16 weeks. There are always four elements in each week. One page is goal setting, which for people who aren’t taking lessons is just themselves setting goals for the week. For people who are taking lessons, it’s usually their teacher will write there. That’s essentially how it works. And then there is space to just log your practice with some acronyms, you know, put a little V if you video recorded yourself, put an a, if you audio recorded yourself, just like a regular practice journal, and then there’s an action prompt and a reflection prompt each week.

And the action prompt asks you to do something, to challenge you in some way to practice, like spend 10 minutes every day on mental practice, not touching your instrument or find somebody to play for. You know, either live or now it would be zoom, right. Perform for somebody, those are the kind of action challenges.

And then the reflection, challenges are there’s one, I think in the beginning, that’s like, here’s a two column list. What makes practicing easy for you? What makes practicing hard for you? Mm. Most people to just kind of write things down or some of them are, you know, might be hard, like asking people really about their fear in music or their shame points. And some of ’em are very positive and this is not in there, but something like this, write a letter to your favorite music teacher. Oh, okay. Which you just write it on paper and then, you know, you can choose to send it or not, but that might be like a positive reflection from that connects you to something or describe your earliest memory in music.

The design is to build a healthier relationship with your instrument and your practice. Yeah. And hopefully have some transformative changes that make your practice more efficient as well cause we all care about that.

[00:14:20] Andrea: And we’re going to talk more about like how you actually came to publish that journal. But then also let’s talk about the app briefly. Just describe what that is.

[00:14:30] Susanna Klein: So the app, it just came out. Right now it’s iOS only. It’s called Clipza. And it is a, just a very simple but strange video recording app that when you open the camera, the video camera is always going and it is essentially recording you, but immediately ditching the footage.

So it’s always rolling. And when it’s open, you can do one of two things. At any point when you want to see what you just did, you can swipe the screen to the left and it’ll replay the last 30 seconds. The idea being that, you know, if you’re practicing, practicing. Okay. Okay. That was pretty decent. Let me see how that sounded.

And you just swipe left and boom, it replays it. At that point, you can either save it or not. And you can set it to auto save or not auto save that’s up to you. Or if you’re practicing and really something’s breaking down, it’s not working, but you don’t understand why, which that actually happens to me a lot where like I have an idea, but not, I don’t really understand exactly again, you can swipe left. and replay something that maybe you didn’t feel good about, but you’re trying to understand it. Or I use it with my students that way as well, so that they can see exactly what they did. And then the other function that you can do is with the camera going, you can just tap the screen once and it’ll capture the last 30 seconds, but it’ll save it in files.

So if you’re not ready to interact with it at that point, maybe you want to take a bunch of those when you practice and you want to later at the end of your practice, kind of review some things because you don’t want to, I don’t know, confront yourself in that moment in the practice, or people also use that to capture highlights.

You know, if they’re at a gig or they’re practicing and they know something was good, you know, they’ll just tap the screen. . Boom they’ve got it. And they can post it to social and that kind of stuff.

[00:16:21] Andrea: I love that concept even. I think of like the eight year old student that I work with, I’ve tried to get them to record sometimes like record yourself playing this, and then listen back. So you can hear if your rhythm was what you think it is. You know what you’re hearing in your head. And that’s just too much, too many steps for an eight year old to take. But I love that just simple little things just removes a lot of the friction that would be.

[00:16:46] Susanna Klein: Yeah, friction and you know, it’s hard to record yourself. It is. The commitment, you know, hit the recording button. Then you get nervous right away. Then it’s like, you know, it was bad anyway. You don’t want to listen to it. It clogs up the storage on your phone. Like a friend of mine said, you know, this was not a problem I knew I was having, but now that your app is out, like I know that I was having this problem.

So, and I think anything that gets us to record more often is better for practice. You know, it is difficult to do psychologically. No doubt about it.

[00:17:16] Andrea: Okay. I want to hear about both of these projects and how they came to be like real things in the world. Let’s start with the journal. What were your first steps when you, you already had the content? It sounds like. So what were your first steps to putting it into an actual physical book?

[00:17:31] Susanna Klein: Yeah, the first steps was probably to just say it out loud to some people, because once I say it out loud, you know, it feels more real. I got a designer that was one step. I started looking for printing companies that that was really labor intensive because I wasn’t getting any quotes back that I liked price wise.

I didn’t want it spiral bound. I was very particular about design, which made the project a little bit harder actually. So I was looking at printers and then I had a designer .And then the designer it turns out like we had kind of a miscommunication. I mean, this is what happens when you’re new to something. I think I hadn’t described fully what I wanted. So it was like right out of the gate, you know, and like wasted some money. But what ended up happening was that while I wasn’t happy with the design I was messing around then myself in Canva. I had used Canva for various things already. And one weekend I kind of laid out a, a few like mock pages and showed them to my husband was like, what about something like this?

He was like, oh yeah, this is much better. Did you talk to your designer? And she made it look good. And I. No, this is like me, like messing around in Canva, you know, he’s like, oh, okay. It’s time to part ways you should do it yourself. So then I was like, okay, I’m gonna do it in Canva. And I had a kind of colleague who would help me format materials, like pretty for going up for tenure.

Who I knew was really good at Canva. And so I approached her and I was like, look, I’m doing this project. Could I pay you to just, I just need a second in command. I need somebody who’s got better ideas to kind of, you know, double check all the, or the lines spaced exactly so, blah, blah, blah, blah. So it was essentially designed, in the book it says like designed by Susanna Klein and Heidi Reckon, but, but my friend colleague, Heidi saved me and was willing to like essentially partner with me on this and that’s how the design came about. And the hardest thing was the choosing the prompt, which what would go where the layout, how many weeks, all that.

And I did, I did that this summer before pandemic summer, I canceled all my summer festivals, all my playing obligations, just to do this book. And then the next summer COVID was COVID summer and everything got canceled and I was like, oh, I could be writing this book right now. Anyway, it was all good.

[00:19:55] Andrea: I’m sure many people appreciated having it during COVID time.

[00:19:58] Susanna Klein: That is true. That is true.

[00:20:01] Andrea: Wow. Okay. So what did you learn? I guess your solution to the miscommunication with the designer was to do it yourself. Was there anything that you took away on future projects? If you were to work with the designer, like, this is how I would’ve done this differently going forward.

[00:20:16] Susanna Klein: Overcommunication is a good thing. Basically, you know, and I had really liked her work, so I saw some of her stuff and I was like, Ooh, she’s got this pretty eye. It’s simple, clean, but very beautiful. So I, I made a little fantasy if that’s what I was gonna get and I showed her a couple things, but I certainly didn’t come in there with a lot of books and workbooks and say, see, look, I look how this feels friendly. And I love how this feels like this. And I like the font on this and, you know, I didn’t over communicate. I, I made a lot of assumptions and we parted on very good ways, but we both knew it was both our responsibility. We didn’t communicate enough. And then she was out of town and then we did a lot by email.

So one takeaway from me was a little bit that it is okay for me to be a pain in the butt. That is what communication is. It’s not micromanaging. It’s just like, here’s my dream for this project. Here’s some things that inspire me. You know, what do you have? What ideas do you have or what ideas do you have in your catalog that resonate with this?

Mm-hmm do you know what I mean? Rather than I like this person’s work, let’s have a quick conversation and boom, we’re good to go. But I don’t have any regrets because I think failure is the best teacher of all, you know?

[00:21:32] Andrea: Yeah. I’ve had some similar experiences working with designers where it is hard to know, like what assumptions am I making in my head? And what assumptions are they making? And then I’ve also been on the other side of it where I’ve built websites for people. And they’ll say, I like this one and to tease out what they really specifically like about it, like it’s kind of a hard thing.

[00:21:49] Susanna Klein: It is. It is. Yeah. And I think just for us not to feel shame about that communicating process and, and to say to somebody, am I telling you too much?

Would you like me to dial it back or do you need more information or both? I mean, the other thing I think is my friend, Heidi, who I worked with, I had worked with her previously on the tenure files and stuff. I knew exactly how she worked. She always kind of double checked. Like if she would go in a certain direction, she’d be like, I wanna send you some drafts before I go knee deep into this, is this resonating with you? Is this, you know? And I knew she had really thick skin. She wanted feedback often, early and often, and that’s how I work best too. And so even though she’d never done a book before, we had this relationship. We had this trust. We had worked together before. I mean, to the point where she was like, I remember her giving me her hourly rate and I raised it and I was like, if you’re willing to accept X, Y, Z, then we have a deal and we can start , you know, and that, that’s a, that’s a good thing. It does help. If you can have some trust and prior relationship, you can’t always have it.. But it is really helpful. But it all worked out. I think exactly how it was meant to be because then pandemic hit, then people wanted the journal, but they remember at the beginning of the pandemic, people didn’t wanna touch things.

Oh yeah. So then I had to do the e-journal myself basically. Right. I just, I had to change a few things because of layout and stuff and the E journal, which is, it’s basically just the regular one, but with a couple layout changes, I mean, that is often from a business perspective, that has a very good profit margin to it because in fact, I have no cost associated with it.

 So if I, if I sell an e-copy that minus taxes is my profit. Yeah. The entire thing. So it was good for me to build that skill and lay the whole thing out in Canva.

[00:23:46] Andrea: Another product you didn’t realize you had necessarily at the beginning. Okay. And then you said finding your printer was a challenge. How did you go about that process?

[00:23:55] Susanna Klein: Uh, I emailed a bunch of people.

[00:23:56] Andrea: Like Googled people and emailed?

[00:23:58] Susanna Klein: Yep. I Googled first I started in town. It was all very expensive. Then out of town, Canada, I didn’t go overseas. That’s one thing probably I’m going to have to do if I do another. I’ve done one print run. I just ran a second one that I just printed. But I think my next one, I probably will look overseas because it’s so much cheaper. But I wanted Singer Stone. There are hardly any printers who do it. So that was just kind of whatever. No, I don’t know. I just kept emailing people, emailing people, getting quotes, getting quotes, and eventually hit the jackpot. Really liked this printer in Texas, very small operation. And she like Heidi was also very back and forth, you know? And said, Ooh, I think we can get this color thread for you. Let me send it to you. And like, I just, I felt good about it, you know. It did take a lot longer to print and like for my second print run, I think they also had a flood down there, but I think I waited for like four months.

I got really nervous. You know, but it’s small capacity.

[00:25:01] Andrea: it sounds like you are really looking for partners when you find people to work with, like, whether it’s a designer or a printer. Like someone who’s gonna work with you to help really finesse the product.

[00:25:11] Susanna Klein: Yeah, I think so. And I think because it was all new to me, you know, I think it, that was sort of instinctive. I don’t know if that’ll go away if now I’m like gonna be like, okay, this is the print that I want. What’s your price? You know, let me know. But, but at the time, I was kind of walking around going I want something that feels good to the touch. What, what is that? I didn’t know what it was called. You know, now I know that it’s a soft touch cover. But at the time I didn’t know any of the terminology. So, so that’s how I did that. And then they, they came, shipped.

[00:25:42] Andrea: All right. Then tell us about the app, cause that’s another place where you said you needed coding help with that. So how did you go about finding a developer?

[00:25:50] Susanna Klein: That that was a, that was a pandemic save. Okay. So I’ve been looking for a developer for a long time, but development companies are hugely expensive. I mean, I was getting bids, like it’ll take $8,000 for us to look at the code that you have. Look at. Not actually build the app. Look at the preexisting code we had, you know, it was crazy.

I kept looking, I was looking for freelancers. Who do you know? Who knows somebody who knows somebody, but the job market was so hot. There weren’t freelancers out there who were like looking for a small project at all. And then the pandemic hit and all of a sudden. I remembered that somebody that I went to school with, who my husband does gigs with Randall Farr had gone to coding bootcamp just before the pandemic hit.

 He had always tinkered. He’d done some coding early in life. And then he was a professional jazz musician. And then he was like, hoping to kind of do technology in his second phase of his life again. And since all gigs were canceled and my husband was sitting on the couch every night. I knew that Randall was also sitting on the couch every night.

And so I was like, I kept saying to John, what about Randall? Do you think he could do something like this? Do you think, what is he doing? He said, I, I don’t know why don’t you contact Randall and find out what he’s doing. And so, you know, I set up a whatever zoom call and I was like, I have this crazy project it’s been kind of planned out for a long time, but there’s still flexibility in it. And I’m looking for a coder and what’s your skill level and iOS and your willingness to do it. And he said, willingness. 100000% cause I have like no gigs whatsoever. He said skill level on iOS. Mm. Okay. I mean, I did all the training courses he said, but I’m very willing to learn. He said, let me look at the whole thing. I need to take a couple weeks and get caught up to speed, like how big this project would be and how much, whatever. So he did that and he came back and he named a price that I could live with. And he’s like, look, I’m not gonna charge you for me to learn. I will do the research of how to do a lot of the stuff.

And then when I actually code it, you’ll be paying for that. So I got incredibly lucky because he’s a musician, he’s a string player to boot, which, you know, string playing is so highly visual. So he was very passionate about the project. He had nothing to do but work on my app, which is like, that’s never gonna happen again.

Cause he had just finished coding bootcamp and the pandemic had just hit. So it was like, yeah. You know, again, I got lucky and I, this was a project that I thought was never gonna happen. Unless I learned to code myself, which I did. I did take a like Corsera course, but I learned that I it’s really rough to start from scratch.

That’s what I learned. So I know a little bit about coding, but not, not enough, you know, so yeah. So then for the, for the app, I would do these again, Canva came into play actually, because I would create these mockup designs for Randall in Canva, which is not how you’re supposed to do app design at all. But it kind of works. It kind of works just from a visual standpoint and I could get all the color codes and all that kind of stuff.

[00:28:50] Andrea: So another partner with the music passion behind him and some conveniently timed boredom. That’s awesome.

[00:28:57] Susanna Klein: Yeah, sometimes, sometimes it pays to wait, like, you know, keep your project, keep mulling them over, keep taking notes in your notebooks. And, but sometimes time is your savior. It’s it’s strange that way actually.

[00:29:09] Andrea: Yeah. So you talked about how you thought that project was never going to work because of funding and just that expense. So how have you, I guess, imagine that journals took funding too, to do that first print run. How have you funded your projects?

[00:29:22] Susanna Klein: It’s all self-funded basically. So when I funded the journal, I bought the stock of it. At that time, it was a thousand journals, which cost me the print cost was I think like $5,400 plus the design. So when it was all said and done. Maybe it was like a 6,500, $7,000 print run. I had sold a violin that I had for a long time and it was, I basically made this deal with myself.

Okay. I’m gonna finance this business. This is where this violin money is going until I’ve returned and I’m not going to worry about it, and I’m not going to worry about profit or whatever. And I wanted to sell the journals myself or through small distributors because I wanted the relationship with fans and clients.

If you publish, you could publish. First of all, on Amazon, you can just straight publish and have no outgoing expenses actually whatsoever. However you can’t control the binding and you can’t control a conversation with a customer because when somebody buys off Amazon, that email address is not disclosed to you.

They’re really just Amazon customers. Like you don’t get to talk to them again. So you can’t let them know if your app is published or if something else exciting is happening. Do you know what I mean? And the same, you can go through a regular book publisher, then you’ll get 10% cut of royalties. But again, you’re not really forming that relationship with your customer. And that I was really interested in the long game, because as I told you earlier, I really wanna develop some technology. I don’t know if it’ll ever happen, but really to help musicians like specifically string players practice mm-hmm more efficiently and have more fun, practicing. and I was hoping, you know, this app would come out.

These are all kind of business practice ideas, I guess on my it’s like I’m practicing the business of being an entrepreneur, you know. But I knew that I wanted those mailing addresses. I knew that I wanted those emails. So I’m aware that I probably can make more money on Amazon. People have told me that over and over again, but it’s not about the money. I’m really playing the long game.

[00:31:33] Andrea: And then how about the app?

[00:31:35] Susanna Klein: So what happened was that the journal ended up paying for the app because the journal did quite well. I made my 5,000 or whatever. It was 7,000 back pretty quickly, particularly because every print journal that goes out, I’ve put in, you know, the cost of the journal, plus the shipping, et cetera, you know, plus my own time, like packaging it up or, or maybe it’s sold through a music store or whatever. But the electronic journals, that overhead isn’t there. So those are more profitable even. Do you know what I mean? And so I took that profit and then I put it into app development. I’m still running a positive budget. I still have money in the bank account, which is amazing.

[00:32:13] Andrea: You didn’t have to sell more violins.

[00:32:14] Susanna Klein: I didn’t have to sell more violins. No, no. At some point it does become important. You, you know, that that money is coming in. You, you do it’ll hamper what you do if not. I’m incredibly lucky because I have a full-time tenured university job. So I have a salary with health benefits and a lot of free time on my hands. And a lot of what I do counts as research, you know. Counts as research at the university. I’m, I’m very fortunate that way.

[00:32:42] Andrea: Yeah, that’s great. Oh, I tell it to like new piano teachers or music teachers when you’re just starting out. If you’re out of school and you’re 22 or 24, that’s the ideal time to be starting a business because you are, can still be on your parents’ health insurance, if you’re in the us, until you’re 26. And that just to have that taken care of and not have to fund right away. It’s a great time to building a business.

[00:33:04] Susanna Klein: And maybe not to have a mortgage or not to have all these expenses to not have a lifestyle that you’re, you know, trying to keep up.

You’re, you’re actually able to take on more risk in certain situations. And I think you have, I think profit isn’t everything. I think you have to kind of play the long game. Where do you wanna be? But I think you can’t be ignorant of it. Because if I had not, if the journal hadn’t done well and I hadn’t sort of hustled, I did hustle for that.

I just, I would just cold call stores, violin shops. Flute Center New York was my very first retail client. Thank God. I mean, I called them out of the blue because I was there once with my husband and they were so nice. That’s what I remembered. And I really wanted to be in a store in New York and I called them and I was like, Hey, you don’t know me, but I just wrote this book and blah, blah, blah. And here’s the website. And can I send you a copy just for you to look at it in case you wanna carry? She’s like, sure. Of course send the journal. They called me, they’re like, oh my God, we love it. You know, whatever they ordered 50, which hasn’t happened since, by the way. But, but it was like, I would, that was just pure luck.

And then after that, the hustle got a lot harder, you know, I would get a lot of people who had taken a lot of people like, no, this really doesn’t sound like what we want. And you know, I, I don’t see anybody buying this. I don’t so like, but I did really hustle. And then the money that I made from that, you know, was sitting in a bank account. So then when Randall and I talked, I, I didn’t hesitate if the price was right. I was like, I have the money, let me, let me go do it now. You know.

[00:34:35] Andrea: That’s a nice position to be in. So yeah, cold calling. Is that how you’ve well, talk about, are you in other brick and mortar retailers?

[00:34:44] Susanna Klein: Yes. So I’m in non-chain retailers. I have a little bit of a social mission in kind of what I do, and I feel like Amazon is doing fine. And like, you know, The Guitar Center, all these chains are doing fine. The people who could really use an add-on product in their store. Add on product means it’s something, somebody buys at the counter when they really have everything they need, but they’re like, oh, you know, you know, it’s the candy park basically. That’s my item in the music store. So I reached out to violin makers, essentially, and The Flute Center of New York, independent music stores, which are like dinosaurs, the Performer’s Music in Chicago, one of the oldest sheet music places that’s still around, Espresso Music in Boston also carries it. Again these are places where you can go in and you can actually find sheet music. You don’t have to order off the internet, which I just think is so amazing. And even though they’re not in my town, there are no music stores in my town where I can walk in and buy some music for my students or for myself. So yeah, I would just call and then I would send them a free copy. In the beginning, I was sending out really pristine copies. And then after a while I was like, Ooh, this is getting expensive. I, I get from the printer, sometimes some, some copies that have dings, they just have cosmetic blemishes, you know, that happens.

 And so I would say, this is a ding copy. Hope you forgive that. But this shows you what it is. So, yeah, I would, what I learned was when I sent an email without calling people ignored me completely. And if I called and they heard my voice and I was nice and I said, no obligation. I’d like to send you this, you know, I won’t be offended.

You can just keep it, blah, blah, blah. But can I send it to you? And if so, what’s your mailing address and who should I send it to? When I did that, most of them converted to customers.

[00:36:31] Andrea: Interesting. So you made a phone call.

[00:36:33] Susanna Klein: I made a phone call and then I would send them the actual physical product in the mail.

[00:36:39] Andrea: Okay. And did you just take their address over the phone?

[00:36:42] Susanna Klein: I would say like, oh, I’m, I’m seeing on the, your website, your address is this, is that correct? Is that who I should send it to? You know, or sometimes they have a buyer, like the big string shops, like in Boston, they, they have a, they have what’s called a buyer or a front office manager, but some of the smaller ones, you know, it’s betty. You’re talking to Betty, I run the shop, you know, if it’s a little flute shop or something, so, and you know, it helps them and it gets my name out there. I, those, those journals, essentially, I, I lose any profit for those. Like, it’s kind of an even wash. I don’t lose money, but I don’t make money, but that’s okay. Gets my name out there and people are using the journal and if somebody sees the journal and they go, that’s, that’s really cool. What’s it called? They Google it. You know, they usually find my website. So it’s essentially free advertising for me while doing a good thing for the community. That’s how I look at that.

[00:37:37] Andrea: All right.

I have to interrupt today’s interview with a story. In a lesson the other day, I asked a student to play a C major scale. They played the first seven notes: C D E F G a B. That was it. No final C no tonic, no resolution. I know you teachers can relate to the oral torture that is an unresolved scale. I feel like I’m doing the podcast version of that to you right now by dividing this interview into two parts and truly I’m sorry, but the alternative was to cut material and only give you a pentascale’s worth.

That didn’t seem fair to you or Susanna. So this is my compromise: a two part episode. I want you to hear everything Susanna shared in our conversation. So I hope you’ll come back next week to hear part two. In the meantime, a reminder that I’ll be running another cohort through Business Building 101, starting in January.

This course is perfect for the teacher whose business isn’t operating as profitably as they’d like, or for the teacher who just wants to get their business in order in the new year. I’ll have info for that in the show notes at musicstudiostartup.com/episode085. That’s all for today. Thanks for listening.

I’ll be back next week with a proper resolution to this episode.