Transcript: 166 – Sam Reti on Starting Muzie.Live (Part 2)
Transcript for 166 – Sam Reti on Starting Muzie.Live (Part 2)
Andrea: [00:00:00] 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 creative 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.
Today’s episode is part two of a super interesting two-part conversation with Sam Reti, a music teacher and a visionary behind the popular online music lesson platform Muzie.Live. If you haven’t listened to the first part, I highly encourage you to go back and listen to that one too. In this episode, Sam shares how a college class at Berkeley, countless Uber and Lyft rides and a whole lot of Chipotle burritos help launch his first business.
And why learning when to quit [00:01:00] was just as important as knowing when to keep going. We talk about how the first app idea morphed into a second, and then a third, which is the Muzie we know today. We talk about the decision to bootstrap instead of raising investor money, how Sam adapted when his original business idea didn’t pan out, and what he’s learned about growing a customer base organically in the music education world.
Sam gives an honest behind the scenes look at startup life complete with all the messy unglamorous realities you don’t usually hear about. Here’s my conversation with Sam. You mentioned that a lot of your marketing now happens in Facebook groups and things like that. How does that look for you?
Sam Reti: Yeah, marketing is very organic. We do do conferences, so we’ll probably be at MTNA this year. We’ll do partnerships is a big part, podcasts, things like that. But Facebook groups have sort of been from day one, like a very organic way of growing Muzie because like I said, in the early days with the original business, that wasn’t a thing. But, cOVID sort of shoved everybody online and those Facebook groups just sort of naturally [00:02:00] bubbled up. And even to this day, we get people literally every single day posting something like, oh man, I’m so tired of using Skype or Zoom or FaceTime. Like, is there anything else out there that does this? And you’ll get a slew of comments that are either suggesting Muzie or one of the other platforms in the market.
And then often we’ll get a demo with that person like the next morning and they’d be like, oh, I heard about you on, you know, the Teach Piano group or whatever it is, and then they go through the product and like, man, I didn’t even know this existed. This is so cool. And then, you know, hopefully they like it and that becomes a customer .
And then honestly, they then go and tell their other piano teacher friends. And so it is very organic in that sense. That has been the main bulk of growth on Newsies side for a long time. Strategic partnerships is another really big one. We have a couple partnerships where like we have like modules, like a lot of companies will do courses that are like teaching how to teach online or teaching how to grow your business, like the Music Studio [00:03:00] Startup stuff or you know, things of that nature. And we will partner with those companies, put a module in there that is Muzie related, and usually it’s like a podcast call or like a demonstration of the product or something of that nature.
And then there’s like a, you know, we do some kind of affiliate or partnership agreement. And that’s really nice because that kind of works in favor for all of us. As you know, business owners. Like if we can drive people to your business, you drive people to our business and it, that kind of does go around nicely.
Those have been really successful and it’s really nice to be able to provide resources to our users that are good. And that we can actually back and say like, Hey, if you need to know more about this, you should go to this person. They’re basically an expert in it. And then podcasts, you know, doing things like this, just telling the story.
People find it really interesting and I really like kind of getting under the hood of what’s actually going on here. And I think I’m a probably a bit more honest about what actually happens than a lot of business owners usually are. [00:04:00] ’cause there’s no PR team behind me telling me to shut up, you know?
Um, so all of those things together are pretty much the mix that makes Muzie work.
Andrea: All right. Have you done any marketing promos or paid marketing that was just a flop that you’ve learned from?
Sam Reti: Honestly, most of the expensive paid marketing we’ve done has been a flop. When we spend like a good amount of money, like just say like over a thousand dollars on like one thing, usually that doesn’t work out very well in our favor.
We had a publicist for a little while in like 2021, I think it was. The idea there was to get just magazines and newspapers or websites that were music industry related, and that was quite expensive, and we did get a couple placements, but it drove basically no traffic. So we’ve been pretty shy about spending big on that sort of stuff.
I’ll occasionally run an ad campaign on Facebook. And then I’ll go look at the organic growth and the organic growth [00:05:00] will beat the ad campaign. And so then I’m like, well, why am I spending that money? Like, that’s like literally a waste of money at this point. Like I could just be partnering with someone else and doing an affiliate program or you know, something of that nature.
And spending the money on product development versus, you know, yeah, going to a conference. And even conferences aren’t really like a needle mover. They’re just good to get out and be in front of people and meet people and make more business connections. Than like actually selling software. So yeah, when we spend a lot of money, we don’t really see the return. When we spend no money, we see a pretty decent return. It’s kind of a weird, like in my world, I’m like, don’t advertise.
Andrea: Well, I guess that might lead into my next question, which was what have you observed in your customers or just in your work that has surprised you about how this fits into teachers’ worlds?
Sam Reti: Yeah. I mean, uh, one thing is the, the I mentioned earlier is like the adoption of new products is a lot slower than I had [00:06:00] expected, and that’s only just because I kind of come from like the techs. Not that my background is literally technology or anything, but like I’m a very techie person. Like I have all the gadgets and things and like I’ve got a VR headset over there and like I will.
Be the first in on some new technology just ’cause I wanna see what it does. Teachers have almost the opposite like opinion on that where they need to like see that it’s been vetted. And I understand why, but there’s a lot of like, okay, let me try it. Let me do a demo. Let me try it with one student. Let me try it with two students. Okay, now, three weeks later I’m comfortable, or a month later. Now I’ll go in and actually buy this thing and set it up. So the adoption cycle was a lot slower than I think we had predicted in the early days. Over time, that’s definitely shortened just because the brain has sort of grown beyond me and is now more of a, people are like, oh, I saw you on this and that and this, and once you see the thing more than once, usually that’s enough for people to be like, oh, okay, that’s [00:07:00] like it’s an established thing.
So that, that was really interesting. Yeah, and, and just the industry in itself is just a bit different than a lot of other industries. Teachers just do things differently than, you know, a lot of like average consumers, so to speak. Being a music teacher though definitely helps ’cause I can relate from that point of view.
So getting to use Muzie as a customer is definitely a benefit to selling Muzie as a service. And honestly, the marketing stuff was quite a surprise. I mean, we assumed we were gonna need to start spending a fortune to keep it growing. And over time we’ve probably spent less realistically. And that’s cool.
Andrea: I’m sure you get inundated with feature requests and things. How do you think about your roadmap for product development and like just kind of filter through that feedback?
Sam Reti: In the early days of the original product, it was yes to everything. And that’s where that feature creep term comes in.
Because if you’re [00:08:00] not careful, that’s exactly what’s gonna happen. And teachers, uh, uh, kind of to also add onto the last question. This relates because everybody teaches slightly differently, and I don’t think I was quite expecting everyone to have a slight, like I thought there’d be like four or five models that we could predict and that is not the case.
There is a very unique model for every single person that comes through the door. So building features that actually supply or are useful to a mass amount of people is quite difficult. We have to be really careful that, you know, just ’cause two or three teachers really want something. We can’t say yes every time because you just end up with a really confusing products that’s, you know, really difficult to use.
And I think one of the things I, I kind of experienced is, you know, we have software where we track all of the feature requests and things like that. And we quite literally do like, put in the feature [00:09:00] requests as they come in and then see which has the most, you know, support behind it. But that doesn’t always mean that that’s gonna be the thing that happens next.
There’s still a lot of, like, we sometimes just have to do something because from a technological point of view, we have to do something like servers might need upgrading or some kind of technology has been released that we need to sort of adopt. ’cause you gotta make sure the backend stays as fresh as possible so that what you’re providing doesn’t become obsolete. And so sometimes we have to sacrifice like a cool feature because we need to go and develop something that you’ll never see or hear of, but it’s gonna be vital to making sure Muzie can last 10, 20, 30 years down the line.
So that is a very much a juggling act.
Anytime we make updates, we don’t always tell people when we make updates, and I’ve learned that this is the right thing to do because if you tell [00:10:00] everybody about every update, you start getting a lot of red herrings and false flags. Because what happens is, I think just instinctively, people will be like, oh, well you made an update and now this doesn’t do what it used to do, or this doesn’t work the way it worked before and nine times outta 10, there’s no correlation. It’s just that like your computer was acting weird that day. Or something. It is just a coincidence. Early days, I wasn’t very good about that. We kind of told everybody about every update and that led us to chasing our tail a lot because we get someone saying, oh, you didn’t update and now this doesn’t work.
So then we spend half a day tracking down this problem that actually wasn’t a problem at all. And it wasn’t even related to the the update. And actually you find out that it had been like something from six months ago that had actually been occurring all the time, but just now they decide to bring it up.
So that sort of stuff you gotta be really careful about. ‘Cause sometimes it is related, sometimes you do [00:11:00] do an update and people go, Hey, this broke ’cause of the update. And you go, oh okay. Sorry about that. We’ll fix it. But we found that if you don’t announce your updates as often, like when’s a big update and you’re gonna obviously notice ’cause we’ve changed the color of something or we’ve moved stuff around, then yeah, we’ll give you a heads up. We’ve kind of had to learn to be a bit more sparing about the details. And it is hard. Like there’s some features that I wanna add because they would just be wicked cool to have. And sometimes we have to just be like, yeah, that’s cool, but that’s not gonna drive any meaningful growth or any meaningful function to the product, and you’re just over complicated things.
Sometimes you have to take stuff away. People really don’t like that, but occasionally there’s a feature that does just kind of become obsolete and you have to say, nobody’s really using this and like we just for, sorry for the 2% of you that were using this, but it’s a waste of our time and effort to keep this thing going when we could divert that [00:12:00] interest to something that 95% of you do actually want. That juggling act is really difficult.
Andrea: I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at the Google Graveyard of products like Google.
Sam Reti: I live on Google Graveyard. I was one of my favorite websites of all time.
Andrea: I was one of the people who mourned the demise of Google Readers back in 2012.
Sam Reti: Google kills all my favorite things and I’m clearly the 1% who used the thing I, those companies are funny ’cause they, they do it on like a scale that I couldn’t even imagine.
Like Google has a rule basically that’s like, if it doesn’t generate a billion dollars then it’s not worth our time. Which means Google Graveyard is a goldmine for pretty solid business ideas for anyone else.
Andrea: Yeah. There are plenty of feed readers that existed beyond people killing theirs.
Sam Reti: But that’s exactly the case. To be fair to Google, like at that scale, it’s understandable. If it’s gonna cost you millions of dollars to maintain this system, but a fraction of a percent of your users are actually using it, then it’s gotta go. The Google Podcast got killed, [00:13:00] which that one was weird to me. ’cause I’m like, I thought that was pretty popular, but hey, clearly not enough. Right. You know? . As someone who used Google Podcast, I was like. All right, well podcast players are out there, guys. Like what do I talk to? So, and I use a Google phone too, so they hit me harder every time. ’cause it’s like I’ll have like a unique Google app on my pixel phone and then it just goes away. So I understand the frustration, but I get it from the business side.
Andrea: Yeah. And something I think music teachers, even in our own studios, can kind of consider that way of thinking too. Does it make sense to kill off this program that I’ve been doing forever and I, I might not even like it anymore, but…
Sam Reti: Absolutely. Yeah. And that’s, that’s a big part of it is like if you’re running a studio and you have some offering that you do and it’s just not doing as well as it used to, or it’s not fun anymore. As I kind of mentioned earlier, pivoting is one of the most important things that I ever learned how to do, and it’s not to say that you failed at that thing, it’s to have [00:14:00] a reasonable understanding of when it’s appropriate to step away and refocus your energy to something more important.
And like with the original practice software that we spent four years working on that and building it as a business. And then we kinda had to sit down and go, it’s not really working. We’re gonna close it down, but we’re not done. We’re gonna focus all this energy now over on here. And then again, if we hadn’t done that, then we wouldn’t be here today. You know, it’s sometimes shutting something down to refocus is the right decision. It’s just hard to do it.
Andrea: Yeah. I do think the more focused you are, the more opportunities you start to see. And it’s hard at the early stages to trust that those opportunities will come with the increased focus, but they do. Like they just do. I noticed that you recently launched Muzie.rtc. Can you tell us about that?
Sam Reti: Yes. So that was one of two companies I launched last year. So just as a side, I launched a card game [00:15:00] company as well, just because not to have too many things to do, but yeah, I launched this company that makes, uh.
It’s like philosophical discussion cards.. With like a conversation starters and things like that. Um, that’s just a side project with a friend of mine that we did on Kickstarter and or rolling that out. Um, but basically at the same time we also rolled out Muzie.rtc and this is really interesting ’cause if we’re, you know, just talking about roadmap and how do you decide where to go next and where to focus your energy and when to pivot and things of that nature. Muzie.rtc is a really interesting evolution of Muzie. We are still a hundred percent committed to Muzie. This is not a pivot and move away. This is a parallel, and what it is, is it’s actually all the technology from Muzie stripped out and then available to be sold to other companies.
You do see this more in like big tech companies. I’ve not seen anyone do this in like the music education space before. So as far as I’m aware, I [00:16:00] think we’re pretty much the first. I’m sure there’s another that I don’t know of, but at least the way we’re doing it. So we get asked all the time by other companies and even by direct competitors.
How did you do your audio and video? How does that work? And like I kind of mentioned earlier, a lot of times people just buy like an off the shelf product, stick it into their thing and call it their own, which is perfectly fine. That’s how most stuff works. I bet you’ll probably even find that Zencastr is actually using something that is probably built on like Twilio or Chime, which is an Amazon product.
Andrea: Mm-hmm.
Sam Reti: So like you’ll find that the technology in the backend is not actually the company’s technology. That’s normal though. That’s like 99% of companies. We had a unique situation where we did build all the technology ourselves. So everything in Muzie is entirely proprietary. Even like our chat, our whiteboards file sharing, our MIDI instruments, everything was built from scratch.
[00:17:00] So we get asked all the time by other companies, Hey, can we white label Muzie? Which basically means, can we take your product, put our logo on it, we’ll pay you a licensing fee, and then we create a business around that. And so Muzie.rtc is a better way of doing that. We’ve basically stripped it down. So you could have our audio, you could have our video, you could have our recording technology, you could have our chat. Coming down the pipe next is live streaming, whiteboards, and file sharing. So there’s still stuff that we’re moving over as we go. But now you’ll see competitors of our own will actually start releasing features that are actually Muzie features inside their own product. And it is an interesting idea because we’re sort of creating our own competition. But we get paid through all of it. So we actually become like the backbone for all of the products on the market, so it’s a really unique sort of [00:18:00] position to be in. And it also allows us to do other things.
Like we can work in education. We can work in healthcare. We can work in entertainment. And we don’t actually have to go into those industries. Those companies come to us, license our technology and do whatever they want to do with it. So like in healthcare, there’s a lot of telehealth. You might do a doctor’s appointment on a video conference.
Well, that video conference could be powered by Muzie now. So those are the kinds of opportunities. So the scalability of that business is insane.
So as I was saying, the music industry is sort of, like we said earlier, they funneled a lot of money into it and kind of realized it’s a bubble that’s only this big, this bubble is a thousand times bigger.
So from a business point of view, It’s really cool. Because in the future, this new company could actually basically become like the funding for Muzie itself. And that’s like all through us. It’s almost like we’re our own investors at that point. So anything we develop for Muzie will help Muzie. [00:19:00] RTC.
Anything we develop for Muzie. RTC will put it in Muzie. So they can be very symbiotic like we do need both. Which is why this is a parallel project and not like a drop one and go the other direction. But it, it is really interesting. It’s kind of exciting too, just from a personal point of view because this is kind of letting me kinda revitalize a lot of my creative juices and things. Not that it’s got dried up or anything, but when you do the same business for five years, really 10 years, you do slow down on your ideas and things. So this has sort of allowed me to like reignite that fire of like, Ooh, I could do this, or we could try that.
And so it’s neat to be able to like point my energy in a different direction, but it still directly benefits Muzie.
Andrea: Yeah, that makes total sense. And I think this is one of the tough things about like why, uh, it doesn’t make sense for Zoom to focus on music teachers because like you said, like they’re focused on a much bigger bubble.
And so the teacher like population just [00:20:00] doesn’t, is not going to get the interest. But Muzie that’s like started out of music teachers right, can go the other way.
Sam Reti: Literally. And Zoom is ironically, I mean, they’ve kind of always been a competitor ’cause. Unintentionally but now like Zoom also sells Zoom, SDK. Which is their version of selling Zoom software to other companies. So we now have that as well. So we’re like trying to get into their big bubble while they’re not really bothered about the little bubble. So part of us is like we could kind of conquer the little bubble and go after the big bubble at the same time.
And obviously music is still the core thing that, you know, sort of resonates with me and with us as a business. So everything we do will always come back to Muzie and make that a better product overall. But yeah, it’s, it’s cool because it’s just a lot of exciting new opportunities that could grow this to a, a level that really is not what we even thought of at the early days.
You know, it could outgrow [00:21:00] Muzie a hundred times over, which is pretty cool.
Andrea: Looking back, is there anything you would’ve done differently in the early days of building Muzie?
Sam Reti: Probably been less afraid to reach out to other people. Imposter syndrome, like everyone, you know. Yeah. Get over that and just do your thing.
Everybody’s an imposter. So you know, we’re all playing the same game there. I definitely, in the early days, had a really hard time reaching out to business partners or other companies with the fear of rejection, of the fear of them like laughing at me ’cause I was too small or something. . It wasn’t until they started reaching out to me.
And they were like, oh, well you know, you are the biggest thing in this industry right now. And then I was like, wait, really? Like you guys think I’m the big one? I thought you were the big one. But it was like, I mean, you had this weird like you’re like, I’m the imposter. You, no, you are the imposter. You know?
So that I think is something, if I’d gotten over that sooner, it would’ve been a little easier to kind of grow the business and [00:22:00] just get more connections and things like that. Now I feel much more comfortable in where I am and who I am, that I don’t really care much about rejection anymore. Not ’cause it’s not important, but because I know there’s a hundred other people I can reach out to right after.
So I used to think a lot of things were like, well, if they say no, then it’s all over. Then I’m never gonna get to work with somebody else. Like, you are gonna tell everyone I’m an idiot. Like that’s just not how it works. Like , for every one person that says no, there’s probably 50 people behind them.
They’re like, we’ll do it. Yeah. You know, it’s like, so yeah, if I could have gotten over that sooner, that would’ve been probably a big help.
Andrea: Is there anything else I haven’t asked that I should?
Sam Reti: Um, don’t think so. I mean, with any of this stuff, you know, like I said, it’s, it’s a lot more is going on under the hood than I think people all kind of recognize.
So it’s nice to be able to uncover that a bit. You know, just on the general notes, if anyone is interested in [00:23:00] Muzie feel free to come and check it out and chat with us about it. But, you know the, the mission is just to help music teachers provide the highest quality education that you can possibly provide.
And when that stops being the mission, then we’ll stop doing it. But I don’t see that ever happening. So, you know.
Andrea: Is there a book or resource that has had a strong impact on you as a music teacher or as an entrepreneur?
Sam Reti: Yeah. Making Money Teaching Music by David Newsome. That book was something I read in college and I was lucky enough to study under Dave at Berkeley for a bit. It’s literally what it says it is. And money is obviously the thing that drives businesses forward. Most common thing I get asked by teachers is, how do I get more students? How do I make more money? How do I make this more profitable? Or some variation of that question.
Even if they don’t ask it directly. So that book literally has all the answers in it
Andrea: And what’s next for Muzie Live [00:24:00] or Muzie? RTC?
Sam Reti: More, uh, just more, there’s some potential for some really intense growth over the next year or two from both sides. So that’s just gonna mean more features, more tools, a better platform, you know, just, yeah, I mean the, the mission is still keep growing Muzie, bring on more schools, bring on more teachers, add more features that are gonna help execute that mission of, you know, providing high quality education. So we’re not slowing down at all. If anything, this is like ramp up time. Okay. Yeah. I’d say right now it’s kinda like the first five years where the runway, and this is like the liftoff of like, this is gonna go to a whole nother level.
Andrea: Okay.
Sam Reti: And I’m pretty excited about it.
Andrea: That sounds fun. Yeah.
Well, you’ve been so generous with your time today. Thank you for absolutely just telling the story, and I appreciate your honesty. I mean, I like having people like you on who aren’t afraid to say the, the truth of, [00:25:00] you know, yeah. What it looks like behind the scenes.
Sam Reti: Like the burrito, the burritos and driving around in the middle of the night doing, you know, basically being a taxi driver while you are an entrepreneur, you know? That’s what it’s really about.
Andrea: And where can listeners get in touch with you?
Sam Reti: Through Muzie. Just Muzie.live. It’s usually the easiest place to find us.
I’m on there a lot and you can always just email me at Sa*@***ie.live. But yeah, it’s, we’re very accessible, so if you reach out to us, it will go directly to me or get to me quite quickly. So yeah, don’t hesitate. We’re always happy to chat with people and hear what you’re working on or anything like that. Definitely.
Andrea: All right, Sam, thank you so much.
Sam Reti: Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. It’s been really nice.
Andrea: Sam is always such a fun person to talk to. I love his positivity and scrappiness. In our conversation, Sam and I talked about the many stages of his entrepreneurial journey, and it got me thinking about ideas and how we interact with them. Ideas are such strange things. They’re [00:26:00] both everything and nothing.
You can’t start without one. But having an idea doesn’t mean much on its own. It’s what you do with it that matters. And if you’ve ever tried to bring an idea to life, whether it’s a studio, a new program, a composition, you probably know the emotional rollercoaster that comes with it. There are three stages I see over and over again in my own experience, in the teachers I coach, and in the stories Sam shared in this episode.
Each stage of an idea’s lifecycle has some excitement to it, but also challenge. The first stage is choosing to do something with an idea. Sam talked about how many of his classmates in the startup lab course had great ideas, but most of them didn’t do anything with them. Thinking of ideas and dreaming of ideas is fun, but deciding to pursue an idea is where we incur the first cost.
It’s not necessarily monetary cost, it’s a FOMO cost, because as soon as you decide to pursue one idea. You have to say no to a lot of other shiny, attractive ideas, and that’s hard, [00:27:00] especially when you’re a creative thinker and every idea feels full of potential, but you can’t do them all, so you pick one.
That’s when your idea starts becoming real. Next comes what I’d call the irrational belief stage. This is where you double down. You choose to believe in your idea even when it doesn’t make sense. You might be actively ignoring all the reasons why your idea shouldn’t work. People might be telling you to your face that it’s a bad idea.
You might be eating ridiculous amounts of Chipotle to win free catering or driving lift between meetings just to stay afloat while your idea doesn’t earn you anything. This is a stage that takes grit. You show up for your idea over and over again long before it proves itself. And then the third phase, and maybe the hardest part, is knowing when to stop or pivot.
After years of working on his original practice app, Sam stepped back and said, this isn’t working. That takes a different kind of strength because when you’ve invested so much time and energy, and in some ways conditioned yourself to ignore reality in the irrational belief phase, it’s [00:28:00] hard to detach yourself from your idea enough to decide it’s no longer worth pursuing.
But sometimes pivoting or quitting is the most courageous move. So yeah, ideas are essential, but they’re not precious. You’ve gotta believe in them fiercely when it’s time to go all in and be willing to let them go when they’re no longer serving you or your goals. Thank you, Sam, for sharing how you’ve navigated this journey with your ideas inside the hub.
This is the kind of work our members are doing right now here in Q2. Our quarter runs from May through July, and it’s a season of reinvention for a lot of teachers. It’s when many teachers start shaping what the next school year will look like, whether that means launching a new offer, simplifying systems, raising rates, or finally letting go of something that’s weighing you down.
You don’t have to figure it out alone. Through hub Office hours and masterminds, we help teachers sort through the noise, set clear goals, and take focused action within a community that gets it. If you’re ready to stop spinning on ideas and start making real progress toward the studio you wanna run next year, we’d love to have you [00:29:00] join us either in the hub or in our Business Building 101 cohort starting in June.
You can find links for both of these programs in the show notes at musicstudiostartup.com/episode166. That’s all for today. Thanks for listening. I’ll be back next week.