Over the last three years we have worked on developing “My Guitar Pal“, an online guitar education site. Now, I think the reason it is called an “education” site is because the process of developing this enterprise has been “an education.”
Initially, the idea was to bring 40 years of teaching experience and materials online with some very innovative ideas for presentation. This required developing a custom platform that would deliver the considerable multimedia content in a seamless and easy to navigate user-friendly manner.
Thus far we have shot over 1000 live videos as well as several animated videos and have recorded approximately 100 supporting audio tracks, published 2 books as well as programmed a chord finder app. We have gone through three different local developers as well as four different overseas developers in India.
At the one-and-a-half year mark of 70 hour weeks we discovered that all of the programming work was fundamentally flawed which meant we had to start the programming all over again. As I said, this is a very educational site.
My son Myles who started as a musician and player and producer of the videos transformed himself – due to the mother of invention – into a programmer. He would literally spend 16 hour non-stop days for weeks on end in order to save the site from sinking altogether while I continued to shoot content with a production assistant. After a year and with the temporary help of a local junior programming assistant (thanks to a grant from the Canada Research Council) Myles reprogrammed the entire site without ever having previously programmed. This required learning a host of different programming languages. Yes, a very educational website.
So, with twists and turns and driving off the cliff a few times we are now back on the road and are just finishing our latest series of 45 carefully produced videos that have taken on a new look and far higher production standard. We have learned to streamline and clearly define our product as well as more clearly identify our market segment and we hope of course that this all leads to the end result of success. The latest iteration is expected to launch mid-summer. Currently we are editing the promotional introduction video. The site is running very quickly and functioning as it should and we are beginning to see the full manifestation of our original vision. From here it will be a matter of continuing to refine our goals and then on to marketing.
Success would mean realizing our goal of being the best online beginner guitar education site on the web which of course is no small task but we believe we have what it takes to accomplish that. If tenacity is a necessary ingredient to that success I would say that this would increase our chances considerably.
If you are interested in our progress ask Diana for a pass code at the front desk.
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