Quick: Name five things you could never learn online.
How to clean and repair a Ming vase might be one. How to operate a time machine—that's definitely one. You probably couldn't learn how to be a competitive ice skater just by watching videos on your laptop (but there must be a lot of valuable tips out there, right?)
How about learning a musical instrument? Impossible to do online, isn't it? You have to have that up-close, personal interaction with a music teacher for any instrument to really click.
Actually … you don't. And Michael Palmisano, B.S. ’14, a guitar aficionado and instructor, is proving it. In fact, in the right kind of online environment, most guitar students can thrive, building their own communities together, speaking the language of the guitar in ways even beginners can understand, and showing off their growing skills through self-made videos that they share with the world.
Rising to the Challenge
Palmisano, the winner of the school's 2014 Rise to the Challenge competition for entrepreneurs in the Existing Business category, has launched Guitargate, an impressive, completely online and interactive learning platform for students of the guitar. Acoustic, electric, country, rock or jazz—if you want to learn how to play a six-string or refine your skills at a higher level, Palmisano has a spot for you in his virtual classes.
"My goal, from the beginning, was to recreate what it's like to go to a music school," Palmisano says, in between updates to his guitargate.com website, which was launched in 2013. "There are 2.5 million new guitars sold every year, and 30 million active players—that's a lot of lessons."
For the past several years, Palmisano has made a living through a combination of playing live in a band (plenty of corporate gigs and weddings) and offering private in-person tutoring to guitarists at various levels of skill. Undoubtedly, this is a wear-and-tear proposition: thousands of miles on his car, many days and nights away from friends and family, plus the inevitability of things simply not working out—the performance that failed to draw an audience, the broken piece of equipment, the band member or guitar student who just didn't show up.
Palmisano, who studied in the Merrick School of Business's Real Estate and Economic Development program, and who is currently conducting business from the offices of UBalt's Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, began to believe that there had to be a more efficient, more effective way to deliver on his talents as a player and teacher.
"Also, I have a family now—two children. I have to think about my wife and our kids first," he says.
Enter the Web. After a lot of struggle to develop and launch a decent web site for teaching guitar, Palmisano believes he has found the right formula for delivering a quality service. Guitargate is growing—more than 10,000 students have signed up at guitargate.com—and now he can look back on his early days and say that he has learned a lot.
"I made every mistake you can possibly make in building and marketing my own online business," he says. "For example, I figured out that you can't teach music in a Skype environment—it just won't scale up so you can make a profit."
Keeping an Eye on the Goal
Clearly, Palmisano has the soul of an entrepreneur—he is determined, analytical, and knows his product inside and out. He knew that if he kept at it, he could find a way to make his concept viable in the marketplace.
The answer, as it is with many issues in business, comes in refining your product and in finding good partners. Palmisano is working with sites like Udemy, which stands alongside guitargate.com and has another 8,000 students. He is producing professional-grade videos for teaching, and offering easy ways on the site for students to engage as a way to enhance their learning.
The basics of the business are this: Guitargate.com is a free, interactive guitar school. The site's masterclass can be purchased directly from guitargate.com, although it isn’t required. Other platforms also host the paid masterclass.
Palmisano's core idea is heading into the stratosphere, as more and more potential customers discover that there is a serious guitar course available through the web. With those millions of guitars being sold every year, he says, obviously there is a significant need for lessons.
A New Student Every Minute
Now, Guitargate's e-commerce platform has a new sign-up every minute of the day, and Palmisano's job as the boss is to develop and deliver first-rate, comprehensive content for students of the guitar. More than 8,000 have enrolled in his master class, and many of them are posting their progress online, where they get advice and tips from their teacher and their fellow students.
As a Rise to the Challenge winner, Palmisano received a cash prize to invest in his business, as well as free use of office space and equipment in the Merrick School's Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Now he is wrapping up his time in the suite, and thinking about some next moves to keep his company on a positive footing.
"There are many things you can teach online, including music," he says. "It's not a complete replacement for a one-on-one lesson, but it is definitely a class that satisfies the student's desire to play the guitar—from the basics and on up."
Given the logistical difficulties, there may never be an online course to learn the pipe organ. And becoming an expert on the calliope via a laptop would take some real effort. But settling in to learn some chord progressions on that nice acoustic you've had sitting in the corner of your living room for ages? Go on—pick it up, strum a while. Then imagine getting better—much better—just by logging on to the web.