The simple answer is: a passionate co-founder that is a real-life professional piano teacher, both in person and digitally. This makes us different and as unbelievable as this sounds: some of the popular piano apps out there are built by co-founders who have absolutely zero teaching experience. What this means is, Piano Planet is bolder and more complete than what’s been done before. We’re going to go the extra mile to build the best piano app ever made, and we need your help to bring this vision to life.

Yes, like anything in life, there’s no way to guarantee we’ll succeed. However, our Co-founder and CTO George Yacoub has nearly 2 decades of development and leadership experience, and Andrew has been teaching piano on YouTube and in real life for a decade and a half at the highest levels of piano. We’ve also spent the last 2 years building out the current version of Piano Planet in our spare time as an example of what we can build with limited resources. We have the skills, passion, and desire to go all the way.

As two guys with young families and day jobs, our time to dedicate to Piano Planet has been limited. Over the past 2 years we’ve worked evenings after long work days, and on weekends, sacrificing our time with our families to make this happen. We’re passionate about helping people who want to learn piano. However, because a single level on the app takes around 300 - 500 hundred hours of work to plan, write, film, edit, produce, upload, code, and deploy, after two years we’ve only built about 1% of what we want to build. We need to build faster so Piano Planet can start making a difference in people’s lives sooner. To do that, we’ll need to work full time on Piano Planet and reinvest the funds we raise to hire more help. Having the resources we need to get started will enable us to get busy building the best darn piano app ever made.

Taking on a business loan of that size without an established revenue stream is extremely risky since you could easily default on interest payments, and is generally not how startups get funding. Secondly, when you take money from investors or VC’s, they’re engaging in an investment with the hopes of a big return on that investment. In other words, they’re in it for their own profit. Because investors are in it for profit, they commonly apply pressure with their equity and board seat(s) to maximize profit instead of maximizing being good to the person using the app. Instead, if we raise our funding from the actual users who believe in the mission and have a passion for piano, we are aligning our interest with theirs which will create a better product for the person actually using the app. In other words, we’ll be free to keep your best interests in mind, instead of investor profit.

When you back the Piano Planet fundraiser, it’s technically a donation to support the mission of making the most complete piano app that’s ever existed, which is not an investment. We give you rewards freely as a thank you for donating to help the mission. As a backer, we know you want to see the best product made, so we will be listening closely to feedback so we can make an experience you love to use.

Apps can be very expensive to create, and many of us aren’t aware of how costly they can be. To give you some perspective, the salary of a single developer ranges between $80,000 - $140,000 a year. A small barebones team consists of 2 developers, 1 product manager, and 1 designer at a minimum, which adds up to a cost of around $400,000 to $500,000 per year in salary costs alone. There’s also content production costs, and editing costs, plus server costs, and service infrastructure costs, that increase the more popular the app becomes. Based on our goals and scope for the app, the total cost to develop the Piano Planet fully will likely be multiple millions. $500k gives us the minimum amount needed to make a significant difference, and any extra we raise will help make Piano Planet even better.

All money raised from the crowdfunding campaign will be spent on building Piano Planet into a feature rich all-in-one piano learning app that teaches people with a passion for piano from beginner up to the highest levels of piano. We detailed a list of the deliverables. If a funding goal is achieved, then those features will be deliverables on our roadmap. The more funds we raise, the more we can accelerate development, and build more and better features, so we can create the highest quality piano app the world has ever seen. But we can’t do it without your help.