Building an Online Music Academy from Scratch with Diana Rowan

Course Lab - Episode 89 Building an Online Music Academy from Scratch (Diana Rowan) Abe Crystal: When people are being bombarded by messages telling them that you have to do X, Y, and Z on social media and you have to be doing all these marketing techniques — they're not necessarily going to be sustainable. Ari Iny: Hello and welcome to Course Lab. I'm Ari Iny, the Director of Growth at Mirasee, and I'm here with my co-host, Abe Crystal, the co-founder of Ruzuku. Abe: Hey Ari. Ari: Today we welcome Diana Rowan to the show. Diana puts the lie to the phrase "starving artist." She's a harpist, a teacher, composer, and the founder of the Bright Way Guild, a thriving online academy and community for creatives. Thank you for joining us today, Diana. Diana Rowan: Thank you. Ari: So to kick us off, could you give us a 30,000 foot view of yourself and how you came to the course building industry? Diana: I am a musician and composer, and I've been teaching for quite a long time. I've been seeing students one-on-one in person, mostly harp and piano. And then I began traveling around the world performing and I got my PhD in Bulgaria. I couldn't see my students in person as regularly. So I began teaching them on Skype back in the day. The resolution was pretty much zero, but still we were able to get work done. I began to realize I could reach out to a larger audience this way. I could teach more than one student at a time. Because although I really customized my lessons, there was a lot of basic information that I was repeating in every single lesson. Eventually what I did was create a membership for harpists where I talk about those essential principles to a large group and then they have individual lessons about their own specific things. So it's a super efficient way of doing things. And the most incredible thing to me was how the community sprung up around it. Because with one-on-one teaching, my students actually didn't know each other. The other big part was I would present at harp conferences around the world and noticed it was a very small and exclusive group who could afford to make it. So I created online conferences. I did four virtual summits in total where I brought in amazing harpists that were not necessarily part of the usual circuit. Perhaps the most exciting part was how much it democratized the harp world. Ari: Could you tell us a little bit more about the membership? Diana: Not everybody takes individual lessons with me. Some do, some take with someone else, some don't take any at all. There's coursework that we go through. That coursework eventually became a book, The Bright Way: Five Steps to Freeing the Creative Within. There's a monthly Q&A where I workshop our material in real time. And a hugely important factor is that we have almost daily Zoom meetings. We call it the Bright Way Harp Circle. Most of these meetings are actually run by members themselves. One wanted to create a study group around the material. There is World Harp Healing Hour, which happens on Friday afternoons at the end of the week. People get on and play meditative music for each other. There are co-practice meetings where we get together and practice for an hour and a half. It's essentially co-working but for practice. People find they are able to stay with practice for much longer. There are many elements because people have different learning styles. Sometimes when people first come in they try to do everything and it's like, well, it's not intended to do everything. Ari: How did this start versus where it ended up? Diana: It started essentially as a course with support. There wasn't the understanding yet about how important community was. I was more focused on, okay, there's this great material that I can share from having already taught for 30 years. But what I came to realize over time was it was really the journey people were going through together that was the most important thing. It became increasingly more community focused. I had originally come in with more of an idea of I'm going to teach all this stuff. I think many course creators do that. And I joke now because my first spiral — that's what I call the six-month cycles — was actually probably four years of learning material that I squeezed into six months. Ari: Overwhelming, I'm guessing? Diana: Overwhelming, yeah. And the hardest thing to teach other course creators is don't teach too much. Because overwhelm shuts people down. Ari: What were the activities you took to foster that community? Diana: Showing up on Facebook Lives within the secret group was really important. Assuring people that they were safe. That their experience mattered and I wanted to hear from them. That I was learning from them. That I'm not here judging them. It was about creating an atmosphere of safety, respect, and fun. Safe to make mistakes. Another big part was, only share from direct experience. It cannot be a link to an article about someone else's experience, because there are a lot of myths around creativity and music that are repeated that are wrong. For instance, the 10,000 hour rule is wrong. We don't take anything at face value. We only go from direct experience. And the final part is, we only offer constructive criticism to each other if we're invited to do so. If someone shares their latest song, unless it says I'm looking for feedback, I don't want to see any negative comments. Because this is the creative process, and we're not here to judge it. We're here to let people go through it. Abe: Just curious to hear more about how you went from focusing on music and harp to a broader focus. Diana: One of my specialties is helping people get through performance anxiety, stage fright. I actually suffered terrible performance anxiety. It was so bad I gave up music for four years solid. I did find my way back to confidence and managed to boil down that journey into my method of teaching, which I call the Bright Way. My publishers very much wanted me to play down that I was a musician and play up that this process works for anybody who wants to be more creative. The big problem for me became I didn't know who I was talking to at that point. I can be so granular with musicians. But when it got to trying to address a wider audience, I got confused. So that was a big lesson learned. I pivoted back to saying, look, I'm going to talk about being a musician because that's who I am. I think the most important thing for a student is to feel seen by the guide. Abe: We are back for the debrief after a very in-depth conversation with Diana. Ari: One thing I found really interesting is how she was saying that the publisher of her book wanted to push her to reach out to a broader audience. But she no longer felt like she would be able to communicate effectively with that group. Making sure that you're able to speak in the language of the people that you want to really reach is really important. Abe: Our story shows the right way to do it. She started with helping harpists, which is very focused and something she understood deeply. Then by working closely with those people and listening to their questions, she realized over time that there are these much broader questions around creativity. Abe: The other takeaway is that it's very grounded. She's not trying to pursue tactics because someone told her to. She's not posting updates to social media because that doesn't align with what she wants to do. Having that self-awareness of what feels valuable — that's what's ultimately going to work for your marketing. You have to care about what you're sharing with the world, or it's not going to click with people. Abe: Diana is the founder of The Bright Way and the author of The Bright Way: Five Steps to Freeing the Creative Within. You can learn more about her at dianarowan.com.