We recently connected with Graeme Winder and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Graeme thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Has your work ever been misunderstood or mischaracterized?
I failed every music class I ever took :). Even though I LOVED everything about music, and I could play, I was always the square peg in a round system because I was such a poor visual learner. Visual learning defines most music education systems but it is very limited on development with other types of musicians such as aural and creative learners.
Even though I could play anything I heard and I could create my own music from scratch, I was told I didn’t belong in music because I couldn’t read well.
This set the stage for the development of the SRM learning method which is highly disruptive and now making it’s way into music classrooms across the country.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I realized later on in life that, I didn’t fail music education, the education system failed me. Because of this, I started to wonder if I could teach my students to learn and absorb musical information the way I did. After a decade of research and development, the SRM method was born.
Next, we had to figure out how to pull our youth’s attention away from highly addictive video games and into our video game that gives them tremendous musical abilities. Keys & Kingdoms video game was the result of our pursuit and was our second attempt at building this product. Our first attempt failed miserably :)
I’m most proud of not giving up when our first startup failed. It absolutely crushed me and I was depressed for many weeks after. But with the amazing encouragement from my wife, friends, and yes even investors, I picked myself up and started again.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
As mentioned in the previous question, we failed and failed hard on our first attempt. I had to lean in on my faith and my support group to reinforce the calling on my life and to know that I needed to start again.
When you hit rock bottom, sometimes it seems like there is no way out. You feel like all your hard work and effort and sacrifice was for nothing. It’s times like these that the people you surround yourself with play a vital role in helping you to take a look at the journey from a macro perspective and to not lose sight of what you have “gained” vs what you have lost. You have gained vital experience, knowledge, and strategies in your temporary defeat that you can use to get back into the game.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
We are actually in the middle of a market pivot as I type this. Initially, we had developed the game to be consumer facing. After several years of being in the market and the data we got back, we realized that the game is not developed enough to hit the inflection point of consumer scale.
However, at the same time we were learning this, we gave the game to several music educators to test out in the classroom. The results were amazing and we realized the product is more than ready for the classrooms, even if it was a few years away from being effective in the living rooms.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.keysandkingdoms.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/keysandkingdoms/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/keysandkingdoms
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/64532059/admin/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/keysandkingdoms
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTPiqmstWrqKPW-0xIpTBKw
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@keysandkingdoms