We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Graeme Winder. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Graeme below.
Graeme, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today One of our favorite things to hear about is stories around the nicest thing someone has done for someone else – what’s the nicest thing someone has ever done for you?
After answering the calling on my life, roughly 5 years ago, to unlock the musical potential in everyone I could, I began the exciting and terrifying journey into entrepreneurship. I didn’t really know how or where to start, only that I had to. 2 years later we had our first lead investor, a small team, and a dream that was very difficult to figure out. Shortly thereafter, we realized the beta product we had worked so hard on wasn’t reaching the market the way we had hoped and due to limited finances, we failed.
What happened next was something I will never forget. I had to call our investor and let him know the company had failed. It was a call I was dreading for many sleepless nights and I knew he would be extremely upset and disappointed.
When I told him what had happened, rather than harsh words and a scolding tone, I heard an empathetic voice on the other end asking me if I was ok, and if my wife was okay. This moment of grace from our investor had me literally in tears.
Months later, I caught another moment of creative lightning and shared my ideas with others. We all agreed this was the right direction to go.
Now, 4 years later, we are about to experience our first major district on-boarding and our program will soon be reaching hundreds of thousands of students across the U.S. very soon.
I often think back to this moment and wonder if not for his understanding of the emotional pain we were going through, I would have had the courage to get back up and continue to pursue my dream.
Graeme, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
You might be surprised, but growing up I failed most of my music classes. This was very upsetting to me as I loved everything about music, but could not succeed in the traditional settings. It wasn’t until much later that I understood my unique modality of processing and how this was never developed.
Because of my struggles, I soon realized that so many others also found traditional note reading to be very difficult which led to over 90% of students dropping out before they even reached high school.
As I started teaching more music, I wanted to see if I could teach my students to learn in a way that was organic, intuitive, and most of all fun. Over the years, my wife and I started our own music school and did our own research and development. The result was a powerful new method of learning called Sight Reduction Method (SRM).
Seeing the amazing results of SRM learning in our students, we knew we had to expand outward and reach a lot more students. The next obvious step was to attempt to build software that could train students the way we did in our school.
But this was no easy task, especially given the adaptive nature of our pedagogy and how we insisted that the program customize to the learning pace of the individual student and not become a one-size-fits-all approach.
In our first start-up, we designed a program that was very ed-tech centered and only had a small amount of gamification. It did not take long to understand that K-12 students did not find our program very engaging and in just a few years, failed.
Picking myself up off the ground and dusting off the failure, I was determined to build a new company with a much better product. I decided to build a really fun game first, and then place the music training inside the program second. This proved to be the secret as our first students who tried the prototype were begging to play more!
Fast forward to today, we are so proud to say we have developed the first ever role-playing adventure game for K-12 that trains real musical skills and abilities in an exciting new way! It’s called Keys & Kingdoms.
Keys & Kingdoms has many unique features including adaptive learning, deep analytics dashboard for music educators, emotional management support, creativity, and so much more. It allows every student to instantly become highly engaged while unlocking their own natural musical abilities.
The program is quickly being adopted into some of the largest school districts in the United States including Denver Public, Miami-Dade, and Austin ISD.
We are so proud to deliver this innovative new program to all of our great music educators.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
Our first attempt at creating a program and a business start up failed. It was personally devastating. I really wasn’t sure what I was going to do. It took some incredible support around me to help clear the fog, reset, and start fresh.
I believe that the calling on my life to unlock the musical potential in everyone is what gave me the strength and resiliency to overcome so many challenges, including new challenges today.
I’m so grateful that I was given another chance to succeed because I took so many critical lessons with me into the second startup.
Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?
I think accelerators are a wonderful resource for new founders and even seasoned ones as well. I wish I had known and participated in my first start-up. The journey for a founder can be lonely and overwhelming.
Accelerators give founders a room full of peers who understand what it means to sacrifice so much for a dream, a dream or vision that only you can truly see at first.
They also provide such wonderful support in the form of mentors, advisors, investors, and even potential team members.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.keysandkingdoms.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/keysandkingdoms/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gwinder/
- Youtube: https://youtu.be/m3nyTkrhB4s?si=WMLyMP_uBQwvN67D