We recently connected with Joanna & Matt Pace and have shared our conversation below.

Joanna & Matt, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

I am an elementary school teacher, and I am always looking for quality songs and videos to include as part of my teaching. It was 2017, and I had been teaching for about 4-5 years. I was teaching 2nd grade at the time. I found a lot out there, a LOT, and some of it was great but a lot of it was painful to listen to or incorrect educationally. It was as if you had a choice: pick something quality OR educational OR fun to listen to. My husband is a musician and songwriter and after searching for material to teach the 7 continents and coming up short, I approached him to ask him if he would be willing to help me out. He was reticent to write kids stuff, since that wasn’t really his passion or typical songwriting area. I started to play him various examples of what was already available – he was shocked. “I know you could do something better than this,” and he did. We workshopped a format and I talked with him about pacing, vibe, and needs for what I was looking for. My co-teachers loved what he came up with, and so we talked about making it more shareable – hiring an animator to provide visuals. At the beginning we weren’t really setting out to make a business – it was just an effort to help teachers out.

Joanna & Matt, 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?

I am a teacher, Matt is a musician, and we’ve been married just over 12 years. We create educational songs together for kids with our channel Hopscotch. We hope that these songs will help students learn, and make learning fun in the process. We encourage teachers, families, homeschoolers, etc. to take advantage of them, they are available on YouTube, and wherever you listen to songs. One thing we strive for is to make all of our songs fun to listen to for ALL ages. We found that a lot of kids songs are hard to listen to, or just use the same tunes over and over again.

We love hearing kids of all ages sing our songs to help them learn, and nothing makes us happier than to hear that our work helped make the process easier or more fun.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

Our first few songs were self-funded, and the animators for those two songs were fresh out of college and really kind – they gave us a great deal. Once the first few were up (counting by 5s and Seven Continents), we saw the potential decided to try a kickstarter. We didn’t really know what we were doing, but we thought it would be a no-brainer. We already had evidence to show that the first few songs were doing really well on YouTube, and we had ideas to show our next five songs. Looking back I remember we didn’t have a super clear idea of if or when they would make any revenue, but we wanted the project to be accessible to all learners, and we wanted teachers to be able to use it for free. Some colleagues encouraged me to make it a subscription only service, or maybe people buy each video, but I work in a low-income school and that went against everything I wanted.

We definitely should have talked to more people about fundraising and how to do a successful kickstarter – asking for money, even for a good cause, was not something either of us were comfortable with. The kickstarter failed pretty soundly. So for initial capital we just used our meager savings from my teacher salary – and decided to keep trying. We did NOT expect it to make much money, but it was a “good will” effort that we both believed in.

If you have multiple revenue streams in your business, would you mind opening up about what those streams are and how they fit together?

Our revenue sources all surround our songs – YouTube views, listening streaming services like apple music, spotify, etc. We also have revenue from our online shop at hopscotchsongs.com (sheet music, merch, etc.) and occasionally a partnership or sponsor who initiates a project.

Contact Info:

• Website: hopscotchsongs.com
• Instagram: hopscotchsongs
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hopscotchsongs/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Hopscotchsongs

Image Credits
credits for each image can be found with the associated animator, but we own all of the images.