We recently connected with Karyn Scott and have shared our conversation below.

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

As a former juvenile prosecutor, I saw many kids in foster care coming through the system without adequate resources. I started a non-profit, Kids in a New Groove, to help provide free music lessons to youth in foster care. I also was frequently asked for music teacher referrals. Care2Rock was the next iteration of this idea; providing online music lessons to schools and students for a reasonable fee, but also providing free lessons to youth in foster care. Very few online music providers had a complete booking flow that was easy to manage, they did not provide instruments, and they did not have custom designed learning platforms. Care2Rock brought all these concepts together on one platform, with a very high quality selection of vetted teachers.

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?

Care2Rock is a lesson subscription service where customers can take any one-on-one private music lesson online with vetted teachers from across the globe. We ship instruments straight to our customers’ doors, helping develop long-term subscriber loyalty to our live lesson platform. And every lesson helps give back as teachers volunteer to teach youth in foster care for free on our site. I started Care2Rock because I wanted to have a thriving online business that would also give back to the community around us. I am most proud of taking the leap from running a non-profit, Kids in a New Groove, to starting a mission-driven business that gives back.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I was used to dealing with the non-profit mindset, which is completely different from a business mindset – even a mission-driven business mindset. At the end of the day, a business must have paying customers and a product that can scale. I was used to having donors and a cause that inspired them. In spite of Tom’s shoes, Americans are not yet used to the mission-driven business model. The product must sell independent of the benefit the business is providing to society. I had to unlearn the non-profit mindset and think more like a business. This helped me find the best teachers and to improve our platform so that we are attractive to customers, independent of the fact that we help youth in foster care.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

We had to pivot from targeting B to C customers to B to B customers. While we are still available for individual customers, our model works best as a partner to schools or online organizations that want to provide private online music lessons to their customers and students. We put so many resources behind our B to C launch, only to find that we were a much better solution for larger partners. We also had to switch from a B to C marketing approach, to more of a sales driven approach.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://care2rock.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/care2rock/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/care2rock
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karyn-scott-56424320/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/care2rock
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDYfcsZtfqWdPXfdnw5IpQQ

Image Credits
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