"The older I get, the more Bach excites me."

Jonas Gößling is co-founder of the piano learning platform "Flowkey." In an interview, he talks about his first attempts at founding the company, the decision not to go with venture capitalists - and his own musical preferences.

Piano lessons are expensive, but learning new pieces with Youtube doesn't work so well either. Flowkey claims to have developed the solution to this problem: An app that recognizes whether the piano student is playing correctly and adjusts the difficulty of the piece to match the ability. Founded in Berlin in 2014, the company is now internationally successful and cooperates with instrument market leader Yamaha. Flowkey did not receive start-up support from venture capitalists - the founders had made a conscious decision not to do so.

Mr. Gößling, you are the co-founder of a learning platform for amateur pianists. Do you play the piano yourself?

I've played the piano since I was a child and simply love music. My parents didn't have that much money when I was little. But we were given an old piano by my grandfather and my father could play a little on it. We used to sing together, he used to accompany us on the piano - and during that time I must have somehow fallen in love with this instrument. So I asked my parents to please let me learn the piano. Since then, music has accompanied me throughout my life.

And you turned music into your profession by founding Flowkey after your studies. How did you come up with this idea?

I have always dreamed of starting a business. In my youth, I had already raised the first business. I had a budgie and parrot breeding business at home.

How did this entrepreneurial adventure turn out?

During my school years, I went abroad for a year and then I realized: I can't keep this up forever. But we kept the budgies - until recently the very last one from the breeding was still alive.

So very long-lived home-bred budgies. But let's get back to learning the piano. How did you come up with the idea for Flowkey?

During my studies I noticed while practicing piano that there was no really good learning program for it, no cool app. At that time, there were really only Youtube videos, and learning new pieces with those works rather mediocre. And so I came up with the idea of offering something myself. I met my two co-founders during my industrial engineering studies. They weren't musicians, but they were still enthusiastic.

I had a catfish parakeet breeding at home.

Jonas Gößling

How does the app work?

Depending on how much experience users have, the app shows a little something different. Beginners are first shown how to pay attention to everything, such as how to hold their hands. Those who can already play the piano can start directly with the songs. The app recognizes if you play them correctly and shows that.

How can the app tell if someone is playing correctly?

The core idea is that the user can tell if they are playing correctly. If a piano player is learning with a YouTube video, then the video just keeps running, regardless of whether he is following along well or not. In the worst case, he is out of his learning flow at some point. So the idea was to build something that recognizes whether the user is playing along correctly and adapts the video to this and to his speed. To build the appropriate technology behind it, we brought an audio engineer into the team who had also written his master's thesis on the subject. Together with him, we developed a program for the app and continued to expand it over the years. In the meantime, the technology is based on neural networks, i.e. artificial intelligence, which we have trained with piano recordings.

This technology also convinced Yamaha to cooperate with Flowkey. Every Yamaha piano comes with three free months of Flowkey Premium. How did this collaboration come about?

It was a funny story. We were on The Lion's Den about a year after we started. We didn't get any investment, but it was still great for us. The channel said it would be cool if we also had a piano on stage during the pitch. And so we came up with the idea of working with the world's largest instrument manufacturer on this. Through a former Yamaha manager we knew, we contacted the German branch and asked them if they were interested in sponsoring the grand piano for the TV appearance. They were immediately enthusiastic and invited us to Hamburg, to their headquarters. And that's how this lasting cooperation came about at some point.

You didn't bring any other venture capitalists on board after your attempt at Höhle der Löwen, why not?

We talked to a few venture capitalists at the beginning and it became clear to us relatively quickly that we didn't really want that. We founded to go our own way and be free, we didn't want to work for someone else. In the conditions that you sign in a contract with venture capitalists, there are a lot of stipulations. We wouldn't have been so free after that and would have had to make a lot of decisions to please the investor and follow their goals - regardless of whether those goals were also good for the company.

But how did you get capital instead?

We raised a lot privately, through angel investors we know, for example a professor from university. And we did a crowdfunding, we raised 300,000 euros within three days. We also applied for various funding programs.

In Germany, "The Fabulous World of Am'élie" is clearly the most popular.

Jonas Gößling

And that was enough to really grow?

We were very, very frugal with our capital. If you don't get a million-dollar investment, you have to get creative to survive. In marketing, for example, we quickly found ways to grow and become profitable.

What were those ways?

We decided to partner with big piano youtubers who promoted our app. In doing so, we worked with a classic affiliate model. That is, when someone signed up for a Flowkey subscription through the link the Youtuber posted under their video, they received money. This meant that we only had marketing costs if the advertising was successful. Because many of the Youtubers were internationally known and shoot their videos in English, we also quickly became known abroad, especially in the US.

What's the song your users like best?

That varies from country to country. In Germany, it's clearly the soundtrack from "The Fabulous World of Amélie." In the U.S., classical music is the most popular category.

And which piece do you like to play the most?

My favorite composer is Frédéric Chopin, I grew up with his works. But the older I get, the more Bach excites me. So I am definitely someone who prefers to play classical pieces.

Personal details: Jonas Gößling studied industrial engineering at the Technical University of Berlin and founded Flowkey in 2014 together with Alexander Heesing and Ahmed Hassan. There, the 35-year-old is CEO and responsible for marketing and general corporate strategy.