Interview With Chris Thur, Co-Founder and CEO of Yousician

Tell Us About Yousician

Yousician is the world’s leading platform to learn and play music. With a combined 22M monthly active users, our two groundbreaking products, Yousician and GuitarTuna, are the leaders in their field. Yousician provides interactive learning for guitar, piano, ukulele, bass and singing. GuitarTuna, the #1 instrument tuner in the world, is the tune-and-play choice for musicians everywhere. We’ve witnessed the way in which Yousician has revolutionized how people learn and play music.  By using our innovative technology users receive real-time feedback to ensure they remain motivated and it creates a curated journey of their learning and playing experience.

The company was founded in Helsinki, Finland and we also have an office in New York City. Yousician has 100+ employees from over 25 countries around the globe. The team is not only diversified in demographics, but in disciplines, music skills and level of expertise in their field of work. 

How Did You Come up With the Idea for the Company?

My co-founder Mikko Kaipainen and I founded Yousician in 2010 by setting out to solve our own problem. We both failed several times over to learn to play an instrument with traditional methods and soon realized we weren’t alone. Research figures revealed that up to 85% of people who attempt to learn an instrument tend to give up! This spurred us on to develop a new way of learning that would work for people just like us – to make learning and playing an instrument accessible for everyone. We’ve created a music platform that invites anyone to learn, create, play and teach music, regardless of background, location or experience. Our mission is to make musicality as common as literacy. We want everyone to have the opportunity to learn an instrument, take part in the power of music and experience the joy it brings.

What Advice Would You Give to Other Aspiring Entrepreneurs?

A few things. Be confident to run with a strong idea, even if you don’t have a lot of experience with it. Personal passion is an extremely important factor in success that can’t be overlooked.

Next, build a dream team. Recruit the very best people so you launch with confidence and continue going strong after. When we first started Yousician, we hired talented gaming designers, music educators and software engineers to launch the best product we could. Iterate on your hiring process as your company grows to ensure you continue hiring the very best that are passionate about what they do. Your people are important.

Grow a thick skin. I was turned down about 50 times when looking to first secure an investor.  Rejection is going to happen–accept it and move on. 

Overall, the most important things are to dream big and retain the passion you had at the beginning. You have to be just as invested five years down the line as you were on day one.  

What Can We Hope to See From Yousician in the Future?

We are the world’s digital leading music education platform and we want to continue building upon that. Our goal is to be a global household brand in a world where everyone plays music. We want to make learning how to play the guitar, the piano or even singing, as democratic, accessible, and as easy as possible, and we want our mission to be brought into every household around the globe.

We plan to evolve to serve our global customer base and continually diversify our product offerings. In light of everything that’s been impacted by Covid-19, we will continue to support music education, particularly through our Yousician for Teachers program. We can achieve positive societal changes if we embrace technology that makes learning music more accessible for all, on a global scale.