A decade. Unbelievable to type, unreal to experience. Follow our journey from filming guitar lessons in tiny bedrooms and broken down farm houses to working with some of the top artists on the planet.
2006 The Year of Risk
The idea is born. Jeff and Jenessa Booth dream "if I can snap my fingers and take guitar lessons on the internet, I would". Jeff recruits Kevin Wimer, who then recruits Chris Dawson, and the team is established. Kevin and Chris take 9 months to build the full JamPlay platform, Membership application, and lesson structure for the web. This would also contain social components with user profiles, social features (inbox, messaging), and friends lists to connect with other members.
During this time, Jeff Booth (in Colorado) scoured his local area for guitar instructors and began figuring out how to create a "video guitar lesson". Keep in mind, Jeff had never used a video camera, or edited a video at any point in his past. This is truly a bootstrap operation with barely any capital, and no financial help from friends of family.
2007 Survive and Advance
JamPlay.com is officially launched, to little fanfare. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube.. these companies either do not exist at this time, or aren't as widely used as they are today. Advertising becomes a major focus as we are nearing the breaking point. After 5 months of constant tweaking, bug fixes and evaluating advertising performance, JamPlay, as a company, is getting close to running out of finances (and by finances, we mean Chris, Kevin, and Jeff's pocketbook). Filing bankruptcy after 9 months of development, and 5 months of being a "real business" is quickly becoming a reality.
At month 7, JamPlay finally reaches solvency on a monthly basis. If this would have been 8 months, the company would have failed. All excess capital is reinvested into the company in the form of paying for new filming sessions, and continuing to dump any money we can into our advertising channels.
2008 The Year of Hope
Seeing a chance for success, Jeff begins to recruit more instructors, and Kevin and Chris continue to expand advertising platforms, develop our Membership Application, and begin create new educational tools for members. Jeff also brings in our first full time employee, Jason Mounce, to help with the new workload of adding more lessons. While still operating on thin margins, we have bought ourselves some breathing room to begin not just surviving, but thriving.
In late 2008, the decision is made for Chris Dawson to begin filming lesson in Ohio to bulk up our electric guitar lesson library, and recruits a childhood friend to help. Enter Mr. Vince Bruno. This starts the process of running two studios; Ohio and Colorado. This would present new challenges of how to make our content maintain brand consistency across locations.
2009 More. More Of Everything.
The next 4 years begins a wild ride into growth, expanding responsibilities, and bringing new workers on board. The Ohio studio begins building a new studio, and the Colorado team moves into a new office to house Jeff, Nessa, Jason, and our newest employee, Tyler Rugh. We begin to fill holes with our content, moving from the standard beginner lessons to more advanced topics and genres. We also move heavily into teaching songs, which piques our interest of having the actual band teach them instead of our own staff.
The Ohio team also added another editor, Mr. Aaron Miller, and begins traveling to globe searching for new instructors. Backstage at concerts, hanging outside of NAMM, you name it.
Live webcam lessons are introduced, and immediately have the servers crashed by Dream Theater's Jordan Ruddess. This happened after 2 weeks of promotion, and our biggest traffic day since the company started. Let the growing pains begin!
2010 Create Your Own Luck
Put your head down and go to work. Grow. Ditch your priorities and hit the pavement! This is the year we really shifted our approach to outright expansion. We were also lucky enough to be featured on television (Lifetime), national magazines and local newspapers about our journey of bootstrapping a business.
In 2010, new teachers were added more consistently, and more workers were added to our staff. We also began partnering with guitar manufacturers and artists to add more depth to the platform.
2011 Anyone Need a Job?
With 2 studios on both sides of the country running at maximum capacity, we were ready to double down on content production for the next 18 months. But with any growth, rough patches are sure to arise. From accounting, to music publishing, to server maintenance.. you name it, we experienced it in the next 18 months. We begin to shift our focus to becoming more efficient with our processes, products and studios.
We can honestly say that everyone in the company went from doing 1 job, to doing 2, 3 or even 4 jobs! No complaining, but this was a hectic year. We finally added more help with the addition of Chad Fawcett and Chris Smith to the Colorado location. On the development end, Matt Korsmo joins the team as our CTO, and begins recoding our backend architecture to set ourselves up for future growth.
2012 JamPlay Worldwide
We are a well oiled, content producing machine. Plans begin to add new instruments to the platform, with ideas for launching Bass lessons in 2013. The Ohio and Colorado studios do a repeat of 2008 and again begin to look for new instructors, but for an entirely new instrument... all while still producing as many guitar lessons as possible.
The Colorado team moves into a new studio location, capable of filming multiple teachers simultaneously. More gear, more output, more stress.. but oh too much fun.
From filming lessons in a barn house, to 11 full time employees and over 120 contractors, JamPlay is now a full operation. We begin facilitating advertising affiliates in 15 different countries, and serve users from 220 countries.
2013 The Year of the Artist
2013 was our attack on the bands and artists we grew up listening to. We dedicated a majority of our resources to bring you the biggest names in the industry. This was, without question, the most exciting year to be a part of our content team (though not the guy picking up the tab)! This was also the year we dove into the bass market with a new product, featuring some of the biggest bass players on earth. Billy Sheehan was the man!
In terms of workload and stress, this could have been the most demanding 12 months of our business. It was not uncommon to have 24 hour code sprints going on upstairs, while instructors were filming downstairs. The business truly became your everything. The necessities of life were food, shelter, clothing, and JamPlay.
2014 Growing Pains
This was one of those years where if you could dream up the scenario, it would probably go wrong. From tiresome, long, and frustrating code cycles to tearing apart studios and revamping for more live courses, this was the year of the grind.
The good news is we came out a better company, with a bulletproof code base, completely rewritten membership
application capable of moving us into the future, and a much better studio environment. The lesson is that for every inch of growth you achieve, you better be ready to support it moving forward. As many of you probably know, running a Dot-Com has many ups-and-downs. Moving
an entire Membership Application, with millions of rows of data and 300,000 lines of code is no small order. A stressful, thankless job that can really eat into your plans.
The decision was also made to transition Chris out of studio production, with the Colorado team running at maximum effeciency. Chris has moved back into "code mode" to begin work on the next generation of JamPlay. New sites, overhauled
interfaces, and (hopefully) a better user experience for all.
2015 Re-Tool. Re-Focus.
Regroup. Collect yourself. Off the back of a successful "Live Holiday Giveaway" during our 2014 Christmas Sale, we decide to begin curtailing our on-demand lessons (how many pentatonic lessons can you produce, anyway?), and moving to Live Courses with both guests artists, and our regular instructors. During this year, we successfully ran over 100 live sessions without 1 major hiccup aside from a few snowstorm delays (hey, it's Colorado).
On the development end, we began restructuring personnel to add more resources, especially with Chris back into development mode. In 2015, a new Member Area was released to re-structure, and modernize our content delivery. This is the beginning of a renewed focus into our code base to begin forward development in a more timely manner, especially with our plans for more additional live courses.
2016 The Year of Live
This year was our first, official year of offering structured courses on our Live Platform. We went from running a studio 2 days per week, to 5 and even 6! As of today, we have successfully completed our 28th Live Course, with over 1,000,000 live minutes viewed from our Members. Each new each course offered 6 to 10 weeks of rehearsed, structured content. Naturally this demands an entirely new set of tasks from everyone in the company, so it has been rewarding to complete this pivot with success.
This is a major milestone as we begin to transition out of the "old way" of producing content and into the new generation of interactive, real-time lessons that more closely mimic the one-on-one experience. We are also diving into a new product layer, which will be announcing this week! A new product ontop of our application that offers you more, for less. What could be better?
2017 Are You Coming?
2017 is shaping up to be a very interesting year, with more transitions from what we have done in the past. Our Holiday Sale starts this weekend, and like every year, we have upped the ante with another massive deal to start the year off with a bang.
In the short term, the goal is simple. Improve. Improve every day. Go to bed with JamPlay.com being better, in some way, than it was when we woke up.
For the full year outlook (for as much as we can mention, wink), our goal is to strike a balance between the production of our Live Courses, with the addition of new teachers and artists. 2016 proved to us that we were
capable of handing a full studio workload of Live Courses, and are ready to jump back into the land of new teachers, artists, and unique lessons from some of world's top players. And who knows, there could also be a dive into a new instrument...
Are you ready? Our Annual Holiday Event starts this weekend! And be sure to review and download your free offers below, including our 2016 Guitarist Toolkit along with a Free JamTrack Pack and Lick Pack.
Free JamTrack Pack
View and DownloadOur annual Holiday Event started off with an awesome Blues JamTrack Pack. This digial download is 100% free and gives you 20 new and exclusive JamTracks, all professionally recorded with full supplemental content. A master PDF and associated Guitar Pro files are included.. download and enjoy now!
Free Guitarist Toolkit
View and DownloadFour Guides. Four Key Concepts. Applicable to audiences from beginner to advanced, electric to acoustic. Prepare yourself and be sure to set aside a generous amount of time to sink your teeth into these featured topics. There are some absolute gems of information contained in this exclusive JamPlay feature.
Free Lick Pack
View and DownloadA preview of things to come? Maybe. For now, enjoy these 15 licks to add more diversity to your lead play. From the blazing Bluegrass licks of Tyler Grant, to the scorching hot Country licks of David Wallimann, these tracks are sure to expand your portfolio of lead lines and phrases.