Goliath Guitar Tutorials
A premium subscription app for guitar lessons, with free and paid levels, and the payments, emails, member messaging and automated marketing that keep the business growing.
What needed solving
Goliath Guitar Tutorials is my own business: 15 years of guitar lessons and a YouTube channel with more than 770,000 subscribers. Free videos built the audience, but they don't pay the bills on their own. I needed a premium product people would happily pay for every month, different levels of access for free and paying members, a way to look after every member personally, and a way to keep reaching new players without hiring a marketing team. So I built all of it, as one system.
My Practice Room
The premium app at the heart of it. Every song has a video lesson, a full playthrough and an interactive tab that scrolls and highlights in time with the video. Members switch between Lesson, Playthrough, Stacked, Full tab and an immersive view, jump between chapters, and the room reopens on their last song.
Practice tools
Slow the video or the tab right down, loop a part or any bars you choose, and tune up and keep time with the built-in tuner and metronome. Members record their playing and keep their takes, write in a notebook and see their practice week, and it all syncs to their account on every device.
Song library and content pipeline
57 songs and counting, sorted by technique, with difficulty stars that explain why. New songs arrive in content drops, 15 in the first. Behind them is a production pipeline I built that cuts, aligns, transcribes, sync-checks, sets chapters, renders and publishes each song, with every video streamed securely.
Phone, tablet and app
The whole room works on a phone, upright or sideways, and on a tablet, and members can install it like an app.
Free and Premium membership
Free members get a taste of the room, hundreds of free lessons, a Guitar Basics course and a percussion course. Premium unlocks every lesson, the full room and three Premium courses: Fingerstyle Arranging, Writing Tabs with Guitar Pro and Learning Guitar By Ear.
Payments
Monthly or yearly subscriptions through Stripe, priced in pounds, dollars or euros depending on where the member lives. Early members keep the price they joined at, there's a 7-day money-back guarantee and a self-service billing portal, and failed payments and cancellations are handled automatically, with a reason collected for each cancellation.
Single lessons and Patreon
Players can buy a single lesson and keep it open in the room. Patreon supporters connect their account and get the access their tier pays for, checked every night.
Accounts
Sign-in with Google or email, full account deletion on request, and protection against sign-ups from throwaway email addresses.
Member emails
Welcome emails for free and Premium members, a journey of follow-ups, and campaigns whenever new songs land. The first content drop went to 1,183 members with no complaints. Daily send limits, consent handling and one-click unsubscribe are built in.
Member messaging and community
Members ask for help or send feedback from inside the room and get replies there, with a notification and an email. The Community has a thread for every song where members share their recordings, and it's checked every day.
Guides and updates
11 short guide videos, a first-run tour, and What's new and Coming soon inside the room, so members always know what has changed and what is next.
The Goliath Automator
An automated system that turned older lesson videos into vertical short-form clips and posted them to TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts and Facebook. Once it was set up, it ran with no human input.
The website and search traffic
The Goliath site rebuilt on a modern stack. More than 1,300 old links redirect to their new pages so no search traffic was lost, and a missing page offers a library search instead of a dead end.
Admin and analytics
Admin screens to see the state of every song, look up an account, view the site as a member and answer support. Analytics bring Stripe, Patreon, YouTube, video and site data together in one place.
Operations hub
A private hub where I run the whole business: every job, decision and meeting in one place, with a team of AI assistants that each have a role, and nothing goes out without my say-so.
TikTok followers in four months. The Automator did the posting across four platforms, with no human input once it was set up.
A clear path from free lessons to a paid subscription, with every member on the right level automatically.
The app, payments, emails, messaging and marketing are built to work together, so the business runs without extra staff.
“My Practice Room is such a great idea. I don't think there is anything else like it. It's definitely the best thing available for people to learn and practice guitar.”
Vara Education
Want something like this? Let's talk.
A quick chat costs nothing. I'll tell you honestly what I'd build and what it would cost.