Matthew Rusk Student Entrepreneur in Residence

It was amazing to hear from Emily Davies of Think, Try, Do earlier in the week to say that the University of Exeter is putting together a “Wall of Fame” showcasing student entrepreneurs past and present. I am delighted to say that a guitar that I gave to Joe Pearce when I finished my role as the Student Entrepreneur in Residence will be included in this showcase.

It was a guitar that I had bought as part of a different business idea called “Amplified Art”, where I would get local airbrush artists to airbrush famous guitarists onto guitars. I trialed this with about 5 guitars, with the one that I gave to Joe featuring Jimi Hendrix on it. While I managed to get the guitar into a local guitar shop to see if it sold the business itself never took off…turns out people aren’t really that interested in buying a guitar with a famous guitarist airbrushed onto it.

It is kind of interesting that this guitar will be used to showcase MGR Music Tuition LTD, as it was actually an example of another one of my failed ideas…of which there were many during university. So the real story behind the guitar is one of continuously trying to create business models and products. After all you only need one business model to take off – so keep making ideas and testing them out.

I would really recommend trying to gorilla test ideas and products, essentially making the lowest cost version of your product/business model to test it out. Get it out into the real world then see whether it works or not. If the answer is that it does then you can increase the investment into the idea and let the product develop from there. I have met a lot of entrepreneurs who look to gain a huge investment into their website for example, even though they have never sold one of the products they wish to feature on their website. My advice – get out on a market stall and see if you can sell the product. This is still something that I know the team at mgrmusic.com are learning – the hardest thing to do is actually get into the world and start selling, it is a lot easier to put it off. Keep focusing on developing the product etc. without doing the thing that brings in the money…which is of course the art of selling the product as it stands today.

It will be great to see how the Wall of Fame looks and I really hope that I get an opportunity to see it. If I do I will post some photos of it on here, highlighting some of the other products that have made it into the “Hall of Fame”.

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A small update this time on progress. The team has been really excited to start working with a partner in the USA to feature teachers in the USA on the mgrmusic.com music teacher database. This will hopefully help us to start generating enquiries for music teachers in America, as well as here in Europe. We also had the great news of launching the Singing Lessons Edinburgh music hub with professional music teacher Joe Revell which is tremendous news. We had previously worked with Joe in Glasgow as a singing teacher so we were delighted to team up with him again to deliver professional singing tuition in Scotland’s capital city.

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