Ukulele, Cultivating hobbies & Jobs-to-be-done by FrontRow
This is a two-part series on FrontRow- a celebrity-led learning & community platform. The first part talks about FrontRow's business while the second part will talk about how they are uniquely achieving their business goals.
The lockdown pushed a lot of people to either acquire a new hobby or pick up old ones. Suddenly, making the best out of our spare time mattered more, which eventually turned into a ‘productivity race’ that was being played on Instagram & Twitter. From learning to play an instrument to learning to do a headstand, some old hobbies were being picked up while some were being newly cultivated.
In India, the most prominent instrument that people were trying to learn was Ukulele (an instrument that at least I hadn’t even heard about). At first, I thought it was just my friend circle, which was focused on Ukulele, turns out it was an overall interest in the country-
The process of cultivating a skill-based hobby
Hobbies are activities that we indulge in our free time regularly. For this essay, I’ll be only focusing on hobbies that require a skill to be learned before you can indulge in it.
Step 1: Finding a hobby
To find a hobby, you need to discover an interest first. Discovering interest is a function of the experiences you have had.
Pre Internet era
It’s not surprising that our interests in the Pre Internet era (& even our career choices) were similar to our parents’ interests because families (& even geography) shaped a big part of the experiences we had. Outside our families, schools & colleges allowed us to discover our interests from a pre-defined pool of choices like sports, drama, singing, dancing, etc.
Post Internet era
Acquiring new hobbies became easier as the number and the diversity of experiences increased due to social media and even streaming platforms. The Queen’s Gambit, a Netflix show, bumped up the sign-ups on an online chess-playing platform to 1,00,000.
Step 2: Developing the skill
Once we have found something interesting, we need to learn its skill to develop that into a hobby. This learning process involves four elements:
- A source to learn from: A source can be in the form of a teacher, a book, or even a friend.
- The ability to learn it: Our ability to learn a hobby depends on the time taken to learn the hobby and the resources involved in learning it.
- Practice: Practicing helps in knowing our current position in the learning journey, it’s a reality check for ourselves.
- Feedback to improve: Feedback is the most basic form of guidance for a keen learner.
Pre Internet era
Schools and colleges were the most prominent places to develop skills as they provided the source, resources, and feedback all in one place. The student just had to have an interest in it and spend time learning it.
Post Internet era
In the post-Internet era, YouTube became the default source of learning. The resources were available to all via Amazon. The feedback was being given directly by the Internet audience while practicing on social media.
Step 3: Indulging in the hobby
Hobbies are not one-off activities but activities that people enjoy doing in their spare time regularly. This is the most important step in cultivating a hobby because if you can’t indulge in the activity regularly, it’s a skill that you have learned not a hobby that you have cultivated.
To indulge in a hobby, you need spare time and the ease of doing the activity. While the first one is quite obvious, the second one can help identify activities that can be a hobby or not. You might enjoy mountain climbing but if you can’t indulge in it in your spare time easily, it can’t be a hobby of yours.
Pre Internet era
Indulging in hobbies was the easiest for a student because they had time, resources, the skill needed, and the ease of indulging in it. As a bonus, they got to do it with a class full of students also interested in the same thing. If hobbies are a way to enjoying yourself then doing it with other people made it even more delightful. This may be the reason why gatherings or parties are still one of the places where we showcase our hobbies like singing or playing the guitar.
Post Internet era
Indulging in hobbies became dramatically easier- thanks to social media. You don’t need a gathering to sing or showcase your paintings, you can post an Instagram story. The way in the pre-Internet era we used to show our paintings to the guests who came to our homes, social media gave us a way to record and showcase what we do in our spare time to our close ones much more efficiently. All you have to do is set up an account, it could be a YouTube account, an Instagram account, or even your own blog. Today, hobbies live on social media.
‘The Ukulele revolution’
Let’s go back and try to understand how people cultivated the hobby of playing the Ukulele.
After digging a bit, I found that Kalki Koechlin was the most prominent celebrity to post videos of playing the Ukulele while singing a lullaby to her newborn on Instagram. Those videos were covered by a lot of media outlets which could have been the source of the Ukulele revolution. But a lot of other celebrities also posted playing an instrument, so what made it more popular than other instruments?
- What was interesting about Kalki’s videos was the fact that she had learned the instrument during her pregnancy. Turns out developing the hobby of playing the Ukulele was easier and affordable which made it far more popular as an instrument.
Ukulele is a smaller instrument with four strings, which makes it easier to learn for people who want to get involved. It is cost-effective and portable, making it ideal to carry along for a weekend getaway or a house party.
— Karthik Nagaraj while speaking to Times of India, director, New Veena Musical
Needless to say, I got to know about the Ukulele because a lot of my friends also started posting stories while they were learning it. Let me ask you this-
How many people on your Instagram feed/Twitter feed were posting about their newly acquired hobbies?
Problem solved by FrontRow
It’s important to note that hobbies are not just a way to pass time, they tell a lot about us and our interests. We are seeing more & more people choosing to spend their time with side projects and their hobbies. It’s not something new though, Apple might nothave started if Steve Wozinak hadn’t been a computer hobbyist.
FrontRow is a hobby learning platform where the courses are taught by celebrities like Amit Trivedi, Suresh Raina, Neha Kakkar. It solves a real problem on the Internet-
The problem of discovery in the age of abundance.
Learning sources are abundantly available on the Internet but deciding where to learn from is a key pain point. FrontRow solves this by bringing experts or celebrities as teachers making it easier for people to make that decision.
If you look at FrontRow as a hobby learning platform then, by just providing the videos the FrontRow team is doing its job. But is it the same reason why people are hiring FrontRow for?
What are people hiring FrontRow for?
Jobs-to-be-done is one of the best methods to understand a product’s value to its customer. It doesn’t talk about the problem that the company aims to solve per se but what the users are trying to accomplish when they hire the product and in what circumstance.
Interestingly, the FrontRow app isn’t just offering videos by celebrity instructors but also providing a community space to the users. The Community tab in the app is a place for learners to connect with fellow learners.
Clearly, FrontRow is being hired when a person has already found a hobby and is looking to develop the skill behind it. Let’s see how FrontRow is providing the 4 elements needed to develop the skill:
- Source of learning: Paid video lectures by celebrities
- Ability to learn: ‘Learning center’ within the app provides users with resources like free beats to budding rappers
- Practice: The Community forum allows the users to create posts to help them practice effectively
- Feedback: Expert feedback sessions organized by FrontRow (which are free) and feedback from fellow learners in the form of comments.
Job to be done by FrontRow is to help people develop the skill behind the hobby so that they can indulge in the hobby in an improved manner.
This is why I believe FrontRow is not in the business of delivering educational content but in the business of cultivating hobbies. To understand the difference between these two, head to Part 2 of this series.
