My nephew plays piano. Properly plays, the award winning kind of playing, the kind where you stop talking and listen.
He's not quite old enough to work in this province yet, which is a strange place to be standing. You have a real skill, one that people genuinely pay for, and no legal way to go and get a job with it. So the obvious answer is teaching. He knows more than a beginner does. That's the whole qualification. Piano teaching is one of those things that has existed forever and needs almost nothing: a piano, an hour, and somebody who is further along than you are.
And then you hit the actual problem, which has nothing to do with piano at all.
How does anybody find out he exists?
That's it. That's the whole business. He can play, he can teach, he can probably explain a scale to a seven year old without losing his patience. None of that matters if the only people who know about it are the people already sitting at our dinner table.
So the questions he's stuck on are the boring ones. How do I get students. How do I advertise past word of mouth. How do I let people know this is a thing I can do.
The lawn sign
His mom's instinct was lawn signs. Print a few, stake them along the street, wait for the phone to ring.
I want to be careful here, because that isn't a silly idea. It's how this has always worked. It's how most of us found our kids' piano teacher, or our babysitter, or the guy who cuts the grass. It's a completely reasonable answer to a completely reasonable question, and she's the one actually helping him get set up, which is more than most people manage.
But here's the thing I keep turning over. Lawn signs cost money too. Printing a handful of decent weatherproof signs, plus the stakes, probably runs more than a month of an AI subscription. Nobody in that conversation flinched at the signs.
What thirty dollars buys now
I watched a video recently about the sites you can build and host straight out of a chat window. Public facing. A real link you can send to a real person. Bookings that come through to you. You describe what you want, you get a site, and if you hate it you shut it down that afternoon and nobody ever knows it existed.
For him that's maybe thirty Canadian dollars a month. An Instagram business account where he posts himself actually playing, which is the only proof anyone needs, and a link in the bio to a page where you can see what he offers and book a slot.
The site isn't really the point, though. What it buys him is three things.
It makes him look like a real thing. A teenager with a booking page reads differently than a teenager whose mom asked around, and I'm not sure I love that, but it's true.
It gets him past the street. Lawn signs mean in-person lessons for people within walking distance, and there are only so many of those. A link travels. It opens the door to virtual lessons, to theory sessions, to recorded material, to whatever he decides to try next.
And it gives him room to change his mind. Once you have a page, you can edit what's on it. He could offer beginner theory. He could put together short pre-recorded lessons. He could use AI to help him plan a proper curriculum instead of winging each lesson on the spot. None of that is available to a lawn sign.
We're pricing it wrong
Here's what I think is actually going on, and it isn't really about him.
Thirty dollars feels like it can't possibly be enough to buy something real. A website with bookings used to mean a developer, a few hundred dollars minimum, probably a friend of a friend who does this on the side and takes six weeks to answer an email. So when someone tells you it now costs one dinner, part of your brain refuses it. Real things cost real money. This must be a toy.
And at the same time, thirty dollars feels like too much to risk on a maybe. On something a fifteen year old might not stick with.
Both of those can't be true. It can't be too cheap to be real and too expensive to try. But that's exactly what we do, because the number moved and our sense of what things cost hasn't caught up yet. We're still doing the old math on a price that changed underneath us.
And the comparison that keeps getting me is the dumbest possible one. We spend more than that on takeout. Once. On a Tuesday, because nobody wanted to cook and the kids were melting down. Forty dollars, gone in twenty minutes, and not one of us thought about it again.
One takeout, or the thing.
What it's actually for
I don't think this is really about him making money, honestly. He might make a bit. He might make none. He might do it for two months, get bored, and go back to whatever fifteen year olds do.
But he'd have built something. He'd know how to put a page up, how to describe what he does, how to handle a booking, how to look at a thing he made and decide it isn't good enough yet. Those are reps. You don't get them by thinking about it, and you definitely don't get them from a lawn sign.
That's what the thirty dollars is buying. Not customers. Permission to find out.
So I'm going to pitch him the idea and see what he makes of it. Maybe he shrugs. Teenagers are allowed to shrug. But if he's into it, I'm happy to sit with him and walk through the whole thing, because this is exactly the kind of thing I wish someone had walked me through, and because it's a lot less intimidating with someone next to you.
If it pans out, I'll share how we did it here.