Notey

We are what Guitar Hero should have been! 

90% of people who start learning the guitar don’t last more than a year. To solve this, team Notey built a mobile music education game, powered by our proprietary ML audio engine, that users play using any instrument. And not only that, we can customize and integrate any musical content into our game, totally personalized to you! We are what Guitar Hero should have been.

We are raising to expedite our growth, capitalize on the hockey stick we have been seeing, and 4x our revenue from year 2024. In 2024, Notey has seen extraordinary growth, with key performance indicators reflecting increasing consumer and institutional adoption:

• 11,000+ consumer users actively engaging with the platform
• 36+ schools integrating Notey into their music programs
• 44% month-over-month (MoM) revenue growth
• 88% MoM user growth
• 63% recent free-trial-to-subscription conversion rate (41% average)
• 15,000 levels per month played by users on average, with peaks reaching 50,000

Recent Performance Highlights

Notey’s rapid momentum has continued into early 2025, with strong performance in recent months:

• January + February 2025: +106% installs, +243% revenue, +127% subscriptions
• December 2024: +258% installs, +68% revenue, +43% app store impressions

TESTIMONIAL: "Notey has been a game-changer for our family! My daughter struggled to stay motivated with traditional music lessons, but since using Notey, she’s practicing every day—without us even asking! The interactive approach keeps her engaged, and we’ve seen real progress in her playing. We love how easy it is to track her improvement, and most importantly, she’s having FUN!"

– A Happy Notey Parent

Our goal is to reinvent music learning globally!

Our story starts with two friends, Dr. Mak Grgic and Adithya Bellathur, who studied at USC in Los Angeles. Mak is now a 3-time Grammy nominee, a university research professor and has worked with the likes of Trent Reznor, while Adithya, a former computer science major, has worked as an AI and robotics engineer at Bloomberg, Amazon and a handful of startups.

We aim to be present in every household worldwide where music learning has a presence!

The two friends, who themselves enjoy video games and had vast experience in music learning and teaching, came together to attempt to answer the global issue of music retention.

We saw no solution to this problem!

This retention drop is a gigantic problem, and the options available were either online platforms in a masterclass format or video games that provided no educational content. So, the two co-founders embarked on merging both gaming and music education into a mobile music education game that students play using their real instrument or voice. This game, after many initial iterations and prototypes, testing, and surveying, became known as Notey's World.

We built an audio engine from the ground up!

Notey's World is a mobile music education game that users can play with any real instrument or their voice. It is fun, less expensive than a regular music lesson, and plays off the elements of extrinsic rewards that are vital to a sense of accomplishment for any young learner. All of this is possible because we built four pieces of proprietary tech (patent pending). Our tech is instrument agnostic, and we have been used by guitar, piano and string students – even singers!

Duolingo meets Guitar Hero meets Roblox!

These pieces of technology allow us to translate any instrument (without any plug-ins) into game controllers and turn any type of musical content, curriculum, or methodology into levels in our game. In a sense, we are a merger of Duolingo (fun learning), Roblox (customization), and Guitar Hero (fun gaming with music).

Want to hear why this game is the next big thing? Here are a couple of reasons:

1. If you are a parent, you will be the cool parent giving your child a video game that not only they enjoy, but you, too, are happy to allow them to play because it has educational value.
2. If you are a music teacher, you will be the exciting, forward-thinking mentor using your own music exercises via a game that students get pumped to play!

Milestones!

Thanks to these qualities, team Notey has been doing very well:

• We got accepted into the Techstars Accelerator program in Fall ‘23.
• We launched our first open beta in October '23 (following a closed alpha and a closed beta).
• We received the Innovision Award in Educational Technology in November '23.
• We started generating first revenue and deployed our first school-based licenses in January '24.
• We had a huge app revamp in April '24.
• We amassed 9000 consumer users and 35 institutional partners, with $23k MRR in the last 6 months––all of this since January '24.

How do we get our customers?

We have been highly competitive in customer acquisition in our sector:

• We are typically able to get our customer at a rate of $2.93 per install and $8.97 per acquisition. Our paying customers spend on average $35 in our app.
• We also work with a variety of schools, where we issue licenses. These licenses average 100 students per license and typically last six months.

We keep our learners & players engaged!

Our subscribers love us! Can you believe that our subscribers stick around far better than the industry average? Our subscriber retention is:

• Day 1: 88%
• Day 7: 84%
• Day 14: 84%
• Day 30: 74%
• Day 60: 72%
• Day 90: 67%

And in schools where we are licensed, we are at +95% throughout the first few months of use.

Here's What People Are Saying:

"Notey provides my students with a fun and interactive way to practice. From scales to concert repertoire Notey keeps my students engaged and allows me to track their progress and helps my students become more confident on stage." – Benjamin Broughton, Music Educator

"Finally an intelligent guitar app! This is what I was wishing for when Guitar Hero was all the rage. No one learns to play the guitar on a plastic, guitar-shaped controller. This app uses a real guitar and what a motivator! This makes practicing and learning fun! It is a “must have” for beginning guitar students!" – Bill Swick, Award Winning Educator

"We are excited about our partnership with Notey to continue innovating the way guitar is taught to youth in our community. School retention rates are low in the majority of schools we serve and having this as a way to introduce music through a gaming platform will help our programs attract students and retain them throughout their time in the school. Notey is meeting students where they are at and that is a major key when it comes to education. With Notey's customizable experience, I have no doubt that we can reach students through music and social emotional learning to make a positive impact in our world." – Jahzeel Montes, Internal Creations

"I’m using this app to insert some different material and bring some variety to my curriculum. My students have taken a liking to the way that the scoring system works and have challenged themselves to not miss any notes. This is a great supplement to my curriculum and once I add more custom tunes, I can see this being a primary course for my kids." – Martin Ly, Music Educator

And here are a variety of AppStore reviews:

“VERY kid-friendly, but also good for adults like me”

“Revitalized my interest in playing guitar and has shown me a new way to learn”

“This game has been incredibly motivating and fun for my students and they've learned more songs in one class than they would've have the "old-fashioned" way”.

We have been growing, and we want to grow faster!

We’ve grown revenue at a pace of 44% month over month starting in January 2024 and have seen a 500% increase in downloads since March 2024. The progress doesn't stop here!

**These figures are future projections and cannot be guaranteed.

Long-term growth:

Our long-term growth consists of expansions in the following ways:

• Offering games catered to a variety of instruments.
• Expanding our presence in schools via strategic partnerships.
• Moving from the US to other English-speaking territories and finally to the worldwide, non-English-speaking market.

Next steps are:

• Development of a full self-service tool, where users (parents, music teachers, or kids) can upload their musical exercises directly through our site to create their own worlds instantaneously.
• Chromebook and Web release.
• Personalized AI Content Generation, where we serve users with custom levels to target exactly what they are having difficulty with.

Our team:

Notey Inc's Grammy-nominated, UX/UI award-winning team comprises professional touring musicians, music professors (universities in Europe and US), developers, and friends with experience in music teaching (several thousand students), the professional music field (millions of streams), gaming (Meta VR, Mojang, Take-Two), and AI (DeepMind, Bloomberg). We are incredibly lucky to have worked with advisors from leading institutions in the startup ecosystem within our industry verticals (Sequoia, USC, NetApp, Talking Tom and more).

INVEST & JOIN US at the forefront of music education and gaming!

We are thrilled to be backed by institutional investors such as Techstars, Silicon Gardens VC, Robinson Ventures, and even the CEO of Cordoba Guitars, and we are excited to extend the invitation to our community. Join us as we pave new music learning and gaming frontiers! ♥️

Want to know more? See our full pitch deck via the link here or check out our most recent pitch video. Have an instrument and an iOS device? Try out Notey's World for yourself by following the link here.