QuarterNote · Public beta
How we built a vertical marketplace where students learn from verified touring and session musicians — AI natural-language teacher matching, Stripe Connect split payments, an in-app lesson room with an AI notetaker, and a full school tenancy layer with master scheduling and payroll. Microsoft shut TakeLessons down in late 2024 and left the lane open; QuarterNote takes it with the studio toolkit and the AI the incumbents don't have.
The two incumbents in music-lesson software — MyMusicStaff and Opus1 — are studio-management SaaS, not marketplaces. They help a teacher run admin; they do not bring that teacher a single student. Teachers consistently name marketing as their weakest skill and admin as their biggest time sink, and the one product that solved the first problem was shut down by its owner.
TakeLessons — the dominant music-lesson marketplace, owned by Microsoft — closed in late 2024, stranding thousands of teachers and students. The demand did not go anywhere. The supply is running on spreadsheets, DMs, and manual bank transfers.
A flat subscription pays the vendor whether or not the teacher grows. Bolting lead generation onto that model breaks it — which is exactly why the incumbents haven't. We took the harder structure: a percentage only when we supplied the demand.
Anyone can list themselves as a music teacher. The hard part is proving the person on the other end of the call actually toured, actually recorded, actually played on something you've heard. Verification is the product, not a badge.
Students pay per lesson, teachers pay for tools, schools pay for tenancy — and any of them can arrive through us or bring their own roster. The fee rule has to be decided per lesson, not per account, or the whole model collapses into special cases.
Discovery, booking, money, the lesson itself, and everything after it — in one product, with AI doing the parts a teacher would otherwise do at 11pm.
A student describes what they want in plain language — "I want to get better at funk bass and I've played for two years" — and the matcher returns teachers. It is constrained to return only IDs from the live teacher list, so it can recommend but never invent a person who doesn't exist.
The student pays the full price on the platform account; our cut is retained as an application fee and the remainder transfers straight to the teacher's connected account. Refunds reverse the transfer and the fee together. The webhook — never the client redirect — is the source of truth.
Lessons run in an in-app Daily room with live transcription. When the teacher ends the lesson, the transcript flows into the same recap pipeline that handles quick typed notes, and the student gets a structured recap and a practice plan without the teacher writing one.
A school owns an organization, teachers join it while keeping their own profile, and students enroll. The school gets a master schedule across every teacher, its own students and lessons, read-only recaps, earnings, and a payroll engine with five compensation rule types — billed as a Stripe subscription entirely separate from the Connect payout flow.
The money model is one sentence: a monthly fee for the tools, a percentage only when we bring the student. That reads like pricing copy, but it is really an architecture decision. At booking time a single function resolves attribution and stamps the lesson as marketplace, school, or teacher_own. Anything that isn't marketplace is fee-exempt, through exactly the same mechanism as the manual exemption flag. One teacher can pay a subscription for their own students and a percentage on the ones we sent, in the same week, with no special-case billing code anywhere.
Teacher cancels, or student cancels 24h+ ahead, full refund. Student cancels inside 24h: no refund, but a teacher-specific makeup credit with a 90-day life, redeemable as a free booking with no Stripe involved. The Stripe refund always runs before the lesson flips to cancelled — money never gets stranded in a cancelled record — and cancelling reopens the slot.
Teacher profiles built around real touring and session credits — the pedigree is the listing, not a tagline.
Describe the player you want; the matcher returns real teachers from the live roster, never an invented one.
Availability, open-slot booking, recurring weekly lessons that reserve four instances ahead, cancellations and makeup credits.
Recaps and a notetaker, lesson prep that picks up where you left off, a student practice coach, and progress insights.
In-app threads per teacher–student pair, in-app notifications, plus email and SMS reminders on an hourly cron.
Org tenancy, master schedule, co-admins, and five teacher-compensation rule types computed from lessons actually taught.
Featured slots are designed as a labeled box only. Paid placement never silently re-ranks organic or AI results — the trust wedge is the whole product.
Every recap-derived AI surface is instructed never to claim a student improved at something the recaps don't show. A false compliment from a practice coach is worse than silence.
Teacher profiles only emit AggregateRating schema when real reviews actually render on the page. Schema that claims what a visitor can't see gets demoted — and quoted wrongly by answer engines.
Browse QuarterNote's verified pros at quarternote.ai — or tell us about a two-sided market of your own that needs payments, scheduling, and AI in one product.