If you can see HER you can be HER - Melodies for Math

In March 2020, I launched Melodies for Math as a YouTube channel and uploaded one song explaining a calculus concept (along with accompanying visuals) each week. I also began establishing our presence on Instagram and started reaching out to our followers and asking what they needed help with so I could write custom songs for them. This initiative soon grew to help more than 17 students directly, but still, the impact wasn’t quite there.

I knew we needed a team to scale. After a lot of trial and error, in July 2020, I assembled a team of high school students across the United States and Canada (although most were from my hometown and our target audience is still USA students). We also gained a mentor, Haley Hoffman Smith (a Forbes influential speaker), who helped us with our YouTube SEO and growth strategy. We began uploading much better-quality songs to YouTube that started gaining even more traction, but we still could barely pass 500 subscribers.

In April of 2021, I read the Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart, which criticized how math was currently taught and asserted that math in itself was creative and should be taught that way. That resonated with me a lot, as someone who saw math as a creative energy, and I was determined to build an audience that could learn math through our songs and other methods that I was still formulating.

Haley encouraged us to try posting on TikTok to build that audience, which I started in June 2021. Through consistent posting and providing valuable content (I repurposed our YouTube videos and put my own spin on trends to fit my niche), I grew our TikTok to 66K followers to date and 2.26K subscribers on YouTube. Now that we had a huge following, I decided to launch an online community where I can help students one on one with a “creative” teaching style. Because of TikTok, our online community also grew to 950+ members.

Currently, we are monetizing through sponsorships as well as our digital offer- which we are in the process of prototyping. We have currently been sponsored by MapleSoft and Notion.