Figures on this page are self-reported by My Music Workshop founder Elias Berlinger in an August 2026 interview, or drawn from My Music Workshop's own published site and Recurly's public case study, as noted throughout.
01 — The challenge
A Decade of In-Person Lessons, Gone in a Few Months
Elias and Lianna Berlinger founded My Music Workshop in San Diego in 2009, building an in-person and after-school music program that, by 2018, was successful enough to start franchising into new territories. Then came 2020.
"We had focused everything in our business on the in-person lessons," Elias says. "We had done that for 10-plus years at the time." When the pandemic shut down classrooms, he and Lianna assumed, like most business owners, that it would pass quickly. It didn't. "Before we knew it, we were two, three, four months in, thinking, we don't know how we're going to come out of this. We had two choices: either do something different, or stop doing this altogether."
They chose different. With no budget for developers, Elias turned to the fastest, cheapest tool he could build on himself: Wix. "We didn't have the budget, at a time when things had collapsed and crumbled for us, to bring in developers," he says. "We could build our own site, we could put our own videos on it, and they already had a subscription system built into the package."
It worked. My Music Workshop's video lessons and subscription model found an audience fast — by 2022 the company was telling prospective customers that thousands of families in more than 50 countries were using the program. But Elias already knew Wix was a ceiling, not a foundation. "We knew we were leaving something on the table," he says. "We always thought to ourselves, we're going to do another version — let's grow this first and prove the concept. But what we had always envisioned was doing something far more interactive — we wanted to build a virtual world of music for kids."
02 — The vision
"A World of Music," Not Just a Video Library
Elias's ambition for the next version of My Music Workshop wasn't a bigger course catalog — it was an entirely different kind of learning experience, built around a philosophy he traces back to how kids actually pick up language. Fluency, he points out, doesn't come from studying grammar first; it comes from immersion, hearing and using a language constantly until it becomes second nature. He wanted the same thing for music: not a library of lessons to work through, but a world kids could live inside — with avatars, a virtual instrument store, customizable music rooms, rewards, and games layered around the core curriculum.
None of that was buildable on their current platform. By late 2022 and into early 2023, with the business sustaining itself for roughly a year and a half, he decided the concept was proven enough to reinvest in a custom build.
"The platform we were using didn't have all the capabilities that we were looking for. The vision lived with us long enough that it wanted to burst out."
— Elias Berlinger, Founder & CEO, My Music Workshop
03 — Finding a partner
Why Elias Chose a Developer He Could Talk To Directly
Elias describes himself as "careful and methodical and calculated and slow" about big decisions, and choosing a development partner was no exception. He researched broadly, including a firm based overseas, before narrowing the field to two finalists — Virgo Development and one other company.
"What I really enjoyed about our conversation was that Dan understood what we wanted to do. He really got it. He saw it both from our perspective and from what you guys had done before, so he was able to marry the two. Whereas a lot of companies, especially larger ones, really wanted to fold what we were doing into an idea they already had."
— Elias Berlinger, Founder & CEO, My Music Workshop
The deciding factor wasn't just strategic fit — it was structure. As an idea-driven founder, Elias wanted direct access to the person building his platform, not a chain of account managers between him and the code. "I just needed to connect with a person," he says. "I'm very idea-driven — I have an idea, I can send it over to the developer, who's Adam now, and Adam can tell me: yes, that's doable; yes, we can add that." That direct line to Senior Engineer Adam Taylor became the working relationship that carried the entire project.
04 — Building the platform
Turning Napkin Sketches Into Music Studio Junior
Development kicked off in May 2023. Virgo's job was to take Elias's stream of ideas — sketched out visually and described feature by feature — and turn them into a working, self-service platform he and his team could run without calling an engineer for every change.
Elias's go-to example is Music Studio Junior, a simplified music-production tool built into the platform where kids assemble pre-recorded drum, bass, guitar, and piano tracks and hear how swapping any one part changes the whole song. "We came to Adam with a vision and an idea for this," he says. "I'll describe the functionality, and here's what it'll look like. And every time I said there seemed to be a challenge, he would say, no, no, we can figure that out."
That back-and-forth — idea, sketch, build, refine — repeated across the platform: onboarding, parent dashboards, cancellation flows, the rewards system. "He was a co-thinker with us throughout," Elias says of Adam. "We came with the ideas for these things, but Adam was the puzzle builder who helped us see how it all worked inside the larger system and flow." The result, live today, includes musical avatars kids unlock and customize, a virtual instrument store where "Rockstar Coins" earned from lessons and practice buy new gear, personalizable music rooms, and games and activities built around composition and music creation — plus the core lesson library across piano, drums, ukulele, and singing, each paired with "Jam Along" practice tracks at multiple tempos.
05 — The migration
Moving a Live Subscriber Base Without Losing Anyone
Alongside the platform rebuild, Virgo integrated Recurly for subscription billing — a bigger undertaking than it sounds, because My Music Workshop already had a paying subscriber base on another platform, a separate subscription-management tool layered on top of their previous site, that needed to move over intact, at the same pricing, without disruption.
"That was overwhelming for me to think through, because we had built a decent subscriber base, and of course we wanted continuity... it was an entirely different subscription management system."
— Elias Berlinger, Founder & CEO, My Music Workshop
Recurly's migration team handled the data side, but Elias credits Adam with making the technical handoff work. "Adam was paramount to that, because he was able to speak the technical language that Recurly needed... I'd be on a call with Recurly, having no idea what they were talking about. But Adam was right there — he understood, and he'd take care of sending them what they needed, no problem." Virgo has since become one of Recurly's Premier Integration Partners, working through the same kind of migration with several other subscription-based clients.
06 — The results
What Changed After Launch
Asked directly what moved the needle on growth, Elias is candid that the new platform didn't change how My Music Workshop finds new customers — that's still marketing, the same as any subscription business. What it changed was what happened after someone signed up.
"Where the new build really helped us was in engaging our customers and keeping them... it drastically decreased our churn and increased our customer retention. It brought our churn rate down by at least 30 to 40% — right out of the gate."
— Elias Berlinger, Founder & CEO, My Music Workshop
My Music Workshop offers a 7-day free trial, and Elias watches trial-to-paid conversion closely. "Our conversion rate from trial to paid customer blows away the industry," he says. "If you're doing 40%, you're doing pretty well. We've been over 70%, consistently, for years." He attributes that directly to product quality: giving families something that earns an immediate "wow" in the trial window, rather than something they have to be sold on.
The public numbers tell a consistent story of growth since launch. My Music Workshop's own site now reports more than 15,000 students served, over 1,000 lessons and activities, and more than 18 million YouTube views. Recurly's own published case study on the migration cites subscribers across more than 60 countries and a 279% increase in recovered revenue within 30 days of optimizing payment-recovery (dunning) settings — a result specific to Recurly's billing tools rather than the platform rebuild itself, but part of the same subscription-health picture Elias has been building since the migration.
Just as important to Elias: the operational side. The platform was built so he and his team can create and manage content themselves, without routine engineering requests for day-to-day changes — freeing Virgo's role to focus on the harder, higher-leverage work of turning his next idea into a real feature.
07 — Why it matters
What a Good Product Actually Buys You
For Elias, the engagement numbers are downstream of something simpler: giving families a product that earns their trust immediately. "If we are over-delivering for people, then we're doing a great thing," he says. "If they think this seems cool, and then they come in and find it's amazing — that's the experience I want them to have." One parent captured that reaction in a comment Elias still keeps close: their family called it the best decision they'd made after struggling to find an affordable, engaging music program for their kids — and said their kids were now practicing and creating their own music inside the app.
He's candid, too, about the tradeoff behind the scale. Fifteen years in classrooms taught him what kids respond to, and he misses direct contact with the families he now reaches at global scale. He's built that instinct into how he teaches on camera instead — picturing a specific kid's face lighting up with a new idea, the same way it did in a San Diego classroom, just through a screen instead of across a room.
08 — Working with Virgo
Elias's Assessment, In His Own Words
"It's been great. I've said many times since we started working with Virgo that I'm so glad I made that decision... Everything has been communicative, easy to understand, honest — a really good, trustworthy working relationship. I have no plans to do anything but work with Virgo for our development work."
— Elias Berlinger, Founder & CEO, My Music Workshop
Asked for an honest critique, not just praise, Elias didn't dodge the question: he'd like to see Virgo offer more in-house digital marketing alongside development, so a client building a platform doesn't have to go find a separate marketing team once the build is done. It's feedback the team has taken to heart as VirgoDev's own service pillars have grown.
09 — What's next
The List Never Gets Shorter
Elias compares building My Music Workshop to learning his own primary instrument, drums, twenty-five years in: the more you build, the more you realize is left to build. Guitar lessons are next on the roadmap — the most-requested addition — alongside a running notebook of activity ideas and plans to make cancellation flows and customer communication more personalized. The mission underneath all of it hasn't moved since 2020: meet kids and families wherever they're consuming content, and use it to keep music — the thing that shaped his own childhood — a real part of theirs.
10 — Common questions
Quick Answers
What did Virgo Development build for My Music Workshop?
A custom, gamified music learning platform — with avatars, a virtual instrument store, personalizable music rooms, and Recurly-powered subscription billing — replacing the client's original self-built Wix site.
Why did My Music Workshop move off Wix?
Wix couldn't support the interactive experience founder Elias Berlinger envisioned, including avatars, a virtual instrument store, and gamified practice, so Virgo Development began building a custom platform in May 2023.
What results has My Music Workshop seen since launch?
Trial-to-paid conversion consistently over 70% and a 30–40% reduction in churn right out of the gate, according to founder Elias Berlinger.
Did Virgo Development handle the Recurly billing migration?
Yes — Virgo integrated Recurly for subscription billing and migrated My Music Workshop's existing subscriber base over intact, at the same pricing, and has since become one of Recurly's Premier Integration Partners.
How many students does My Music Workshop serve today?
More than 15,000 students served, with over 1,000 lessons and activities and more than 18 million YouTube views, per My Music Workshop's own site.
Best music app ever. My kids are loving this app this year. Best decision — I've had such a hard time finding an affordable piano and music lesson app or teacher. This is great. Here they are practicing and creating their own music.
Curious what all of this looks like in practice? Explore My Music Workshop and try it for yourself.
Ready to turn your own idea into a platform your customers actually stick with? Book a Discovery Call with me and the team.
Jamie Lords ↗ LinkedIn is CEO of Virgo Development and teaches Business and Marketing at Southern New Hampshire University. This is the first in an ongoing case study series documenting real Virgo Development client partnerships. Quotes are drawn from a recorded interview with My Music Workshop founder Elias Berlinger conducted in August 2026, lightly edited for clarity and length. Public metrics are sourced from mymusicworkshop.com and Recurly's published My Music Workshop case study.