It's been over four years since we started Dancesportlife and over one year since we’ve been working on our online education platform, Dancesportlife Academy. Hard work and dedication have paid off as we now have over 1,200 students on Dancesportlife Academy and over 200,000 passionate dancers following our social media accounts from all around the world.
I feel that in these challenging times, it is now more important than ever to share with you our plan to develop this project so it may help you even more.
In this article, I’ll explain our motivations behind creating this project, our vision, and what we would love to accomplish in the future. Also, I would greatly appreciate you sending me your feedback on our project at [email protected].
The Beginning of Dancesportlife
After six years of being a ballroom dancer and then three of leading a marketing agency, I realized that the lack of available solutions for dancers’ issues is absolutely bonkers.
Ballroom dancing is a very complex sport. It demands a lot of time spent practicing, a lot of lessons with great teachers, and hours upon hours of travel. It requires an intense, artistic, hard-working personality, and it was frustrating to see that there weren’t many tools in place to make dancers’ lives just a bit easier.
Hence, I decided to assemble a team of enthusiastic people to start building the Dancesportlife community and creating content for all of you passionate dancers. Our guiding principle was, and still is, simple:
"To promote and support great dancers, teachers, and the entire dancesport community, independent of country, federation, or affiliation."
Our biggest wish is to make the world dance—and for those who are already dancing, to make your life that much easier.
What I Thought Could Be Improved
- Online education and community - The only way to develop as a dancer is to travel to great teachers and camps.
- Finding a partner - This isn’t that easy to do, and the presently available solutions are not always fruitful. People still use Instagram, crowded Facebook groups, or their teachers (if you’re lucky to have a well-connected teacher) to find themselves a partner.
- Finding a great studio - How do you go about finding a good studio for yourself if you're just starting out? How do you go about bringing people into your studio as an owner/teacher if you're not famous?
- Buying and selling - I believe even I have $3,000 worth of “dancing stuff” sitting in my closet that I will never get around to selling. And that’s probably not even close to what other dancers might have. A good solution is needed here, too.
Online Education: How Is It Useful?
Ballroom dancers mainly have five means for learning dancing:
- One-on-one private lessons
- Group lessons
- Camps and congresses
- Couple practice
- Other resources (such as YouTube, books, etc.)
The main problem is that there is a very limited pool of great dance teachers in comparison to the number of students. And this situation forces dancers to go long distances and spend tons of money on travel and accommodation.
Furthermore, teachers are only earning money when they're working. This means that if they have a family emergency, physical injury, or simply want to retire, their cash flow stops.
Therefore, our plan is to first create a very comprehensive library of videos. We’re already doing this by working with camps and teachers worldwide and filming content on a continual basis.
Our next step is to focus on providing a complementary solution for private lessons—a platform for couples and teachers to send and receive feedback.
It’s in these hard times of a global pandemic when we can see the importance of online education. Many teachers and dancers are currently in their homes, not teaching or dancing. It is for this reason that we are doing our best to come up with content and a solution for online private lessons more quickly!
Our Next Plan
As I said earlier, education is not the only aspect of a dancer’s life. So we plan to address other problems, such as helping you to find a partner or a studio and providing a platform to facilitate the buying and selling of dance costumes and accessories. We are very focused on creating enough revenue to pay dance teachers and sustain ourselves. But our goal is to invest everything else in:
- Research and development
- Creating better content
- Providing additional benefits for our membership plan
- Improving our platform
So, every single person who has bought something from us has directly
supported our plan, and for that, we THANK YOU!
We're also currently raising a seed round of investment from a group of investors from around the world. This will surely also help to increase the rate of our current growth and support for this plan.
The Power of Dancing
Science has proven that dancing is one of the best activities for the holistic development of a person. By “holistic,” I mean that it develops you physically, mentally, emotionally, socially, and spiritually.
We believe that all types of dancing are beneficial, so I don't exclude styles other than ballroom dancing. Actually, very few people are aware of the incredible benefits of dancing. Here are just some of them:
- It allows people to express themselves in a way that words will never allow. All artists are, in a sense, solving a problem that the world may not even realize exists.
- Dancing improves brain health, as this study shows. Furthermore, it aids in the discovery of your body overall, which is the gateway to the discovery of your mind, emotions, and spiritual life.
- It helps your mental health and reduces pain, as you can see here.
- It allows for the development of self-control and emotional intelligence.
Now, imagine the impact that it could have if all seven billion of us danced. We all would be more socially and emotionally intelligent. We would be better in tune with our bodies in addition to being more creative and innovative. As I see it, dancing is a meta-solution that helps us to improve all aspects of our lives.
The Master Plan
Ballroom dancers make up just under 5% of the total amount of dancers in the world. From hip-hop to ballet, there are literally hundreds of styles of dance.
Our master plan is to approach all those other styles of dance and do the same things that we're doing for ballroom dancing. Once we create solid solutions for online education, partners, studios, and buying and selling, it's our goal to build passionate teams in other styles to match what we’ve built for ballroom dancers.
This is a five-to-seven-year plan and we're up for it! Along the way, many things need to happen for this to work out, but we believe the impact could be huge, so why not go all the way?
We are super grateful for all of you who are with us on this journey! We hope you'll understand that mistakes will be made along the way, but overall, we will focus on delivering something great.
Let me know if you’ve found this article useful because I am thinking about doing these project updates for you on a regular basis.
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