Circle of Live ‘In Bloom’: building an educational platform into a succesful line of business

Circle Of Live, the live electronic performance and improvisation project led by Sebastian Mullaert and Niko Seizov, had been carrying an idea for years before it became ‘In Bloom’: a mentorship programme teaching Sebastian’s creative approach, first tested in short form at festivals like Mutek and ADE. When touring stopped at the start of the pandemic, they finally had the time to build it properly, and approached me to lead that build from the ground up.

My role covered the full scope of the project: creative strategy, operations, digital marketing, partnerships, and community, working directly alongside Sebastian and Niko rather than executing a brief handed down to me. Over four years, this grew from a single mentorship course into a six-figure line of business with multiple programme tiers, mentors, and global partners.

The challenge wasn’t just building a course. It was building something that actually reflected Sebastian’s philosophy — that creativity isn’t a rare talent but something innate, accessible to anyone through improvisation and flow — while also making it commercially sustainable. Sebastian and Niko were clear from the start: they wanted growth, but not at the cost of these foundational values.

Those two goals didn’t always pull in opposite directions so much as they required careful navigation. Staying true to the project’s values became running every session live, once a week, capped at 25 participants to keep it genuinely communal. That decision protected the creative integrity of the project, but it also meant we couldn’t sell more seats to grow revenue. Every choice from there (pricing, partnerships, new programme tiers) had to find sustainable growth without compromising what we’d set out to build.

Early on, the biggest unknowns were technical and marketing. We knew how to market music, but marketing a music online course was entirely different and I had to build the playbook from scratch.

Circle Of Live gave a space to experiment, and we received initial training from WFMA agency on paid marketing and reporting. At first we saw a steep increase in ROI and sold out the first few cohorts; eventually we found it harder and harder to fill up the seats.

With a hard cap on seats, scaling revenue meant testing different growth levers. We tried a Patreon-style subscription model and learned directly from how students responded: real community doesn’t live behind a recurring paywall. That insight shaped everything after it.

From the technical perspective, sessions had to be live, which meant Sebastian Mullaert, and later other mentors, connected their own performance equipment into a remote streaming setup. We worked through recurring audio synchronisation issues, connection drops mid-session, and inconsistent input quality across different mentors’ home setups — all with no existing model to follow and a remote team working through a pandemic. Getting a reliable, repeatable setup took sustained trial and error.

Pricing was the most persistent tension. We were charging a fraction of what comparable courses charged elsewhere in the industry. At ‘In Bloom’ our conviction that the course remain accessible, to uphold the belief that creativity is for everyone, meant that each new cycle raised the same question internally: raise prices toward market rate, or hold the line. For several years, we held it, until an adjustment due to increased costs was necessary.

The turning point wasn’t a single moment so much as a repeated realisation: every time we faced a choice between faster commercial growth and maintaining our foundational values, the programme’s actual strength came from not compromising. Sebastian, Niko, and I were aligned on this from day one. The tight group size built the community that made the Discord thrive. The scholarship programme opened doors to students who couldn’t have afforded access at any price. Within the constraints we chose, we achieved strong commercial growth, from a niche but dedicated audience.

That clarity shaped how we approached partnerships and which artists we invited to lead their own mentorship tiers. From the start, the plan was to work with mentors who embodied Circle Of Live’s values: artists rooted in improvisation and live performance. Neel, Frank Wiedemann and Erika all embodied the vision of what ‘In Bloom’ could become when built with the right collaborators.

Once that principle was clear, the work became building the systems to support it. I built the full marketing engine from scratch, with support and social ads training from WFMA agency. Developing a digital playbook and using a data-driven approach, we outlined a strategic plan to roll out ‘In Bloom’ in key geographical territories.

The results were a growing campaign through social ads, audience creation and targeting, ad optimisation to increase ROI (by 2,400%) and management of ad campaigns. I set up automated onboarding through Zapier and Thinkific, cutting onboarding time by 25%, so the growing student base didn’t create a growing operational burden.

Shortly after launch, I proposed and personally ran the scholarship programme, which increased participant diversity by 12% and later gave us a concrete, values-aligned story to bring to potential partners. That approach helped secure partnerships with Ableton, Native Instruments, and Resident Advisor, relationships built on alignment rather than transactional sponsorship. In one case, after seeing the programme deliver on a scholarship commitment, Resident Advisor chose to offer more support than originally agreed.

As the programme matured, Sebastian launched a second, more production-focused tier, and eventually a third: a full year of personal mentorship for a smaller group, at a significantly higher commitment. Other mentors joined with their own programmes, and the project expanded into in-person creative retreats in Ibiza and Sweden, and workshops at festivals including Nuits Sonores and XP Music Futures.

Over four years, In Bloom grew into a six-figure line of business for Circle Of Live, reaching over 700 students globally. It built a community of artists that remains active today, with former students supporting each other’s releases and live shows.

Beyond Sebastian Mullaert’s core mentorship programme, the project expanded to include mentorships led by Neel (Spazio Disponibile), Frank Wiedemann (Innervisions), Erika (Interdimensional Transmissions), and Alma Ernst (Little Big), each bringing their own approach to improvisation, production, playing live, and bookings. Partnerships with Ableton, Native Instruments, and Resident Advisor reinforced the programme’s position within the global electronic music community.

One relationship from the programme speaks to the impact beyond the numbers. A jazz singer from Georgia joined on scholarship in one of the earliest cohorts, received a free Ableton licence through our partnership, and began producing her own music. She stayed with the programme through its later tiers, and a track she developed in mentorship became the foundation for a full collaborative album with Sebastian, released years later after a long-distance creative partnership that eventually brought her to his studio in Sweden.

‘In Bloom’ was managed under Starling Works, the agency I co-founded, and my day-to-day involvement in the project came to a close when I stepped away from the agency.