Turning Music Into Reading Success | Exponential Impact in Colorado
Jon-Michael Horst
Jun 10, 2026
AI Assisted
There are a lot of founders chasing trends. Jeremy Spartz built something from experience.
Before launching Lyrics2Learn, Jeremy spent 15 years in the classroom as an elementary teacher, tutor, and coach. Day after day, he saw the same challenge many educators and parents still face today: helping kids truly engage with reading.
So instead of waiting for someone else to solve the problem, he started building a better way.
Today, Lyrics2Learn is helping students across the country improve fluency, comprehension, and confidence through a unique reading program that fuses music with research-based literacy instruction. Using jazz, blues, hip hop, and rock, the platform transforms reading practice into something kids actually enjoy. The result is a K–6 reading experience that feels less like a chore and more like participation.
At its core, Lyrics2Learn combines rhythm, rhyme, repetition, and guided reading strategies to help students retain information and strengthen literacy skills.
Jeremy describes the company simply:
“We offer parents and schools a K-6th grade reading program fusing jazz, blues, hip hop and rock with research-based literacy instruction.”
That blend of creativity and educational rigor is what makes the platform stand out.
The company’s roots are deeply practical. Jeremy originally built the program as a reading center his students could complete independently while he worked with small groups during reading rotations. Over time, the idea evolved into a scalable technology platform with hundreds of leveled reading activities and integrated fluency and comprehension tools.
What started inside one classroom is now serving classrooms, schools, districts, homeschool families, and tutoring clients around the world.
Jeremy joined the Exponential Impact Scale Cohort during a pivotal moment for the company. At the time, he was launching a new tutoring branch of Lyrics2Learn designed specifically to help struggling readers outside the traditional classroom environment.
That decision proved to be a major turning point.
“In three years, the tutoring branch has gone from concept to what looks like will be $800K annual recurring revenue in 2026,” Jeremy shared.
At the same time, the school-focused side of the business successfully raised approximately $800,000 through a combination of dilutive and non-dilutive funding, including winning a highly competitive SBIR grant.
Notably, the tutoring branch was bootstrapped from the ground up.
That kind of disciplined growth says a lot about Jeremy’s approach as a founder. While many startups focus heavily on hype, Lyrics2Learn has stayed focused on delivering measurable outcomes for students, teachers, and parents.
Research surrounding the platform has shown strong potential in improving reading engagement and fluency through music-supported repeated reading strategies. The platform has also served millions of lessons and built a growing reputation among educators looking for effective and engaging literacy tools.
But beyond the numbers, Jeremy’s story reflects something foundational in Colorado’s startup ecosystem: founders building solutions from lived experience.
He didn’t create Lyrics2Learn because it sounded like a good pitch deck idea. He created it because he spent years watching students struggle and believed there had to be a better approach.
That kind of founder-market fit matters.
It also explains why his advice to other entrepreneurs is refreshingly grounded:
“Understating and overdelivering is going to serve you better than overstating and underdelivering.”
Simple. Honest. Proven.
At Exponential Impact, we believe Colorado’s strongest founders are often the ones closest to the problem they are solving. Jeremy Spartz is a great example of that mindset in action — building with purpose, scaling with discipline, and creating meaningful impact along the way.
As Lyrics2Learn continues to grow, it is also helping shape the future of educational technology by proving that literacy instruction can be rigorous, research-based, and genuinely engaging for students.
And that is the kind of innovation worth paying attention to.
