Jo Fellows - Arts Instruct Membership

This week on The Membership Podcast, Claire chats with Jo Fellows about creating an online art membership for young people and building a business from a small village in rural France.

After leaving her career as a secondary school art teacher in the UK and moving to France, Jo found herself missing teaching and the creativity that came with it. Rather than returning to the classroom, she built Arts Instruct, a membership designed to help young people develop artistic skills, creativity, resilience and confidence through project-based learning. 

In this episode, we discuss:

•  Moving from the UK to France and building an online business abroad 
•  Why Jo missed teaching after leaving the classroom 
•  The journey from digital downloads to creating a membership 
•  Launching a membership with a simple lead magnet and Facebook marketing 
•  How the membership has evolved since launching in January 2025 
•  Creating project-based art lessons for children aged 11-14 
•  The balance between teaching curriculum-based skills and encouraging creativity 
•  Why resilience is just as important as artistic ability 
•  Using affordable and recycled materials instead of expensive art supplies 
•  Supporting both home-educated students and children in traditional schooling 
•  Teaching art online to students around the world 
•  The opportunities for scaling memberships into schools and educational organisations 
•  Lessons learned from building a membership as a perfectionist 

Key Takeaways

•  Memberships don't have to be aimed at adults. 
•  You can build a successful membership around your professional expertise. 
•  Creativity often grows when people work with limitations. 
•  It's important to launch before everything feels perfect. 
•  Teaching online can create opportunities far beyond your local area. 
•  Memberships can evolve significantly once real members start using them. 
•  A strong educational background can become a unique selling point rather than a limitation. 

About Jo

Jo Fellows is a former secondary school art teacher who now lives in southwest France. Through Arts Instruct, she helps young people develop artistic skills, confidence, creativity and resilience through engaging project-based learning.

Her membership combines curriculum-aligned art education with the freedom to experiment, explore and create independently, making art accessible and enjoyable for students around the world. 

Member Story Highlight

One of Jo's favourite success stories involves a young student in Texas who didn't have all the materials needed for a project. Rather than giving up, she searched around her home, found alternative materials, adapted the project, and created her own version.

For Jo, this perfectly captured the real purpose of the membership: not simply teaching art techniques, but helping young people become creative problem-solvers who think independently and confidently. 

What You'll Learn

By listening to this episode you'll discover:

•  How to turn teaching expertise into a membership business 
•  Ways to structure educational content for self-paced learning 
•  How Jo combines projects, skills training and personalised feedback 
•  Why creativity and resilience are valuable life skills 
•  How online memberships can create international opportunities 
•  The potential for expanding a membership into schools and educational settings 

Links Mentioned

• Arts Instruct
• Instagram - Arts Instruct Tuition
• Facebook - Arts Instruct Tuition

Connect with Claire

For more membership and recurring income strategies, visit:

• Recurring Income Academy
• Claire Mitchell Coach

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a business owner who has expertise they could turn into a membership.

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:11

Welcome Jo. Would you like to tell us who you are and what your membership is all about?

Speaker 0:17

Yeah, sure. So my name's Jo Fellows. I'm a former secondary art teacher from the UK, and I emigrated to France about three years ago, and that's when I decided that I wanted to create a membership. So my membership is aimed at kids age 11 to 14. So in the UK, that'd be like key stage three level. And it's a project-based membership where I upload, design, create, and upload a monthly art project for kids to work through at their own pace and get creative. So you said you're in France. Whereabouts in France are you? We're in the southwest. So if you know anything about France at all, we're inland from La Rochelle and south of Poitiers. Do you like living there? Absolutely love it. Yeah, it's a great place to live. So we've been, we're just coming up to three years this month, actually. Beautiful weather, great people, great place. The only downside is the admin, that's quite intense. But uh, apart from that, it's a really good place to live. So you've told us a bit about your membership. What's it actually called? So the membership is called Arts Instructs. When did you start your membership and why did you start your membership? So the membership started early this year, January 2025. Although I was in the planning of it probably from April 24, but I had some other ideas of it first. I guess when I moved to France, I was moving away thinking, yay, I'm gonna early retirement. And I quite quickly realised that I miss teaching, I really miss teaching, and I miss interacting with young people and just teaching art. I had to try and find a way of coming up with something that would allow me to do that. Obviously, living in France, it's not so easy to find work, particularly on a visa. So I had to create my own business that would allow me to be able to teach art and continue with the creative business that I started.

Speaker 1 2:02

Were there any difficulties around starting a business in France? I know it's you've got a visa, but did you have anything that you had to work around from that perspective?

Speaker 2:10

Basically, I had to try and create a business that will be viable, financially viable, because living here on a visa, we're not entitled to any help from the state, so you have to prove basically that you can you're self-sufficient. So our business model's quite unique in a way. The property that we own is combined of two houses, so one half we so originally when we bought it with gîtes and we've renovated the whole house. One side is now our house, and the other side is the gîte, but due to the stipulations of the visa, we couldn't just rent the gîte out. So, we're like, what can we do to earn money? So, actually, initially, I started out by designing digital planners for teachers, and I was doing digital downloads on websites like TES and Teachers Pay Teachers, and then I came to the realization I was like, why am I doing all this for other teachers when I could be doing this myself? The way the business then works back to the gîte is basically for part of the year we have students come stay with us. Um, so I do a bit of English teaching, and that's how we can like get around the gîte bit and occasionally holiday makers, and then my actual business consists of the membership, these digital downloads that I started initially, and I also tutor one-to-one as well, teaching art online. I've got a client based around the world at the moment, but also a lot of GCSE and A level students work with me as well, and occasional adults too.

Speaker 1 3:28

Okay, and so how did you get your first members? How did you launch it the first time?

Speaker 3:33

So initially I launched it on Facebook, and I did an advertisement around a launching like an ebook, a lead magnet ebook. So it's like supporting parents to teach art at home. So from the first launch of that, I think I received about 100 subscriptions to the newsletter and kind of took it from there. Yeah, I got quite a good uptake of people interested in the first instance and just started building from there.

Speaker 1 4:02

Are you still using that that lead magnet?

Speaker 4:05

I've not used that, I'm t I'm testing other lead magnets at the moment because I feel like when I started that lead magnet, perhaps the way I was going was slightly different because at the beginning I was interested in doing group lessons for students, but it then evolved into the membership, actually, where I could have this content that was pre-record pre-recorded and it could be accessed easily rather than doing groups, so that's the way it went. And actually, I think I'll come round back to groups afterwards, but just to have the membership in place in the first instance seemed like a better way to do that. Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 1 4:39

Yeah, you launched it in January this year, which is what eight months ago. Is it still the same as when you launched it, or have you changed anything?

Speaker 4:48

I think it's evolved an awful lot. The way I deliver, the way the sort of setup of the website works is very different to how I first started out because I guess I was learning on the go as well.

Speaker 1 5:00

So what's changed then?

Speaker 5:01

What does that actually look like in terms of the way you deliver and then what's changed? I've streamlined the process a lot, and I think I've had to learn to stop being such a perfectionist because if I was, then I literally just every month I would be burning out of planning what I'm doing, recording the lessons. And actually, what's different now is I think at first I was doing the videos, then doing the script over the top. Now I try not to do that, now I talk and work at the same time, just because my confidence has grown, I think, with the kind of the delivery and the tools that I'm using, but also the time it saves as well. It's just not time efficient to do both of those things. And also what's happening now in the membership is because I have there's two parts to it. So there's a projects, and then I've created this other section called Essential Skills. So within a project, you might be, for example, looking at I don't know, colour theory or the colour wheel, and then that can now be linked to a separate lesson, like looking at the colour wheel. So then I can have other lessons that then link back. So it's I'm not repeating the wheel all the time in within the projects. So when someone does something, it may come back and say if you're not if you're not clear of the skill, then go and look at this bit in the essential skills section, and also the layout as well, because the more I add into it, the more complicated it started to get. So I've had to start like with a welcome real welcome page now and directing people. How did they get there? How did they work through the process? What are they doing? So yeah, it's evolved as I've been going along.

Speaker 1 6:29

So would you do anything differently if you were starting again now?

Speaker 6:38

Maybe I don't know, it's hard to say because it's like how prepared can you be? Because knowing what I'm like, I probably could have been too prepared and never got going with it. So probab actually, probably in that respect, no. Maybe just not spent so much time at the beginning like focusing, sweating the small stuff, maybe. And over time I've got like quicker and better at how I'm creating things. I think the hardest thing for me has been to find out where I sit, if that makes sense. So, who are my audience? Who are my people? Who are my tribe? Because I feel part of me is still quite school because I was a teacher. However, maybe that comes across to maybe home education parents and it's not really their thing. But if you actually went and looked at the projects, you would see that actually it's about creativity. And I think my super skill as a teacher is helping students to become creative and to be resilient. So if I have some core values, they are what that would be. So if people get put off that I was a teacher, basically what I'm teaching is resilience and creativity, so it's not a copy and repeat process. I'm actually creating projects where students can see what I've done but go and make their own, and that's my intention that they go and they make their own. I'll give them the tools, I'll tell them how to do it, but I want to see their individual pieces of work, and maybe that's what makes me slightly different than other projects and other arts memberships that you can join. But I think that that for me has been the hardest thing to get across. And so, how are you marketing your membership? So I market um through Facebook mainly. Um, so I am uploading content all the time, also on Instagram as well, every few weeks. Oh, all kinds of things. So I I try to do I do educational post pieces, I do videos, I do information things, hints and tips. If something weird or wacky happens in the day, I'll take a picture of that and put it on there. Blogs as well. I've started writing blogs, then there's my website as well. So yeah, using those avenues at the moment to market.

Speaker 1 8:40

So you've already mentioned a little bit about the fact you've got two sides, two membership, and you've got the project side. What does it look like inside there? What does a student or a member actually get?

Speaker 8:50

So you've got the projects, so you can choose which project you want to do. You don't need to do them in order, and every month there's a new project, so go and choose a project. Then you've got the essential skills, which are linked to the projects, but they've also got their own lessons within there as well. So you can actually do some of those on their own without actually being linked to the projects. And then once a student has finished, they can then upload their work to me. I use a website called Artsonia, and students can send me their finished pieces of work and I can give them some feedback. But within the actual projects themselves, there's like downloads, there's videos, PDFs, resources that they can use. I give a full list of materials. I think one of the big things for me as a creative sort of teacher is helping students to find and like using materials I've at home. So I'm really big on recycling things and secondhand things and repurposing stuff. My little art room is full of like old letters and envelopes, and and I think that again is one of my core values. Art doesn't have to be expensive. So I absolutely love finding things on the Facebook marketplace and in Lidl and just like places where art can be cheap. So I also do a list and I'll also give parents alternatives as well. And I like when students come up with their own alternatives, is amazing. I absolutely love that. I will give a standard of things to get, and then they'll just go, not got that, so I'll use this instead. And I absolutely love that. That makes my day when somebody does that and they think out of the box, and yeah. Um, and another part of the the membership as well is also a monthly feedback lesson if students want to join. They're not obliged to do that, but if they want to have some time with me one-to-one, they can do to talk to any projects, and also they can leave feedback on the member site as well if they need any help, they can leave little notes, messages, and I can respond and give them any feedback and help as they're going along as well. And so, how many members have you got at the moment? So there's about 25 on there at the moment, so that's a range. What kind of people are they? I have had some students who around the age of nine-10 go through some of the projects, however, they would need more support. So it is aimed at that key stage three level, but it's done in a way that parents don't have to be there. So if you're 11 to 14, certainly for the 13 to 14 age bracket, you should be able to just log on, follow all the instructions in, do it yourself with little parent parental input, really. It's been designed that way. So each lesson or each project's generally broken down into about 10-11 videos, and each video is between maybe two to five minutes long, and each one is a sort of natural pause point as well. So you can start a project, start it on the Tuesday, go back on the Thursday, and you'll know exactly where you are and how to continue with it.

Speaker 1 11:29

So you're a teacher, an art teacher. How much of that are you bringing to this membership? Are you actually basing it on the art lessons you would have taught in school with the curriculum and things? How are you working that?

Speaker 11:40

Yeah, generally I do that, and that's just the way I work. So all of my lessons, I guess, are key stage realigned. So by following the lessons that I'm teaching, you are learning the skills that you would be taught in school. But obviously, it's done in a slightly different way, it's done in a more creative project-y type way. There's no assessments, there's no tests or anything like that. Each lesson does come with a quiz, but it's just to test a little bit of what you've learned and remembered. But each lesson will we will look at artists, which you would do in school, and I think that's really important to understand like the wider context of art in the world and not just projects in isolation. So I guess that's what makes it slightly different. Is I'm not creating crafts, I'm looking at art from perhaps like a fine art background. Um, so every lesson will start with a look at an artist that's linked to the project somehow, a little bit of research on the artist, how that artist has influenced the project, how the artist might influence the student as an artist as well. And then they given the instructions of how to go about turning that research into a piece of art and the materials that they need, but also adding that kind of special touch themselves. That's for that to that for me is a real important thing of teaching children how to be creative and not just copying. Um, because anyone can copy, but you're not actually learning to be creative when you copy. I think that's maybe what kind of sets it aside. But I guess if you're homeschooled and you're worried about are you getting the same level of education, then yes, you are because it's based on how a curriculum is taught, but without with none of the restrictions of perhaps what goes on with school.

Speaker 1 13:18

I know there are quite a few different art memberships. So what makes yours different?

Speaker 13:24

I guess what makes it different is it's aimed specifically at 11 to 14 year olds. It's coming from an art and design background that is rooted in research. Teaching styles are perhaps rooted in research as well. So as a teacher, I'm fully qualified, so I've got my PGCE and I've got qualified teacher status. I'm also a member of the National Society of Education for Art and Design. Um, I've got my DBS, so I can work one-to-one with students, and I'm also a member of the tutoring association as well. So I'm coming like from a professional background, so hopefully that would reassure parents that what I'm teaching is credible. But then I guess it's the fine line of like I'm trying to the point I'm trying to get across that I'm not a classroom school teacher anymore, so I am coming with my own fleur. I now don't have the restrictions that come with a school anymore. Maybe that's what is different, so I can teach what I want to teach, and also as well, I guess with when you're teaching in school, it's quite fast-paced, and there's not a lot of time to stop and reassess and redo where these projects there is. They're meant to be long, they're meant to take time, you're meant to explore and do it as your own pace. And I guess that's very different to the school sort of system, and also there's no assessments and no tests. Although I can give people feedback and tell them what's gone if there's any improvements they want to make. Um, it's not going to make or break how well they do that year because it is supposed to be fun and creative at the same time as well. And what do your members love about it? I think that it is different, so that they can do like quite in-depth projects, so it's not crafts, it's art and design and rooted in fine art, that they can stop and start it when they want to, but actually they're able to express themselves, so they're not just making something that I'm telling them to make or showing them to make, they're actually coming up with their own version of what the project is about. And I find that, like when students send me in pictures and I see what they've done, I find that to be like really amazing. You're like, Oh yes, look, I designed that, but they've made it. So that's one of the best bits, I think. That leads me on to my next question. What do you love most about running the membership? The same thing that I loved about teaching, and that's when you get them kind of light bulb moments with people, or people do something. I like there's one little story that I really love. I work with some home ed students actually as well. It's some three sisters who live in Texas. So often I will trial out my projects before they go live, or once they've gone live, I'll try them just to make sure they're working okay. And one of the projects that I designed, I went through with my students, so she's 11, 12, and she didn't have a lot of the materials. And I felt a bit deflated afterwards because I was like, Oh, am I making this too hard? Not by just using general materials, like keeping it to pencils and coloured pencils and pens. So I went away and I started thinking about it. I was like, is this a barrier to people doing this? Because I'm being quite creative here with what I'm expecting. Anyway, a week later, she came online and she had this bag of stuff. She's like, Look what I found, and she'd gone around her house and she'd been thinking about this all week, and she got the materials, but she got her own versions of the materials. And that I was just like, Oh my god, that's amazing because you've just shown like creativity and a resilience there, not to give up and not go, oh, this is too hard, or she's asking for too much. And that cemented in me. I was like, No, I'm gonna, I'm not changing this, I'm keeping this because that's important to me. That's why I do this to push people. It may push people out of the comfort zone a little bit, and and maybe that some parents might not like that, but for me, that's important in art just to push you beyond your boundaries, push your creativity, and that makes you a better artist and more creative.

Speaker 1 17:07

Yeah, so that's brilliant. So, what kind of things had she found around the house that her version?

Speaker 17:13

One of the things I'd asked for was a sheet of acetate, what you use as a photocopier. Obviously, not that many people have a sheet of acetate. So she she was in her sister's bedroom and she found a piece of plastic that had been wrapped, something had been wrapped up in, uh like a gift or something. So she got this piece of plastic. Oh, this is quite thick. We could use this. I'll try and do there's another thing as well that was on there that she used. What is it? Oh, yeah, so she I'd asked for a Sharpie pen. So she'd managed to find some kind of alternative for that as well. And like the colours, she didn't have the same colours as I did. So she's just I'm gonna just use these ones instead. So yeah, I was just like really pleased because the new acetate was maybe pushing it a bit. But yeah, she went away and just that idea. Oh, and then she didn't, and that was it, she didn't have an A3 watercolour paper, so she found a piece of old cardboard and she's like, Oh, we can use this instead. So I was like, Yeah, that's brilliant, that's what I wanted you to do. And but I didn't help her, I didn't prompt her, she just went away and um found her own thing. Yeah, and I think that's what's maybe flexible about it as well, is that there are alternatives and you just make your version with what you've got. So if you don't have pen, what can you use instead? Just use what you have available and see what you can create.

Speaker 1 18:24

You mentioned that those sisters are in Texas and you're in France. Yeah. So whereabouts in the world do you the rest of your members?

Speaker 18:31

Also, I've worked with people from all over the place. So I've worked with a few people in America, a lot of students in the UK, students in Cyprus, students in China. So, yeah, quite a few different places. I also often attract Chinese students who are wanting to get into teaching into international schools as well. That's a different story, but interesting.

Speaker 1 18:52

So it's a really global business thing. Yeah, definitely. Excellent. I love the story about the sisters in Texas. Have you got any other member stories you want to share?

Speaker 19:02

Yeah, so I do get some awesome feedback, some feedback that I got from a parent who'd been looking for an online art course for her teenager, but she struggled to find anything that kept her daughter interested. So the feedback that I got and once she joined, I thought was really amazing. So she said to me, she her daughter found it really engaging, and she'd started creating art that had expressed her personality, and she started trying out different techniques that she'd never done before. And the parent hoped she was really hoped, really hoped, sorry, that she was keen to continue. As a and a mum, she was like really impressed with the content of the tutorials, and and she said, I can see you've put a lot of thought into making these, and as it stands now, coming up to month nine, she's still a member of the of the course, and she sends me her work regularly of what she's been doing. Um, so for me, that was like really good feedback. I liked that feedback.

Speaker 1 19:51

That's excellent. So, Jo, what are your plans for your membership and how scalable is it going to be?

Speaker 19:58

So, the way I design my business in a sort of way that I always knew some parts of it I would drop and other parts I would put more focus into, and I guess it would just depend on which part I got most success from. So, the next thing for me now, because I enjoy the membership and what I like to do is to scale it now into schools. I'm already engaging and starting like a pilot of testing out the platform in schools, and just to see how like how it could be used within school settings in the UK as an enhancement to what schools are oft are already offering. Sometimes schools don't even have art teachers teaching, so I also see it as an opportunity for a sort of a CPD element with this. Um, where I've got these projects, but also there could be an offshoot of this, is now a teacher platform which would have the projects on it but in a different way, and then a CPD element for that for teachers that are looking to maybe like who were teaching off subject basically, because that can be quite difficult to teach a different subject when you're not trained in that subject, so that's how I envisage it, but also in terms of like enrichment in schools and just adding that offstead are always interested in schools that are offering you know other services and different things, different value for other students. So that's my next step with this business and how I'm gonna the direction it's gonna take. And is that mainly UK schools because you're a teacher of the UK? It will, I will start off with UK schools, but also the plan as well is to try international schools as well, because again, what I found with working with people is uh a lot of international schools, a lot of, for example, in China, I've spoken to a lot of Chinese teachers, and they don't necessarily always know the UK curriculum all that well. So they often come to me for a little bit of CPD as it is now, and to find out actually how do you teach in the British academic way in a school? What does the curriculum look like? Yeah. Sky's a limit.

Speaker 1 21:52

Honestly, there's I can see there's so many possibilities from this membership. It's amazing. So, Joe. What does having a membership allow you to do in your business in life that maybe you couldn't do without it?

Speaker 22:05

I guess for me it's the continuing teaching. Obviously, living in France it's not that easy. Now, particularly, I don't want to blame Brexit, but you can't, it's really difficult now to be on a visa and to get a job in France. So to be able to set up my own business that's allowed me to teach has been absolutely amazing. But obviously, to build uh an income stream of revenue as well is great. So we can get a lot of people. They can pay yearly if they want to. There's a discount if they pay for they can pay 10 months instead of 12 for the year, but it's a monthly membership, yeah.

Speaker 1 22:40

Excellent. So what advice would you give to somebody who's sitting on a membership and hasn't taken the leap yet?

Speaker 22:46

Probably don't procrastinate too much. Um, it doesn't have to be perfect, and maybe think about like how you maybe can trial it as well and test it out first to see what works and like to see what interest you get. Because sometimes I feel as a person I go too big too soon or to like trying to get to the perfect result too soon when actually there's other things I could be doing which are equally of value beforehand. I guess that's one of the lessons I'm learning is not to straight to the top, you have the steps in between that you have to take.

Speaker 1 23:18

And I guess just on a slightly different um angle, I'm sure there'll be teachers listening to this now who may be thinking, could I do that? What would you say to them if you've got teachers who are either looking to build it into their existing kind of life or maybe leave teaching and do something like you've done, what advice would you give them?

Speaker 23:38

I would say coming from an art perspective, there is a demand for art online, and I think a lot of people don't think that there is. So, since starting my business, not just with the membership, but I've now completed over 500 hours of teaching of art online, which I never thought well, I wasn't sure whether that was a possibility. And I'm now a tutor as well with Minerva Tutors, which is one of the top tutoring companies in the UK. So there is a call for it. Um, and I think really it's just maybe having the confidence is the main probably barrier to that will probably hold people back, and perhaps not go in like completely on your own. There are groups out there, and there's community and there's support, so you don't have to be by yourself and do everything yourself, and just reaching out and seeing what contacts you already have and making those contacts, calling on them and using them. And and that's maybe something I could do with being a little bit better at. I've got like a list of LinkedIn people at the moment where I'm like, I need to go through that LinkedIn. And I think, yeah, the I was doing this free online course for uh this I can't think of his name now, Alex something or other. He's an American guy and he's made multi-million busin businesses. It's about how you get that website going and the steps taken. And the one of the first things he says is when you're doing like the like setting up, um, what the only way you can do it straight away, people who don't know who you are and what you're doing, is to make those contacts, make those relationships, and give that freebie out until people are starting to trust you. And maybe that's something that I underestimated a little bit was like how difficult it can be to start from nothing and start building that trust with people. You would just expect because you think it's a good idea, you expect everyone else to go, oh, that's an amazing idea straight away. And that's not always the case, but I think it's it's about relationship building. I think that's the main thing at the beginning, and not underestimate that really. That would be my main kind of piece of advice.

Speaker 1 25:33

So, Jo, I know that lots of people will be wanting to find out more about your amazing membership. Can you tell us how to find you online?

Speaker 25:40

Yeah, so my website is artsinstruct.com. So nice and simple and easy. And I'm you can also find me on Facebook and on Instagram where I'm under the title of Arts Instruct Tuition. Um, on those two. But if you want to get in contact with me, then my website can send me an email and uh happy to respond. Excellent.

Speaker 1 26:00

Thank you so much for sharing your membership story with us today. And yeah, I can't wait to see what happens next. It sounds like you've got some amazing plans. Too many ideas.