
Teacher builds $50M a year business with learning materials - prostoalex
http://www.ocregister.com/2017/08/23/orange-county-teacher-builds-50-million-a-year-business-with-learning-materials/
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jasonshen
I'm sure there's a lot more to this business than we can know from this fairly
sunny writeup, but always good to hear about businesses that succeed outside
of tech on HN. A couple business lessons I took away from this account:

1) Know your market - she was a teacher and deeply understood the pain of
finding ways to engage students in a hands-on way.

2) Hustle: "she hand-wrote tens of thousands of letters to teachers. She
followed up by driving to 60 teacher supply stores."

3) Capitalize on your hits - their first really popular product was a book on
health and nutrition called "My Body" that sold more copies than there are
teachers in the United States and still sells today.

4) Evolve the business: as technology became more popular, they started making
materials geared around tech and their 2nd big product was "Technology for
Terrified Teachers"

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jlebrech
hustling like Ray Kroc

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jedberg
Although she seems to be much less caustic than Ray.

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javiayala
I'm one of those lucky software engineers in the Bay Area that happens to be
married to a teacher and I can 100% confirm that they are real hustlers at
what they do. Every time I get home after a hard day of work and listen to
what her day was like it humbles me and makes me really appreciate the awesome
job that teachers do in our society. She is always super tired but super happy
and satisfied at the same time.

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Pulcinella
Teacher here. Good teaching materials are incredibly valuable.

One would think that some big company like Pearson would have cornered the
market on teaching materials. Turns out, most teaching materials out there are
just complete garbage.

Most materials made by a company are easy multiple choice and fill in the
blank worksheets rather than engaging activities.

Most materials made by teachers are better, but usually have some kind of
glaring flaw (like just too short or not modified for students with
accommodations) because a teacher created it out of desperation with little
time available and never went back to fix it up.

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sushid
There is
[https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/](https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/).
The teachers are incentivized to fix up their one-off material and sell it for
profit.

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hbcondo714
Wow, what a small world. I went to high school with the daughters in the '90s.
Both of them were nice and I'm happy for their family's success.

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hello_newman
as someone who grew up in the HB/FV area, i can definitely tell you're from
the area too based on your username ;)

~~~
hbcondo714
Ha, yes. Huntington Beach pride! Great to see another OC native on here.
Sometimes I'll check the Who is Hiring thread to see which OC companies are
using HN for recruitment

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wkirby
I'm sure most qualified teachers will tell you they are in desperate need of
quality classroom materials. What this article doesn't address (and a quick
search reveals no answers) is that these materials _need_ to fit into a
research-based curriculum. It's one thing to make engaging lessons, it's
another to conclusively prove they teach the material.

