
How I Made $600K in the iOS Education Market (2012 update) - ja27
http://blog.lescapadou.com/2012/12/my-sales-experience-in-education-app.html?p=5
======
paulsutter
I didn't realize that Montessori is considered a generic term and not
trademarked [1]. Since people buy apps before they try them, the name is
probably a big driver of the app's success.

Similarly, the guy who generated 800,000 books uses "Websters" in the book
titles for his best selling books, which is also not trademarked [2] and can
be used freely.

[1] American Montessori Society, Inc. v. Association Montessori
Internationale, 155 U.S.P.Q. 591, 592 (1967), referenced in the Montessori
Education Wikipedia article.

[2] <http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websters_Dictionary>

~~~
podperson
Indeed, the key to success seems to have been finding a high brand recognition
word that could be used without actually having to be licensed or whatever.
(The apps may be fabulous, but the name is gold.)

~~~
PierreA
word wizard app has not the Montessori keyword and it works pretty well !

~~~
podperson
Yeah but once you have one successful app you get cross-fertilization.

------
robomartin
Pierre, thanks for sharing this information. It's nice to see a post on HN
that does not talk about making hundreds of thousands of dollars after
throwing something together over a weekend. The vast majority of successful
business ventures --of any kind-- take time. Generally years.

It's also nice to see an example of a lifestyle business rather than a mega-
million-dollar exit startup that so often dominates the headlines in these
communities. Quite a few developers would be more than happy to earn a third
of what you have earned on a regular basis. And that would be considered to be
an absolute success.

I too am delving into the educational-app-for-kids market inspired by my own
kids. I'd enjoy the opportunity to get some feedback from you if you are open
to it. My email address is in my profile.

~~~
majani
I think there is a good balance in discussion between hot startups and
bootstrapped businesses now.

In fact, there's been a large number of exit-focused threads filled with guys
who are mad at the whole situation, while I don't see too many "lifestyle
business" jibes being thrown around nowadays.

------
georgelawrence
Hi Pierre, nice blog post. Thanks for sharing your insights.

I was looking at your AppStore SEO. Like you mentioned, your position for
"spelling" has dropped a lot. But there are other phrases where your positions
are rising nicely...

For "crossword game for kids" you've gone from 10th to 7th in the past few
weeks.

[http://www.straply.com/app/apple/l-escapadou/montessori-
cros...](http://www.straply.com/app/apple/l-escapadou/montessori-crosswords-
spelling-with-phonics-enabled-alphabet)

And your Android version has a few phrases moving up too...

For the phrase "kids words" you've risen 6 places, from 23rd to 17th. I know
17th isn't awesome, but that's a fairly popular search phrase, so at least
you're moving in the right direction.

[http://www.straply.com/app/android/l-escapadou/montessori-
wo...](http://www.straply.com/app/android/l-escapadou/montessori-words-for-
kids/sort-trending-down)

~~~
PierreA
thanks ! I have to check SEO more precisely, I'm really not an expert..but you
understand that losing #1 on "spelling" had a great impact

------
ja27
This is a follow-up from Pierre's 2011 numbers post:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3157739>

------
ianstallings
This is a real inspiration for all indie developers. I currently work for a
startup but I have a ton of projects on the back burner I plan to unleash when
I move on in a couple years. Although I understand that success in the app
store is subject to variance, this helps validate the idea of a one-man shop
(with outsourcing as needed of course).

~~~
kranner
No doubt OP's apps are good, but I'd think a lot of his success can be
attributed to being early (as he himself states in the post as I recall).

As a current App Store indie developer, I'd say you should consider the
counter-examples also. I enjoyed a book called Buttonless
([http://www.amazon.com/Buttonless-Incredible-iPhone-
Stories-B...](http://www.amazon.com/Buttonless-Incredible-iPhone-Stories-
Behind/dp/1439895856)) which discusses indie games and discloses sales
figures.

The average picture is not the rosiest.

~~~
ianstallings
Cool thanks for that post I'll check that book out. I have very high profile
apps on the app store I wrote for others and I can completely relate to all
the hassles and insanity surrounding the market. It's very finicky and totally
unpredictable. Honestly I attribute a lot of successes and failures to simple
market variance.

------
brador
Pierre, my question: The income tax rate for high earners in France is crazy
high. Have you considered moving?

~~~
grecy
Believe it or not, high income earners in other parts of the world are very
happy to pay "crazy high" taxes.

Those countries provide a hell of a lot to their citizens, and the citizens
are happy to pay.

For most of his life in Australia, my Dad, a teacher, paid very close to 50%
income tax on what he earned over about $60k. He was extremely happy with
this, as Australia had provided a lot for him and his family of 3 kids. We had
a very good uppder-middle class life.

EDIT: A couple of examples of what "crazy high" income tax gets you.

1\. My brother broke his leg horribly, required multiple surgeries, ambulance
rides, helicopter rides, multiple hospitals and close to 2 months in hospital.
There was never a bill.

2\. My 5 years of university for Software Engineering were paid for by the
Australian government, and I now have a interest-free loan for the ~$24k.
Whenever I earn over $40k/year, I just pay 3% more income tax to pay off the
loan. If I don't earn that much in Australia, I never pay back the loan and
that's fine. (actually, my Mum and Dad are angry about this - for them,
university was free like High school.)

3\. The Australian government will pay a "wage" to low-income students going
to university/college (approx. $176/wk)

4\. The Australian government pays unemployment benefits to any adult out of
work (approx $228/wk). It does not matter if you have ever had a job or been
fired or not. This payment will continue forever.[1]

They will also help to pay your rent, with a program called "Rent Assistance"

Despite what you might be thinking, Australia has a very strong economy -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Australia>

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_benefits#Australia>

UPDATE: Dole is $228/wk

~~~
tmh88j
>Believe it or not, high income earners in other parts of the world are very
happy to pay "crazy high" taxes.

>Those countries provide a hell of a lot to their citizens, and the citizens
are happy to pay.

When you have a $600k per year income, those services aren't necessarily as
valuable as they are to someone who makes $60k per year.

Seems that I've upset some people. Have you forgotten that international
business does exist?

~~~
rorrr
Try getting a serious sickness in the US and watch your $600K melt away, watch
your insurance company dropping you, or refusing to cover you because you
forgot to mention some minor thing when you signed up.

Intestine transplant costs more than $1 million. Heart transplant - $700-800K.
Bone marrow transplant - $600-700K.

~~~
tmh88j
When did non-government sponsored benefits equate to no health care at
all?...especially if you're making over half a million dollars per year.

~~~
grecy
When your insurance company drops you.

~~~
sp332
If you make half a million a year, you have options for paying for services
yourself instead of relying on someone else (like an insurance company) to pay
it for you. You can just, you know, buy healthcare.

~~~
jw_
Note that some of the life-saving operations listed above a) cost
significantly more than $500k and b) are related to ailments that will likely
stop you from working on AwesomeApply.io or whatever it is for a potentially
indefinite period of time.

------
ronyeh
Thanks for sharing, PierreA. I started on iOS at around the same time as you,
and became profitable this year (not quite as successful as you, but still
doing well). It sure looks like it does take that long (2+ yrs) for an indie
developer to gain enough experience to do well!

~~~
PierreA
happy to know that! Yes that's a long road and the experience you gain help
you to know what you have to do . You can be more or less lucky (I was pretty
lucky with the education market) but most of all you have to be persistant and
learn from mistakes (I think I've already heard that somewhere else...)

------
erickhill
Nice post, but what's left unsaid here is exactly how much he spent on
marketing. His gross revenue might have been $417k for the last 12 months, but
what's his gross profit?

~~~
PierreA
that's a good point, and I will add this in the report. I work at home so my
expense are only a little bit of marketing, some devices and I've made a trip
to a conference this year in california, and a very important thing is that I
have to give some royalties back to the speech engine company for the word
wizard app. So according to my files, it is about $35K. I would say that
marketing is not very expensive but takes a lot of times (anyway buying ads
don't work well) EDIT: updated the expense (bad euros/dollars conversion
before)

~~~
gawker
Hi Pierre,

Would you be able to comment on how your process and decision on picking a
speech engine company?

Thanks

~~~
PierreA
it was simple - I tried all the major engines on the market and take the best
one for iOS. All companies almost offer the same license (20 to 30% of your
income).

------
dxbydt
Watched your videos on montesori numbers. Very impressive. Have you thought of
doing iphone aps with arithmetic for the older kids and/or prodigies ? I
learnt to add three digit numbers when I was like 6-7. I didn't understand
what I was doing...like I didn't know why 7+4 was 11...but understanding can
wait. Its very useful to nevertheless pattern match your way to addition &
multiplication. You can learn multiplication tables upto 20 or so simply by
osmosis...not repetition, but intelligent pattern matching. You look at 3 and
7 and just automatically write 1 in units place and carry over 2....reasoning
can come later. There were various tricks for remembering factorials &
summations & the like...it was a real blast.

------
revelation
I'm happy for your success, but as a developer, having one app for each of
{French, German, Swedish} sounds like spam. It reminds me of "auto wallpaper"
apps or the like.

The actual question of course is: how does establishing a unifying brand fare
compared with a bazillion of generic apps?

~~~
PierreA
and actually for the Word Wizard app, I can't release a single app with all
languages because it uses a text to speech engine and each voice is 90M ! In
addition, due to the contract I have with the text to speech company, I can't
release an app with several languages...

~~~
danielharan
How many words do you have in total? Is it possible to record most or some of
them?

90M is a lot; maybe we could work something out? :)

~~~
PierreA
text to speech engines do not work like this. They built the pronunciations of
any words on the fly using their phonetic sound library. so 90M is for the
sound library I think

~~~
danielharan
If you had 2-300 words, it would be much cheaper to just record the words.

Otherwise, if it's still just dictionary words, it's just a lot easier if the
dictionary already breaks down the word into phonemes, and the speech engine
then collates the phoneme sounds together. You're not actually using most of
the features of a text-to-speech engine, so I don't see why you'd have to pay
for the full price tag.

So: how many words? And what's a price that would make you want to buy a
license to a simpler engine? :)

------
scott_karana
Pardon my newbiness, but what generated your charts? Is it part of the iOS
Store, or a third-party dashboard?

~~~
PierreA
appfigures.com

------
towski
Does this sound ironic to anyone else? Do educators ever post about how much
money they made teaching children?

~~~
PierreA
Ironic that I get more money than an educator ? Yes it is in a way. But it is
the world we are living, no ? (and we should not start to talk about bankers)
On the other hand, there is no comparison between a software developer and a
educator (I teach nothing except to my kids)

~~~
mdda
An educational App writer has much better operational leverage than a single
teacher of 30 kids. The App also has to compete on a global stage, so the
rewards to the winner are likely to be higher too.

------
ScottWhigham
Congrats! That is awesome. Thanks for sharing.

Having said that, every time I read one of these types of success stories I'm
reminded of Jacques Matthieu's "So you're making good money. STFU" post.
[http://jacquesmattheij.com/So+you+are+making+good+money+now+...](http://jacquesmattheij.com/So+you+are+making+good+money+now+STFU)

~~~
javajosh
I hadn't read that STFU piece before, but it is truly awful. It basically
argues "Don't talk about your success because you'll give away your secrets
and increase competition, lower the barrier for competitors." One presumes
this goes double for actual code: don't open-source! You'll give away all your
secrets!

It's that kind of selfish, greedy outlook that makes life suck. Jealously
guarded secrets retard the growth of industries - and presumably, if you
really care about your customers, and you're building good stuff, then you
want more good stuff in the world. Of course it sucks if you get undercut, or
your product gets cloned. And you can't rely on your market to know the
history and do the right thing.

The saving grace, and why Matthieu's post is horse shit, is that software is a
lot like art. People don't want clones. They want Plants vs. Zombies not a
clone. It's music, it's art, and guarding your secrets about how you make your
art is unhealthy.

One of the things you get, too, is influence and respect from your peers.
Pierre certainly has mine. He's put together an excellent resource for those
who want to follow in his footstep writing and selling apps having realistic
expectations about what it takes, and some great links to resources for doing
things like promotion. It's still a lot of hard work, clearly, but he's
increasing the size of his community, not giving away the _secret sauce_.

~~~
paulhauggis
"Don't talk about your success because you'll give away your secrets and
increase competition, lower the barrier for competitors."

This is the truth. I know I've gotten ideas from posters like the OP talking
about how profitable an app is. If I have a bigger team or more resources, I
could take away your customers pretty quickly.

"Jealously guarded secrets retard the growth of industries"

Really? Rather than everyone using the exact same idea/code base and branching
off from it, we have completely different products. It helps the growth of
industries and ends up being better for the consumer (more choices, etc).

"They want Plants vs. Zombies not a clone. It's music, it's art, and guarding
your secrets about how you make your art is unhealthy."

Don't blame anyone when you can't make any money because you gave all of your
best stuff away for free.

Making money from the app store (or any startup) is hard enough as it is.

Do you really want to take a chance and give away any competitive advantage
that you may have had?

~~~
javajosh
Do you realize that the exact same argument can be made against honesty in
government? "If you're honest, look at all the money in bribes you're giving
up! Everyone does it, it's almost impossible to get caught and even if you do,
it's a slap on the wrist. It's _stupid_ to not take bribes."

And sure enough, everyone starts taking bribes. The corruption spreads to
every level of government, because every individual makes the same
calculation: take the bribe, more money for the family, don't take the bribe,
less money.

Secrecy is a bribe.

