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How I Made $600K in the iOS Education Market (2012 update)
- ja27 14y agoThis is a follow-up from Pierre's 2011 numbers post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3157739 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3157739
- revelation 14y agoI'm happy for your success, but as a developer, having one app for each of {French, German, Swedish} sounds like spam. It reminds me of "auto wallpaper" apps or the like. The actual question of course is: how does establishing a unifying brand fare compared with a bazillion of generic apps?
- gte910h 14y agoUnfortunately the search algorithms/hotlists work much better for separate editions then unified editions of many things.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- PierreA 14y agoanother point for localization : I can sell an app at a higher price in France (tier 4) because of the euros rate. tier 4 in france is a little bit like tier 3 in the US (eg 3$ in the US and 3.5 euros in France - it was 3 euros before Apple updated their price). In Sweden, where there is less competition I can set the price to tier 5. In the English market (which is 73% of my income), all the apps are $3 (except today).
- PierreA 14y agoand 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 14y agoHow 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 14y agotext 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 14y agoIf 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? :)
- danielharan 14y agoLooked it up some more; most of the difficulty of speech-to-text engines are text normalization and converting words into sounds. Since you only have dictionary words, you might be able to use a phonetic dictionary. Wikipedia and discussions with another techie friend: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_synthesis#Challenges http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_synthesis#Challenges
- ronyeh 14y agoThanks 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 14y agohappy 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...)
- brador 14y agoPierre, my question: The income tax rate for high earners in France is crazy high. Have you considered moving?
- PierreA 14y agodon't believe everything that is written in the newspapers, it's only for the super-rich :-) I think that France is one of the best place for authors (Ireland is the best one I think) Indeed there is a specific status for authors in France and tax rate is much better that if it was a salary. So actually I'm considered as an software author in France because I sell nothing, I just give to Apple the right to sell my apps and they gave me royalties. I don't even own a company.
- PierreA 14y agodon't believe everything that is written in the newspapers, it's only for the super-rich :-) I think that France is a good place for authors (Ireland is the best one I think) Indeed there is a specific status for authors in France and tax rate is much better that if it was a salary. So actually I'm considered as an software author in France because I sell nothing, I just give to Apple the right to sell my apps and they gave me royalties. I don't even own a company. To give you a number I think I pay 35%/40% of taxes, and for me I'm really happy to pay (honestly if you pay a lot of taxes it is because you earn a lot). Note that it includes social security and retirements. The issue with some people that have a lot of money is that they don't realize how others people live and they always want more. I did not have a lot money 3 years ago so for me it's really OK to pay.
- purplelobster 14y agoI wish people were a little bit more patriotic about paying taxes. Well, provided the taxes go towards good things. It's so frustrating to see businesses getting rich on the back of a country's resources and infrastructure, only to abandon it when it's time to pay back.
- paulhauggis 14y ago
- ScottWhigham 14y agoCongrats! 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+STFU http://jacquesmattheij.com/So+you+are+making+good+money+now+...
- rex64 14y agoSTFU why? I love reading success stories, they're so inspirational.
- ScottWhigham 14y agoI posted an article explaining his reasons. Why ask "Why?" to me?
- javajosh 14y agoI 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.
- towski 14y agoDoes this sound ironic to anyone else? Do educators ever post about how much money they made teaching children?
- druidsbane 14y agoWell, he is a developer who writes educational software and he is explaining how he did what he did for the educational market. I think in a market context the numbers make sense and help both shed light on an opaque market and to give tips to those trying to break in.
- PierreA 14y agoIronic 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 14y agoAn 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.
- Egregore 14y agoActually educators have salaries, the author of the post tries to automate and gamify some aspects of education, and posts report on how successful it is.
- ja27 14y agoTeachers don't take on the financial risk of failing or spend 6-12 months teaching before they ever know if they'll be paid for it.
- jtheory 14y agoCan you explain? An average teacher posting about what they earned teaching children would be boring; "my salary last year was $X; this year it's up 2%". This is interesting because making educational apps is far riskier than applying for a salaried job as a teacher -- you might make a grand total of $0 or only slightly more after many months of work. Maybe you're saying that any educational software should be permanently priced as cheap as the developer can afford, to reach the maximum number of kids? That's not obviously the best approach, though, even if we assumed that every developer choosing this market would be so philanthropic as to forgo all profit; that would also force them to all remain tiny one-developer shops with minimal support, etc.. Is that necessarily a good thing? Also, publicizing moderate success in a risky endeavor (apps in the education market) is a good thing for the market as a whole -- anyone who reads Pierre's post and realizes "hey, if I do right, maybe I can actually make a decent living doing that" will mean more good apps for students.
- erickhill 14y agoNice 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 14y agothat'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)
- erickhill 14y agoThanks for responding publicly to my question, Pierre. Class act. And congrats on your success.
- gawker 14y agoHi Pierre, Would you be able to comment on how your process and decision on picking a speech engine company? Thanks
- PierreA 14y agoit 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).
- robomartin 14y agoPierre, 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.
- PierreA 14y agoof course I'm glad to offer advices. Send me mail - my address on my site lescapadou.com
- majani 14y agoI 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.
- paulsutter 14y agoI 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 http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websters_Dictionary
- PierreA 14y agodon't worry Montessori is used extensively in the App Store since 2 years. On my side, I've got a friend who is montessori teacher, and he test all my apps and give me feedback. There is a lot of discussion in the Montessori world about the good/bad usage of screens
- podperson 14y agoIndeed, 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.)
- georgelawrence 14y agoHi 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-crosswords-spelling-with-phonics-enabled-alphabet http://www.straply.com/app/apple/l-escapadou/montessori-cros... 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-words-for-kids/sort-trending-down http://www.straply.com/app/android/l-escapadou/montessori-wo...
- PierreA 14y agothanks ! 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
- dxbydt 14y agoWatched 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.
- scott_karana 14y agoPardon my newbiness, but what generated your charts? Is it part of the iOS Store, or a third-party dashboard?
- PierreA 14y agoappfigures.com
- ianstallings 14y agoThis 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 14y agoNo 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-Behind/dp/1439895856 http://www.amazon.com/Buttonless-Incredible-iPhone-Stories-B...) which discusses indie games and discloses sales figures. The average picture is not the rosiest.
- stevenwei 14y agoWhile timing is important, I think the OP made a great choice in targeting an underserved, niche market. That's where a lot of great opportunities still exist, IMO. The game market by comparison is much more highly competitive and has quite different dynamics, I would hesitate to use 'failed' games as a counter-example.
- ianstallings 14y agoCool 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.
- DRMAN 14y agowith crappy UI you were able to generate lots of revenue. However I will suggest don't try to make more any apps next year and make your crappy UI a little better!