How I Made $600K in the iOS Education Market (2012 update)

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-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-words-for-kids/sort-trending-down

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.

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.

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