Wow, thank you SO much for sharing these numbers. It seems to me a huge part of your success was due to you picking a niche (Montessori) with weak(ish) competition and making a high-quality product in that niche, would you agree with that assessment?
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I think my luck is that I was here at the beginning of the /marketiPad. I was not thinking the market would grow so much. Using the Montessori name was not a big marketing plan actually (I was really dumb about marketing 3 years ago - just check the name of my company, it is really not good - especially for the US Market!). It was just because the concept was coming from a Montessori activites my homeschooled daughter was doing...
Some people told me that it was a very good marketing to have used the Montessori name, and now I agree but at this time I didn't know that.
My second app and 3rd app has no "Montessori" in the title because I don't want to use this name too much (perhaps I should because my work is always inspired by Montessori methods we use at home...)
Anyway, picking a niche and sticking to it is definitively something important and that worked well for me. All my apps are in this niche.
As a final note: when I release my first, there was almost no competition. The market was empty.
I'm not familiar with Montessori and the search results regarding what it is are confusing. Is it a company that produces educational products that haven't been "digitized" or a theory/method?
It's not a company, it's a teaching method/movement. The word Montessori is the name of it's originator (died 1952,) and it is used freely by anyone who uses the method:
In 1967, the US Patent Trademark Trial and Appeal Board ruled that "the term 'Montessori' has a generic and/or descriptive significance."[24] Therefore, in the United States and elsewhere, the term can be used freely without giving any guarantee of how closely, if at all, a program applies Montessori's work. The ruling has led to "tremendous variation in schools claiming to use Maria Montessori’s methods."[25]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_method#Use_of_Monte...
Some states have additional regulations on who can call themselves "Montessori". For example, Maryland requires schools using the name "Montessori" to be approved by a "Montessori Validating Organization" that the state recognizes.
http://www.marylandpublicschools.org/msde/nonpublicschools/m...
I went to a Montessori school from about age 3-5. The classroom was organized into stations. It was a bit like doing a workout circuit going from machine to machine, but the stations were educational.
Some of the activities I remember are:
- Pouring water from a pitcher into cups.
- Learning to tie shoes. There was a frame with laces, where you would tie the knots 5 times.
- Learning modular division - The teacher would ask what is 25/7, and you would have a bead board and a sack of beads and discover the answer is 3 R4
- Ordering tuning forks by pitch
- Reading station
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education
Now there is a lot of discussions on how this approach can be translated to touch devices because moving things in the real world is something important in the approach. But most of Montessori people thinks that it is just another tool that can be useful (I think that too - it is just another tool) and there are certified Montessori teachers (I'm not) that are doing apps, and a lot of teachers told me that they love my apps