Games and Learning

Some 67% of Tinybop’s downloads have come from outside the U.S.

Remember flipping through a collection of Time Life books and spending hours examining a topic in detail, absorbing all the details of the illustrations? Finding that section that included layers of transparencies to flip between that helped illustrate things such as the systems of the body?

Raul Gutierrez, founder and CEO of Brooklyn-based, Tinybop, does and those experiences are the inspiration behind their unique – and gorgeous – educational apps.

Starting with the idea that all kids are curious explorers and that mobile platforms should be used to produce works on the level of the greatest of children’s books, Gutierrez set out to establish a unique line of educational and entertaining apps.

“I believe the world is endlessly fascinating for kids. Virtually any subject, as long as it’s explained in a way that is appropriate to children, becomes really interesting to them,” Gutierrez said.

The Production Process

Tinybop has launched two apps to date: Human Body, released August of 2013, and Plants, just released in May. These are the first two apps in a line called “The Explorer’s Library,” for which there are many more apps planned. In the future, new series will roll out focusing on other areas, such as creativity and storytelling.

These two apps have seen success on Apple’s App Store around the world. The Human Body has been the #1 Education app for iPhone in 143 countries and #1 for iPad in 140.

Tinybop’s Plants

The company has evolved its release strategy for its second app and has been top ten in Education for iPad in 19 countries. As they add new content, what they call biomes, they hope to see that grow.

Tinybop chooses the subject of each app by thinking about a general topic that kids everywhere need to know about. They then do a deep research phase, buying every old textbook they can find on a subject. They study how the subject has been taught over time, while looking for great infographics and illustrations for design inspiration.

From there, they pare it down to the most essential questions and interview kids to see what their baseline knowledge is. Once they have a grasp on what they need to try to explain on a given topic, they look at how to embed those ideas into interactions.

“An easy example is the skeletal system. What’s the most important thing about the skeletal system – it holds your body up. So in our app, if you pull a bone out of the skeletal system, the whole body collapses. There is no need for us to explain or have a graphic there that says that the body is held up by bones – the kids intuit that,” Gutierrez said.

“To me it’s all about this quiet interaction. Quiet is an important value we hold as a company. We also think it’s important to be a little bit weird and a little bit funny.”

While they do all of their technical development in-house, they work with top-notch outside artists, and test the ‘stickiness’ of the images with kids before they even start development.

“We know that we’ve done it right if at end of the session the kid wants to take home the big print,” Gutierrez said.

Publish Once, Reach Everywhere

The Tinybop apps have no tutorials or voiceover prompts to guide the user along. They aim to make the entire experience as exploratory as possible.

When we put out the first app, a lot of parents were sort of confounded – ‘there are no instructions! There is no informational text!’ We say,that is kind of the point. All of the learning is embedded in the interactions.

One thing they make heavy use of in the apps are labels. In the Human Body app there are over 1,000 labels and that’s no accident.

“When I was a kid I loved naming things. Rather than taking the approach that many of these apps do which are sort of flash cards or quizzes, when the kid touches the label it falls off, and then it’s up to them to put it back, and most kids want to put the label back in the right place,” Gutierrez said. “There is innate sense of order that kids have. And we’ve found it’s a very effective way to teach things. Kids like to name things. Once they’ve named them, they start asking questions.”

Using labels and little other copy (other than the copy for parents) has another benefit for Tinybop. It makes it easier to create the app in other languages. Getting their apps out in as many languages as possible is part of their business strategy. Human Body came out in 49 languages, and Plants in over 50.

This is not only part of their success in terms of features from Apple and sales around the world, but they also know their apps are being used as tools in places that don’t have a lot of meaningful educational apps available to them.

“We get emails all the time, especially from bilingual parents, saying thank you so much, this helps me teach my kid in my native language,” Gutierrez said.

So far, 67 percent of all downloads have been outside the US.

“This is the power of the Apple App Store – publish once, reach everywhere,” Gutierrez said.  “We expect as we build our brand that our percentage of sales outside the US will be our biggest source of growth.”

Reaching Classrooms

The apps have also found an audience in school where teachers say the apps are open models that can be taught against, rather than having specific rules or curriculum baked into them.

While the Tinybop apps weren’t necessarily designed for classrooms, they still test there.

“We get a lot of great feedback from teachers, and a lot of our apps by design are STEM aligned,” Gutierrez said. “We look at STEM standards and what they’re trying to teach. We want it to work in classrooms.”

The Human Body app has had 20,000-30,000 downloads from educational institutions, which Gutierrez says has been completely organic.

“We didn’t actively reach out to them, but we speak the language of teachers… Our handbook is written by former teachers who are versed in educational theory and use an inquiry-based approach that doesn’t tell kids what to think, but rather prompts them to think deeply about the subject. And then it spreads on its own. The best advertisement for our apps is the app itself. We keep hearing stories about someone using it in the classroom and then the parent downloads it and vice-versa,” Gutierrez said.

“We hope in the future as we get a little bigger we can do more to facilitate teachers. We want to open up a section of the website so teachers can upload curriculum for example. We know that teachers have developed lesson plans around the apps.”

Marketing and Reaching Users

Their success in the App Store has been somewhat organic — they don’t do any paid marketing – but they have also been helped by receiving numerous features by Apple across the App Store, around the world.

Still, Gutierrez knows that is not a business strategy.

We’ve been really lucky to get featured which has helped kick us off. But as a company we don’t always want to rely on that. So ultimately it’s really important for us to focus on brand, and as we grow, to have a very strong and consistent brand presence so that with each app people become aware of the other apps that are out there in the system so that it eventually allows for cross-marketing between apps.

“We don’t really do any paid marketing yet. We’re still small with only two apps out their. When your app costs is less than a cup of coffee, it’s really hard to market against that with paid marketing. Spending X number of dollars to acquire a user is probably not a good deal. The equation might change when we have more apps out there.”

The apps have also had the benefit of garnering really good press, including a few seconds on the Today show. “That few seconds very much made our first quarter. It was huge. Any time we can put ourselves out in front of a large number of people it’s helpful to us.”

Securing VC Funding

Tinybop closed an initial $1 million of seed round funding in late 2011, and secured another $5 million of Series A funding in late 2012.

That success has been tied to a clear business strategy, says Gutierrez.

“I talk to people all the time looking for funding who only have great general ideas, but only a vague sense of how they’re going to turn those ideas into products and more importantly into sustainable companies,” he said.

He adds that it is this clear plan that fueled the interest of VC firms.

“Venture capitalists are in the business of making bets on companies they believe will have explosive growth. They want to say yes to entrepreneurs, but you have to give them a reason to say yes,” Gutierrez said. “Having a well defined roadmap, a long-term growth plan, and details of how to execute that plan in in terms of time, people, and money are basics every entrepreneur should start with.

“Before we closed our seed round we built a comprehensive brand book. It was beautiful and showed the level of seriousness with which we approach our practice. Two years down the line, we refer to the brand book every day.”

But he stressed it is important for a company to evaluate carefully whether the VC route is right for them.

“They should ask themselves: ‘Do I need the amount of money I’m seeking to reach viability.  Am I asking for too much? Not enough? Is venture the right road?’”

He cautions that for many businesses, venture capital and its emphasis on growth can introduce tensions, and that it’s not for everybody. He advises entrepreneurs to find investors who share their values.

“When VCs are partners they add tremendous value,” Gutierrez said.

While TInybop is young, it shows great promise to continue to be a successful creator of unique content.

“We have years of content planned out. And my hope is that if we continue to attract audience in the market that we’ll be able to expand and get more of these things going. We’re only limited by our bandwidth right now,” he said. “I think when you’re sort of a young company full of really enthusiastic people that love what they’re doing, it’s a very fun environment to be part of, and it all feels very exciting and meaningful.”