Teacher builds $50M a year business with learning materials | Hacker News Reader

Teacher builds $50M a year business with learning materials

ocregister.com

186 pointsprostoalex14 comments

I'm sure there's a lot more to this business than we can know from this fairly sunny writeup, but always good to hear about businesses that succeed outside of tech on HN. A couple business lessons I took away from this account:

1) Know your market - she was a teacher and deeply understood the pain of finding ways to engage students in a hands-on way.

2) Hustle: "she hand-wrote tens of thousands of letters to teachers. She followed up by driving to 60 teacher supply stores."

3) Capitalize on your hits - their first really popular product was a book on health and nutrition called "My Body" that sold more copies than there are teachers in the United States and still sells today.

4) Evolve the business: as technology became more popular, they started making materials geared around tech and their 2nd big product was "Technology for Terrified Teachers"

hustling like Ray Kroc

Although she seems to be much less caustic than Ray.

This is pretty cool - my spouse is home schooling our children and they absolutely love the "My Body" book. My 5 year-old was actually teaching me things the other day.

The writup is sunny because it is the classic "local done good" story written by a local paper.

It is an inspirational story.

Just remember this business started in late 70s. This is not some get rich quick story.

I'm one of those lucky software engineers in the Bay Area that happens to be married to a teacher and I can 100% confirm that they are real hustlers at what they do. Every time I get home after a hard day of work and listen to what her day was like it humbles me and makes me really appreciate the awesome job that teachers do in our society. She is always super tired but super happy and satisfied at the same time.

Teacher here. Good teaching materials are incredibly valuable.

One would think that some big company like Pearson would have cornered the market on teaching materials. Turns out, most teaching materials out there are just complete garbage.

Most materials made by a company are easy multiple choice and fill in the blank worksheets rather than engaging activities.

Most materials made by teachers are better, but usually have some kind of glaring flaw (like just too short or not modified for students with accommodations) because a teacher created it out of desperation with little time available and never went back to fix it up.

I always thought this would be great area to have open source teaching materials. So many teachers are writing their own materials, would be great to coordinate and combine.

There is https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/. The teachers are incentivized to fix up their one-off material and sell it for profit.

Wow, what a small world. I went to high school with the daughters in the '90s. Both of them were nice and I'm happy for their family's success.

as someone who grew up in the HB/FV area, i can definitely tell you're from the area too based on your username ;)

Ha, yes. Huntington Beach pride! Great to see another OC native on here. Sometimes I'll check the Who is Hiring thread to see which OC companies are using HN for recruitment

And I can tell you like the show Seinfeld from your username.

I'm sure most qualified teachers will tell you they are in desperate need of quality classroom materials. What this article doesn't address (and a quick search reveals no answers) is that these materials _need_ to fit into a research-based curriculum. It's one thing to make engaging lessons, it's another to conclusively prove they teach the material.

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