Turning a side project into an app kids have used 200,000 times.
Alex BB.
Founder, Visual Binary
Context
Ever since 2021, I have been tinkering in the educational app space. Creating prototypes to help my younger siblings.
In 2024, together with my partner in crime Thomas, we managed to create an app that scaled well beyond our family & friends. To date, the app has been used over 200,000 times by kids.
Here is the story, and key takeaways, from working on Jelly Tutor.
What did we build?
Originally intended as an app to help track and encourage good habits, 'Jelly' has evolved into an app full of bite-size learning games. Focusing on the topics of Maths, English and Reasoning.
The app incorporates AI-enhanced features, such as 'explain the answer' - which lets each child get bespoke advice from an LLM-based teacher inside the app.
The app also has a points-based incentive mechanism; kids earn 'Jelly points' for each correct answer, which they can use to customise their in-app avatar.
An example of the fun mobile app UI/UX.
An example of the App Store promotional imagery.
Lesson 1
Know the difference between a 'user' and a 'customer'
The tricky thing with an educational app, especially one aimed at younger audiences, is that the person getting the most benefit from using the app (the child) isn't the one with the ability to purchase (the adult).
There are many tangible logistical issues with building an app for kids:
You can only run ads targeting parents.
You then need the parent to set up the app on both their device and their child's device.
If the child doesn't have their own device, you need to encourage the parent to give their device to the child to learn (harder said than done).
Not only this, but their are more stringent rules (rightly so) on the App Store for how an app designed for kids should function. For example, you can't simply show a paywall inside the app without first identifying whether the current user on the app is an adult (we created a very sleak UX to solve this!)
Lesson 2
Your competition isn't Duolingo, it's Roblox
A key goal of Jelly was to make learning fun and engaging. We saw the gold standard for this, from a UX perspective, to be Duolingo.
We leveraged a lot of the similar gamification mechanisms Duolingo employs:
Rapid positive feedback loops
Small, achievable milestones
Delightful animations
A careful balance of difficulty
After seeing Jelly being used in the wild, and how my sister and her friends use their tablets, it dawned on me that the biggest competitor to Jelly was in fact large-scale, world-based games like Roblox.
Roblox, and other apps like Minecraft, employ similar tactics to some of those inside Jelly, such as avater customisation. But, unlike Jelly and Duolingo, there is so much more scope for enjoyment and engagement in these apps. The infinite feeling of exploration, the obstacle-course-like challenges and elements of role-play are just few of the elements that make these apps so fun for kids.
This sets the bar for app experiences for kids: if it isn't as fun as Roblox, the majority won't persist much longer than 5 minutes per session.
A hypothetical… if you were to create a learning app that looked more like Roblox than Duolingo, how would it look?
Lesson 3
Education has a big dichotomy
Seemingly, everyone can be split into two camps when it comes to the topic of education:
Camp 1: "Education should be a public right and free for everyone"
Camp 2: "Education is incredibly valuable and I'll be willing to pay top dollar to give my child the best resources."
Sometimes, the first camp feels like the large vocal majority.
However, people in the second camp explain why there is a big market for private tutors, private schooling, and now a collection of premium-priced educational apps (e.g. there is one reading app for 2 year olds that charges $500 per month!)
If you want to make money in edtech, you need to focus in on the people already inside the second camp, and showcase why what you're building is better than any of the existing resources they are already paying for.
The future of Jelly
Jelly is live & rocking on the App Store. It recently hit the top 10 in the UK App Store charts for kids.
We will continue to refine the app, based on user feedback, to try and make the most fun educational resource for kids available.
Showcase of Jelly's App Store ranking
Fin.