Download this episode, in which Ian and Andrey talk about growing to a point where you have no idea where stuff is in your own company, building mobile clients for Snappy and Quintu, Minecraft, live coding streams, games, client work, system administration with SaaS, the Sturgeon/Laravel argument, the forums, SaaS growth curves, the PHP Book Book, Seinfeld, Bill Gates, and the Gone Home game.
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I’ve just finished a client project using the Ionic framework Ian mentions.
It’s really good - way better than jQuery Mobile. If you’re doing some HTML5 mobile app development, give it a go.
Ah, good to hear! So far we’ve had a pretty good experience with it as well. We’re not to the point of building it for devices. What did you end up using for that, Cordova?
You talked about making products for kids…I’ve long been convinced that education products for parents to buy children can be a goldmine. I don’t have kids, so I lack that natural dogfooding ability (not to say that I’d feed my kids dog food) to make it a field for me.
The logic goes like this: “Poor Johnny is struggling with his maths, because he doesn’t get on with his teacher (or whatever other reason). What about finding something on the Internet to help?” followed by googling for “maths lessons for 10 year olds.”.
I have downloaded quite a few maths apps for the iPad for my son. Some are quite polished, but most were fairly poor. I did buy a few. It must be a fairly sizeable market with a constant churn of potential customers.
For all the promise there’s very few educational games on iOS my kids stick with. They use it for a bit then done. The pre-school age ones probably fair the best and the oldest being 7 perhaps not old enough for more content rich ones but something seems not right. Maybe it’s knowing all the other games on there make concentrating too difficult?
Business wise though I do think it’s not a bad spot. I keep buying them 
Andy, I didn’t even think about the continually replenishing of potential customers…makes it even better…
Ian, what you describe is exactly why I think it is a great market. It doesn’t matter (from a business perspective) if little Johnny uses the maths app more than once or twice. What matters is that parents have a clear motivation for buying it…
As a student, I worked in a computer store, and I remember the crappy “educational” apps that parents tended to buy from us for Christmas presents and birthday presents for their children…how disappointed those children must have been…and yet those programs kept selling.
I think I need to have myself some children so I have a test market…