From Disney Designer to App Store Royalty: How She Won the 'Oscars for Apps' Twice

If you have kids, you probably know that finding a way to let them use technology without worrying about addiction or overstimulation is hard.

And you've probably tried dozens of "educational" apps, only to find your toddler zoned out or throwing a tantrum when it's time to turn off the screen.

Hampton member Melissa Cash felt the same way. But instead of just complaining about it, she decided to fix it.

Melissa breaks down her journey from Disney product designer to startup CEO, building Pok Pok - a Montessori-inspired app for kids 2-8 that's specifically designed to be non-addictive and truly educational. She covers everything from their early prototype testing (with brutally honest toddlers) to raising over $10M in venture funding and being named one of Canada's Most Powerful People.

My favorite part: The crazy "Play Kit" growth hack inspired by Paul Graham that's fueling their word-of-mouth marketing.

Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?

I'm Melissa Cash, the Co-Founder & CEO at Pok Pok. We created a Montessori-inspired app for kids 2-8 years old that's specifically designed to be non-addictive and educational. Think of it like all of the toys scattered on the floor of your living room, but in a super safe digital playroom. There are no rules, no language, no levels to beat or points to score.

Last year we 5x'd our user base, grew MRR 350% and we raised over $10M in venture capital in the last three years. We're now one of the fastest growing kids apps in the world, and the first ever to win both an Apple Design Award and an App Store Award—the Oscars for apps.

A random, cool thing that recently happened is that I was named one of Canada's Most Powerful People of 2024. They obviously didn't have my toddler on the judging panel.

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

I've always been a very creative person with a love for kids and toys (my first real job was at a toy store). But the last thing I ever thought I would become is a startup CEO.

I moved from Canada to Germany after university. I couldn't speak the language and had no clue what I wanted to do with my life. I met a woman at a bus stop who happened to work at Disney, and three months later I was hired to design and oversee baby and toddler product development there.

Six years later I moved back to Canada, got a job at a tech startup and met my husband-and-wife co-founders Esther Huybreghts and Mathijs Demaeght through my brother Ryan (also a Hampton member!).

They wanted to find a healthy, safe way to introduce their then two-year old son to technology, but everything on the market was either an overstimulating, addictive video game or a boring pedagogical app that just had kids memorize and regurgitate information instead of doing deep thinking and learning.

After working in the children's space for years I was sick of seeing the same products just being made over and over again, just with different IPs. To really make screen time for kids better, we had to do more. And I was really excited by the challenge of helping raise the next generation of creative thinkers through healthy, creative play and technology.

They had the idea, my gut made the decision and my brother and his business partner convinced me I could actually start and run a company. The rest was easy. Just kidding, it was the opposite actually. But it felt simple because I was so passionate about the mission and I was so confident in Esther and Mathijs' creative vision. I was certain we were the right people to do it, even though I had major impostor syndrome.

We started tinkering with toys and talking to everyone we knew with a toddler. Those first months were incredibly joyful and fun, consisting mostly of us just playing and reminiscing about our childhoods. We built prototypes and tested them with kids. Once the pandemic started, our playtesters asked if all of their friends could be testers too. Suddenly, we had over 100 families using the app daily and we were still a year away from release. It was clear we were onto something.

Take us through the process of building and launching the first version of your product.

Esther and Mathijs are the creative visionaries behind Pok Pok's minimalist, Montessori-inspired design. We wanted it to be simple and soft on the eyes and ears to make sure it never overstimulated kids or caused a meltdown when screen time had to end. We also wanted to make sure it was never annoying for the parents to overhear either.

This all felt really obvious to us, but somehow no one else had ever approached children's digital content this way.

We tested every iteration of every activity we developed with kids from the beginning. Toddlers are brutally honest, so it was always very clear when something sucked. We worked closely with educational advisors like a Paediatric Occupational Therapist, Early Childhood Educators and a Neuroscientist to make sure we were getting all of the details just right.

Two weeks after we launched the app we won an Apple Design Award, kickstarting our early growth and critical acclaim. We got a ton of press. Many other awards and accolades followed, encouraging a lot of word of mouth in those early days.

Our big challenge was that many parents were (and still are) often just looking for the ABCs and 123s type of education app. They questioned how to play with Pok Pok and asked us how they should teach their kids how to use it. We spent ages trying to solve this problem and are frankly still finessing it. Pok Pok is like playing with art supplies, wooden blocks or a marble run. There's no right or wrong way to use any of those things. It's terribly simple, but figuring out how to communicate it properly was the crucial challenge.

Since launch, what growth channels have been most effective for you?

Earned PR and word of mouth fueled our growth for the first year. We didn't do any paid marketing for a while.

Influencer marketing, affiliate marketing and Meta are some of our most reliable growth channels. However, Meta is a volatile, expensive channel and our performance there still fluctuates.

We thought a lot about where parents go for advice, tips, etc. It's to three people—the teacher, the pediatrician and their parent friends. Those parent friends are why influencers and affiliates work so well, when done correctly. We've experimented with tons of different approaches and find the most effective are the most niche, like Montessori Mom influencers.

We do this crazy thing inspired by Paul Graham's Do Things That Don't Scale essay. We send physical Play Kits to families for free during their free trial. They include a handwritten note for the parent from my co-founder and I, a few recyclable craft activities for kids, and stickers. Families LOVE them. The parents are in shock that we actually send them something so cute and personal for free, and the kids are just so thrilled to get mail (what toddler gets mail!?), so parents share on social media too. It works wonders for top of funnel conversion rates and retention.

Here's a video of our crazy play kit story.

Did you ever have an "oh shit" moment where you thought it wouldn't work?

Not really, but we did have a lot of moments between the initial organic rush post-launch and starting paid marketing where we thought, "shit, our product is too niche and we might have to change it" to grow and build the business we envisioned. Luckily that wasn't true, it was that we were explaining our value propositioning all wrong.

What we thought people cared about (open-ended play, child-led learning, creative development) was of little interest to parents. What they did care about was non-addictive, gentle screen time that's low-stimulation and worked offline. It was a very important lesson in speaking to users from day zero and never stopping.

This is when the word "Montessori" changed our entire marketing strategy.

We'd always developed Pok Pok with a Montessori lens (not exclusively, but heavily inspired by it). Yet it never occurred to us to market it as such.

Turns out, even though most people don't know what "Montessori" even means, they associate it with all of their most important core values when it comes to technology and their kids. Safe, educational, premium, quiet, gentle, etc.

We changed the app name, plastered it everywhere and started talking about Pok Pok as a Montessori-inspired app. It was the most obvious thing, but we almost completely missed it.

Can you break down the keys to this business model for us? What makes it work? And What do outsiders typically not understand about your industry?

Pok Pok is a monthly or annual subscription with a 7 day free trial. We have a hard paywall because our user isn't our customer. Parents need to commit to a subscription to get a free trial (and can unsubscribe within the trial period without being charged). This works for us because we can't expect a four-year-old to convert from trial when they get locked out, have to select a plan, enter a credit card, etc.

In 2023 we 5x'd our user base, grew MRR 350% and more than doubled the content in the app. We've raised over $10M in venture capital in the last three years and will be profitable in the next year-ish.

In the last two years we've focused on driving fast growth with performance marketing and growth experiments (aka tweaks to the app/funnel itself). The majority of our spend is on Meta and influencer marketing and we'll continue to focus here as we test new channels this year. We'll spend over $1M on paid marketing in 2024.

We've also made significant leaps in top of funnel and bottom of funnel conversion rates through product tweaks, such as adding more screens to our onboarding flow, tweaking copy and or tinkering with pricing.

Our next big milestone is releasing on Android this fall. We've been exclusive to iPad and iPhone for the last three years. This exclusivity was important because it allowed us to focus, keep the team lean in the early days and focus on the platform with the highest revenue potential.

Next we'll tackle more STEM-based toys, giving kids innovative new ways to explore math, physics, chemistry, biology, etc without rote memorization.

What platform/tools are absolutely crucial for your business?

Notion and Slack keep us organized and on track.

We're a big Apple-centric company, so all of our hardware is Apple and we draw some of the artwork in the app on iPad with Apple Pencil. We also use ToonBoom, Photoshop and Procreate for creative development.

The game part of Pok Pok is built in Unity. We also use Mixpanel, Firebase, RevenueCat, Singular and AppFigures for various analytics and data tracking.

My personal favourite tool is Pitch. It's a much better Keynote/Powerpoint.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

Creativity Inc. was a very influential read for me about five years ago. It showed me how to cultivate a creative culture and mindset amongst our entire organization, not just the design team.

The We Can Do Hard Things podcast is what reminds me that we can actually pull this off. The content has absolutely nothing to do with business, but it restores my faith in our ability to do hard shit every day.

Know Your Value was a book I read eons ago, but I never forgot Mika's teachings about finding self worth. An important asset in designing your own career, compensation and a culture where employees feel truly valued.

My latest read was Andrew Wilkinson's Never Enough. While I'm not quite encroaching on his billionaire status (sense the sarcasm), it was a stark reminder of why we do what we do in business-building. Money and success are probably never going to be "enough" for most of us entrepreneurs. His story helped me re-focus on my own core values, and why building a company that makes cultural impact is really the reason I got so excited about in the first place.

Where do you see untapped opportunity in the market? What business do you wish someone else would build that would make your job easier?

I want someone to create a parent mecca app. A place we can all go to figure out the hard shit, from how the hell does my body give birth to what products you really need for baby, how to play with and teach your kids things, how to manage children's mental health and development, etc.

This information already exists, but it's scattered in a million different places and 95% of it is soiled by sponsorships and consumerism. I want Dr. Becky + Emily Oster but for everything parenting-related. No sponsors, no affiliates, all backed in science/recommended by real human parents who don't get kickbacks (kind of like our Hampton #talk-parenting group, but add professionals).

I'd pay a hefty subscription for this for at least 18 years.

What are some strong opinions you have about leadership, and how do you actually put those into practice in your company?

I believe that getting out of the day-to-day work is one of the best ways to yield the greatest innovations and the secret to keeping people happy. Aka take breaks from work. Take holiday. If the sun is out, get out.

We started Black Box Day at Pok Pok a few years ago.

On the last Friday of each month we block our calendars with a black box and go do something interesting. There are only two rules:

1. You have to use the day to work on something Pok Pok related.
2. You can't do your day-to-day job, have meetings or cross anything off your to-do list.

You can do anything else. Literally ANYTHING.

We've had designers go to museums or toy stores. A marketer design and invent new toy content. A PM code bots to automate data flows. And a bunch of people collaborate who never normally work together.

Highly recommend!

Where can we go to learn more?

Website: playpokpok.com

Instagram: instagram.com/playpokpok

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/melissa-cash

Twitter: x.com/melissacash_