The rising birthrate, the gradual increase in home-PC ownership, and the dearth of educational software on the consumer market all suggested to Narodick that an explosive category was about to be born. When she saw a handful of early-education products sell more than 100,000 units each, she knew this was a market that would serve one of her elegant financial models well. "You could see the consumer market for this stuff on the horizon barreling toward us," explains Narodick. "It was a ramp opportunity."
Her scholarly strategy, cautious enough to garner shareholder support, recommended entering educational software gradually. "We'd take it in bite-size increments," Narodick recalls deciding. "Raise a little capital, hit a few milestones, go back for more." Her plan, ambitious enough to demand superb products, would be nothing if not reasonable.
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Narodick's vow to market only the finest software under the Edmark name was a powerful lure for an award-winning educational-software auteur named Donna Stanger.
Stanger, a frugal developer with impeccable credentials as an educator, had both the instincts and the track record, Narodick recognized, to develop Oscar-winning products for Edmark. "I didn't want to do B movies," says Stanger, her soft-spoken manner belying a flinty ambition. Narodick also realized that her gambit to launch an Edmark brand in the educational-software business would be a stillborn fantasy if she failed to find a product visionary.
"It's all about great product," says Narodick. "A brand starts there. It's sustained there. And it can be lost there." Without high-quality products, there would be no fawning reviews, no groundswell of demand, no welcome from the distribution channels, she reckoned.
"We were willing to pay what it would take to get a top-notch developer here," says Narodick. "But four? At once?" That was the bargain struck in November of 1991, when Stanger refused to travel from Rochester, Minn., without her entourage of hotshot programmers. Stanger's "package deal" included three of the "kids" with whom she had been hacking for more than a decade. She called herself their "den mother." Some were alums of her fifth-grade class. All were under 25. None had developed a consumer product before.
In one fell swoop and with no immediate sales boost to offset it, Narodick would have to increase payroll 20% to hire the brood. While she did have $1.6 million in freshly raised equity capital, a cash-flow crisis that only a little more than a year before had forced her to cut salaries and staff was still fresh in everyone's mind. The risk that no products would result was real. But so was her commitment to making products that were so good they'd practically sell themselves. Narodick stopped blinking long enough to see the benefits of importing a team that was already humming: these people knew how to work together, they'd ramp up fast, they'd cut the time to market. She told her board she'd found a "turnkey solution," and before 1991 was out, the Minnesota Four, as insiders came to call them, went west.
The team had its work cut out. Its first products had to be winners. Only a third of the software released in a year ever gets reviewed. Even less of it finds a perch on a retail shelf.
By the summer of 1992, in about six manic months, the team had produced working demos of the two products that would ship that fall. Millie's Math House, a numbers program for preschoolers, targeted a nook in the market where little competition existed. KidDesk, an interface that prevents kids from damaging their parents' files, aimed not simply to exploit the market but to grow it. When parents stopped worrying that Junior might trash the system folder, then they'd be game to buy more kids' software.
With the product still shrouded "in smoke and mirrors" -- "If you were careful and you talked fast enough, you could get through a demo" before it crashed, recalls Narodick -- Edmark took its show on the road. Narodick and her cohorts buckled their PCs into empty airline seats (they were too nervous to check them) and flew to wherever they'd finagled five minutes with a reviewer or buyer.
"We knew we had to get reviews," recalls Narodick. With no direct sales force and no money to advertise, "it was the only cost-effective way for us to talk to our customers."
Mailings, phone calls, and electronic messages exhorted 40 influential reviewers to spare 20 minutes. "If we weaseled even a few minutes with a reviewer, we almost always got some ink," says consumer marketing director Jennifer Cast.
Later that fall the first reviews rolled in. Thumbs up, they said. When the Wall Street Journal's personal-technology columnist published a glowing report a few weeks before the holidays, Christmas came early for Edmark. Calls from buyers and customers jammed the switchboard. Narodick's meticulous plan was working: the products and their plaudits were pulling open doors to distribution.
That first year the company gained distribution with Egghead Software and a smattering of other computer-specialty stores and catalogs. Ingram Micro, the industry's largest distributor, agreed to carry Edmark's wares. The company won the first of more than 55 product awards it would clinch in the next two years. It posted sales of $6 million in 1992. "We were off," says Narodick.
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When vice-president of consumer sales Dan Vetras joined the company, in October 1993, it already owned a trophy case. In it, the gold statuette that Millie's Math House had won from MacUser magazine stood flanked by Codies from the Software Publishers Association. After less than a year in the business, Edmark was racking up its Oscars. "This is stuff I ought to be able to sell by the truckload," figured Vetras, a veteran of DEC and Lotus.
His mandate was clear: take those products and get them into the retail channel. Reams of registration cards, every one read by Stanger and Narodick, confirmed that customers were eager to buy more. The company was introducing two additional products in 1993 -- the second release in its early-learning line, and the first in a new line that Stanger had dreamed up for four- to eight-year-olds, called Thinkin' Things.
