How a 10-year veteran at Samsung built one of Asia’s top kids’ education apps

How do you get your app pre-installed on almost every Samsung Galaxy device sold in East Asia? Easy: you work at Samsung for 10 years first, of course!

At least that’s how Jung Soo Kim, founder and CEO of Bluepin, went about it.

“I was lucky that I was able to build internal relationships as an employee. I know how the company operates and many of the key people within the company," he says. "This has helped me find success with what I know can be a challenging partner for startups to engage.”

Bluepin’s flagship app KidsWorld acts as a portal for children’s educational content, including ebooks and puzzles. It has over 12,000 unique content items from more than 100 providers that split money from purchases using a profit sharing model. Some of that content is developed internally, but the majority comes from third parties in Korea, Japan, and China.

Pre-installs aren’t the only advantage to having the world’s largest phone maker at your back. "Samsung have 9,000 shops in China and 5,000 of those have KidsWorld marketing material placed in the shop," Kim says. In addition, Bluepin manages all of Samsung’s e-learning services.

A decade into his career at Samsung, Kim came up with the idea for Bluepin, but decided a large corporation was not the right environment to make it. He ventured out on his own to found the company in 2009.

"There used to be many small publishers who were potential competitors. But increasingly they are being forced to move into a partnership model due to increasing competition and marketing budgets," Kim says. While the rest concentrated purely on creating content, Kim pioneered his portal model that would aggregate them all. "Naturally, they are being drawn to the largest platform, which is KidsWorld."

An interactive kid’s book can cost up to US$30,000 to develop, according to Kim. "We have developed a tool that is able to dramatically reduce the cost of development and the time to market our interactive content that can be consumed across mobile platforms," he explains. “To our knowledge there are no other players in this space whose technology has this capability."

The path to graduation

Today, KidsWorld has 3 million monthly active users. It’s the number one ranked app-based content provider in Asia on both Google Play and the Apple App Store. Bluepin generates US$3 million revenue per year, half from KidsWorld and half by developing white-label apps for content providers.

In 2011, Bluepin drew the attention of another big player. Tencent, China’s biggest internet company at the time, invested US$3 million into the startup. The Chinese version of KidsWorld has been downloaded 12 million times including pre-installs.

Bluepin raised another US$4 million from Korean private equity firm STIC Investment just last December. "So far we have spent very little of our investments, so we have around US$10 million that we will channel into our market expansion," Kim says.