How Numberella Transforms Math Learning for Kids

Jason Hsieh (00:42)
Hello, welcome to another episode of Toy Business Unboxed podcast. I’m your host, Jason Hsieh and today’s guest is Alex, who is an entrepreneur, educator, and the creator of Numberella a world-winning math game that has proven to make math both engaging and fun. When he started out with classroom innovation to connect with the children on the autism spectrum has now become a global phenomenon with thousands of kids improving their math skill while having fun.

And his journey is a combination of creativity, resilience, and also impact, turning his passion from teaching into a product that has been used worldwide in both school homes and even ⁓ digital escape room. So thank you so much for being on our podcast today, Alex.

Alex Newberry (01:24)
Thank you for having me.

Jason Hsieh (01:25)
Yeah, so can you kind of first start sharing with our audience on how do you even start this journey of creating this mass game that you currently have right now?

Alex Newberry (01:35)
So it came out of an observation which was that children, when they stopped being engaged in learning, became very difficult to teach. I intuitively felt that if it was possible to make more of a game of what I was teaching, they would be more likely to listen. so I just brought a couple of dice along to a class.

And the germ of the idea of Numberella Deluxe was just folded pieces of paper with numbers on them and you roll a dice and according to the number on the dice, you pick up that piece of paper. And that tiny little bit of gamification immediately transformed classes. And so I just felt that that was the path to go for teaching kids because kids fundamentally want to play.

So I didn’t really have a bigger idea than that. I just, knew that if the kids were into it, it would likely work with other kids. So I just went on this journey of trying ideas. I mean, I played a lot of games as a kid, so I had a lot of ideas, I guess, you from all of my years of gameplay. I sort of curated a version, a game at university, which was very popular with my friends. So I sort of dabbled without really ever having an intention.

Yeah, that was how it all began.

Jason Hsieh (02:52)
Do you actually, I forgot to ask you before we started recording, but do you actually have a physical copy of the game that you can also show our audience on how it works? Okay, perfect.

Alex Newberry (03:01)
We’ve got one right here.

very simple explanation. you have two components to an Numberella deluxe. One is the math’s component. So on there, you can see a question. This is a true or false card. You can see true or false. So the student simply has to say, is it true or false that…

a rhombus has five sides of equal length. If they say true, then they would get no money. But if they say false, then they win this many ant coins. And the game comes with, this is a bit harder to show you, so I’ll just have to bend the screen. But there we go. These are these are Antcoins, the money, the currency of the game.

And that makes a massive difference to learning to count when you actually have money. Because even though they’re just pieces of wood, you immediately feel a sense of possession over them. And you hate it when you lose money and you love it when you make money. You know, you’ve got your maths component, which is earning money for answering questions. And then you have a luck

Jason Hsieh (03:52)
True

Alex Newberry (04:02)
component, you see this magic wand, well, if you get the question right, then you roll a dice and times it by 10. And you get that much more money, right? means that this card could be worth up to 120. So it immediately gives it another gear, if you like, as a as an experience.

Jason Hsieh (04:04)
okay. interesting. OK, OK.

Alex Newberry (04:22)
Because it’s a magic times 10, if you roll a one and get one times 10, everyone else who’s watching the game will feel happy that you only rolled a one. know, Schadenfreude means they want you to roll a one because they want you to get as little as possible. Whereas if you roll a six and get 60, then you feel great because, you know, you maxed it out. And then you’ve also got this time component here. So you can play the game using time pressure, which means that the other players in the game can hold a sound timer.

They can put pressure on whoever has to answer the question. So you have all of these forces which make this process fun, right? Just the idea of answering a maths question. So that’s kind of the maths component. And then you have the other component, which is sort of luck and strategy, which is from these fortune cards. And there’s five of them. So the one that everyone enjoys is the thief.

Jason Hsieh (04:58)
Okay.

Alex Newberry (05:13)
So you can play it to your opponent, then you can steal this many Antcoins off them. That’s pretty fun. But then if you have this card, the Ronnie Resist, then you can block them. So you just have sort of classic gameplay. I try and steal your money. You can stop me doing it. So, you know, that’s fun. And then you have the Jin Genie card.

Jason Hsieh (05:14)
Okay.

Okay.

Alex Newberry (05:38)
which allows you to get money from the bank. So it’s basically just play the card, get money. And then you have this card, is an interesting combination of a teaching tool and also an engagement tool. So let’s say that you read the question, a rhombus has five sides of equal length and you don’t know the answer. I, as the teacher could play Harry hijack so that you don’t feel embarrassed.

by your lack of knowledge. Okay, so in other words, I take pressure off you and I then get to answer the question. All right. Now I answer the question and at the end of that process, both players roll a dice and whoever wins the dice duel gets to keep the card and get the money.

Jason Hsieh (06:09)
I see, okay. Oh, interesting.

Alex Newberry (06:21)
I have the bonus. So what that means is that you who didn’t know have been saved from feeling embarrassed, I then can explain to you and you listen because you know that when I finished you’re going to get a chance to roll the dice and maybe you can get the money. So you keep this sort of this tension over that whole process.

where the student is still engaged because they know that there’s a game to play and they’re going to get cash. Maybe they get cash at the end of it. And in the hands of other students, of course, it means if you’ve got four kids playing the game, anyone who’s got a Harry hijack is listening to the question because they want to hijack it. So you get the attention of all students and they are then thinking about a rhombus.

Jason Hsieh (06:59)
Mm-hmm.

Alex Newberry (07:07)
and whether or not it has five sides. you’ve got lots of mechanisms in the game which make it really fun to play, but also very effective as a teaching tool because, you know, in any box, you’ve basically got a syllabus. So this level two box would have the grade six syllabus and it’s got some grade five and some grade seven in it as well.

So in a US context, you can use it to teach or atleast to revise syllabus. Because obviously, the questions come up at random. But there’s a box to play if you want to get kids back up to speed or whatever. Then it’s a great tool for that. Yeah, I mean, it’s hard to explain it without playing it. But hopefully, that gives you a little idea.

Jason Hsieh (07:50)
Yeah, thank you so much for the explanation. that actually kind of already answered my next question. It’s like, what is the secret behind the success? It sounds like it’s the engagement, the interactiveness, and also really trying to make sure all the kids is kind of engaging when other player is playing or participating in the round. But so far, based on all the different years that the product has been in the market, what are some of the feedback that you also

hearing from the teacher and the students playing the game.

Alex Newberry (08:20)
Yeah, mean, feedback is hard to come by in places like Amazon. Generally, I think people don’t feedback pretty very easily. But when we do get feedback, it’s generally saying that the kids loved it and asked to play again. From teachers, we have great feedback, such as one teacher who I actually visited in Georgia.

I went to her classroom and saw her using it and she’s a gifted teacher at Tunnel Hill, elementary. she plays it once a week, every week, and she says that she’s noticed that her kids are doing better in the Math Olympiads that they attend. So she notices the uptick in mental arithmetic.

And we had a couple of formal surveys of data reports done as well. one district in the US of four different schools taking part in, 70 % of their fourth grade students said that playing Numberella was their favorite activity in math. And in the UK, we had a club running at a school and the kids in the club.

outperformed the kids who weren’t in the club by a factor of just over two in terms of the improvement of their grades year on year.

Jason Hsieh (09:34)
Oh wow Okay, okay.

Alex Newberry (09:35)
We’ve had some amazing data from the game and very strong feedback from people who use it. So it’s been good like that.

Jason Hsieh (09:43)
Yeah, and I think one thing we also discussed before the interview before is during the pandemic, you pivot to some of your product and services to more of a digital first strategy. What are some of the challenges and also some of the success when you do some of the shift into creating more digital based content?

Alex Newberry (10:03)
Well, digital content is much harder to monetize when you’re selling physical things on Amazon, the challenge is to get a conversion ratio that allow you still to make money. It’s pretty easy to sell stuff on Amazon. It’s difficult to sell it at a profit because Amazon, if you give them a budget, they will spend the budget.

Jason Hsieh (10:27)
Yeah, they will spend it.

Alex Newberry (10:28)
So, you know, it’s pretty hard to do. But if you can figure that bit out, then you can build brand awareness and take market share whilst at least not losing money. Whereas if you’re just trying to advertise, say, an escape room using social media ads or Google ads or whatever, you can spend a lot of money very quickly and you get almost nothing back.

So I suppose the simple answer to your question is that selling a digital product, you have to have a much bigger marketing budget, I think, and you have to be willing to lose a lot of money. Whereas with a physical product, I think it’s possible to build slow and also build a bit more rationally because Amazon’s possible to, you can figure it out. Whereas, I mean, I’ve tried a social media strategy, trying to using

Shopify and and advertising on Twitter and doing like posts and hashtags and all of this stuff complete failure like Probably spent $50,000 and made nothing right? So You know, I think that’s the main challenge is the marketing part. I mean on the physical on the sort of creation side, know when you make a physical product you have to put huge effort into getting

It right before you commit to it. Yeah, or is it a digital product? You sort of I found that it’s a little bit more of iterate what you’re doing. So, you you see it on the screen. You realize bits don’t work You tweak it you try it again. It still doesn’t work So it’s more like you make it up as you go along. Whereas with a physical product, you can’t do that. You have to Basically have to play test. So yeah, you know with a physical product there’s there’s no upfront cost really because

I mean, there’s no upfront cost before you commit to production. Whereas with a digital product, you have to commit a lot of money to see anything at all because you’re paying people to code unless you code yourself, which I don’t. So basically you need much more capital, I think, to do digital. And I mean, I had capital to do it, so that was good. But then getting it to work perfectly is hard. And also adapting it, like times change, right? So since I started, we’ve suddenly got AI.

Jason Hsieh (12:33)
Yeah.

Alex Newberry (12:34)
This is a complete, complete shift in terms of what’s what’s possible and you know, developed the number of platform with no thought for AI I don’t actually think it’s creating a problem for us. But as an example of How things can change? mean the number of platforms six years in build you know and We’re just pulling the weeds out of the ground still, you know, it’s like it’s it’s super close to being ready but still one or two things to fix then there’s the next question which is You know, do you continue to build slow? And use physical products to carve open some market share and then Build a user base and invite them in to try the digital stuff Or do you try and market the digital stuff? independently, And yeah, I haven’t ⁓

I decisively decided on the best strategy for that. I have a marketing strategy in mind for it. These are ongoing problems, right? If there was an easy answer, more people, or everyone would be a millionaire, right?

Jason Hsieh (13:32)
For sure, for sure. So I want to kind of transition since you mentioned about Amazon and this is something we also have, you know, quite a bit of experience with as far as putting your particular type of game on Amazon. How has your experience been? And maybe if you can share some of the success and some of the struggle with our listener.

Alex Newberry (13:51)
First of all, Seller Central is an enormous, it’s a TARDIS, right? You’ve got a massive amount of controls and interfaces to understand. So, you know, between figuring out how to do the shipping, it’s not that difficult, but when you don’t know anything,

It’s pretty daunting, right? Because you’re just sending stuff off. shipping to your own country is one thing, but shipping to Australia or Canada, mean, have to jump through a ton of hoops. you have to have certain permissions and numbers. And when I had to get one number for Australia,

So what did I do? I Googled like Australian import export companies and I just started calling them until someone picks up the phone. I start talking to this guy. I tell him what I need. And this guy was the nicest guy you can imagine. Right. So I spoke to him. I said, look, this is what I need.

And he said, fine, I’ll look at it for you. So he goes onto his computer, he looks at it, and he goes, okay, I need a copy of your passport.

Jason Hsieh (14:52)
Hmm.

Alex Newberry (14:52)
I’m like, Identity theft and all of this and I gonna trust him. I’m gonna take the risk right so bang I sent him a copy of my passport I was a bit nervous two or three minutes later bang here comes my code and I’m done into Australia, right? and so now I can send boxes into Australia no problem and Australia has become our most profitable marketplace

So yeah, would say just simply the logistics, the shipping, all of that stuff is a big thing to understand. And then compliance. wow.

Jason Hsieh (15:26)
Yeah, compliance it is very tricky. I’m dealing with that on a daily basis.

Alex Newberry (15:31)
You’ve got to have your certificates from the chemical tests and Yes, that stuff changes. You need to do new chemical tests sometimes And amazon if they don’t like it bang they shut you down and then yes, and then you go through seller central and of course the help in seller central Is often, you know one feels not speaking english as a first language And so You know you you write an email

and you get a response which doesn’t seem to have understood your email at all. then four emails later, you get an email that says, you email us again about this, we’re going to close your account. And then it’s like.

Jason Hsieh (15:59)
That happened as well,

Alex Newberry (16:09)
What am I going to do? And this is very tricky. So then you have to call them up. And ultimately, if you’re patient and polite and kind, generally, I think you can make it happen. But I’ve had some terrible, terrible things happening. You feel like you’ve got a bit of momentum, and then it gets shut down because of compliance. And then you’re offline for three months while you’re trying to fix this.

you know and Yeah, so all sorts of things because so that’s a massive challenge on amazon is compliance So the advice I’m giving anyone looking to launch Is do not cut corners on compliance? Spend the money you’ve got to spend to make sure you’ve got every bit of paper you could possibly have Because if they come knocking at your door and you can’t show them what they want to see you get shut down

Jason Hsieh (16:56)
Yeah. And

for the kids products, sometimes they have some additional requirements including the children product certification. Sometimes they will be asking for the packaging images as well. And that is just to get your foot into the door because right after that, you need to work on your listing images, your copy, SEOs, videos. Then you need to do the advertising and also make sure everything is set up.

Your catalog is also need to set up. This is quite a bit of step. Definitely not the most easy platform to use. that’s why we have like a whole team just for Amazon. But what is your experience working with Amazon? Are you currently just building out your own team right now or are you partnering with other companies?

Alex Newberry (17:39)
I’ve partnered with another company. I I partnered with them for nine months They’re called asteroid X. they work out of Toronto and They are It’s basically an India based team and they run the ads for you It’s not a sort of it’s not a crazy charge

it’s $450 a month for one account with however many products. And then if you want to add other marketplaces, an extra $150 a month, it may have changed. I may have gone up. I’m not sure. So I brought them on board because I didn’t feel that I had the real expertise to run my own Amazon campaigns. I’d done it. I’d asked a couple of other people to come in.

Over the years that I’ve been doing Amazon a couple of times I just shut the ads down because I just got hit with massive bills and I didn’t really understand how to fix it You know, so I tried a lot of things they are, you know, sort of a bonafide operation and They took over the account and basically, you know sales improved but what they weren’t able to do was make sales improve enough

the cost of employing them allowed the business to be profitable. basically they never got the ROAS in the US profitable, even if I hadn’t had to pay them. They were unable to do it.

Jason Hsieh (18:52)
I see. Okay.

Alex Newberry (18:54)
Yeah,

and Basically, although we had one or two good months the overall picture after nine months was that The account was not going to be profitable with their managing it. So I I decided to stop working with them I decided that in order to make this work I had to take it on myself because otherwise it just didn’t seem like it would work so I felt like

Jason Hsieh (19:14)
believe it is a more holistic approach based on what you just shared with me. That approach is a little bit different on how we do it because we don’t just tackle the problem on the advertising side, but we are also looking at clicks rate. How can we maximize the hero images doing different A-B testing? And we are also trying to maximize on the conversion rate by testing or create different iteration of the copy and also the listing build up itself.

And based on our experience, think sometimes when some company only focusing on advertising but nothing else, it kind of, it just don’t get as many results. But thank you so much for sharing that. I think that’s a very interesting kind of case study based on your experience when you’re working with a company that only do advertising

Alex Newberry (19:57)
They did images as well. I’ll tell you a funny story about the images. I had their design team take the images I already had, which I’d got done by a professional photographer, and they were nice images. They tarted them up. We went forward with this new set of images. Again, it seemed like they were doing something good.

So, you know, sales picked up a little bit. And then something happened about six weeks before Christmas, which is Amazon suddenly changed all our images from the new ones I’d done back to the old ones nothing we could do would would get Amazon to change those images back like we couldn’t upload new is like they took control of our listing like no, you must use these images now. We had our best ever.

Q4 of 2024 was our best ever sales. I was sold more in Q4 than we did in Q1 to 3. So yeah, it was a brilliant period We got we got the advertising sorted and you know, it was great but I suppose the moral of the story is that Like the creative work apparently Amazon chose the images which they felt would perform better we never did they be testing on that although

I know about A-B testing, we haven’t done it. But anyways, I don’t know, it’s interesting. And I looked on other toy listings, and I found some of the images that were in our A-plus content was also in the other people’s A-plus content, like family sitting around the table. obviously, there’s like an image library, and teams of creatives are taking the same image and using it. So maybe…

I had photos of kids in classrooms and stuff that was organic and obviously not done by a creative team. Maybe those images work better. There’s huge amount of things that you have to think about.

Jason Hsieh (21:44)
Yeah, for sure. Thank you so much for sharing with us some of your experience. I want to transition about the plan that you have for 2025. ⁓ Can you also share some of the new product that you’re currently working on?

Alex Newberry (21:59)
Yeah,

of course. So part of the Numberella range is a range of books. So these are brain training books, which look like this. And these books come with stickers. This book doesn’t actually have any stickers in it, you’ve got a sticker book in the back.

And then you’ve got your various different types of stickers. So these are bespoke, like you can’t get these anywhere else. So they’re very big, very shiny. And you use them to create engagement, right? There’s a lot of talk about how to get kids fluent in arithmetic. And there’s a ton of books out there, which get you to write sums. Now,

These books can double a kid’s fluency in three weeks.

Jason Hsieh (22:40)
Hmm.

Alex Newberry (22:41)
Why are they so effective? Well, the reason is that you use these stickers and things like setting personal bests and goals creates a motivational arc. And because when kids are engaged, they learn so much faster. If you give them that motivational arc, then they learn more quickly. So this is the story of 2025. The books are old. I’ve had this range of books for several years, we haven’t tried to push them on Amazon yet.

Jason Hsieh (23:05)
Okay.

Alex Newberry (23:05)
So,

know largely because it’s only since in for the last year that you’ve been able to advertise books until then You couldn’t do advertising for books. So now that opportunity has opened up. We’ve got 35 titles. So that’s 35 new to push so of course if we can get some traction on these products, then our turnover is gonna increase significantly and

Yeah, that’s the first thing. We’ve got several other games in final stage play testing. And I may be able to do one of them, which is called Numberella Junior, in time for Christmas 2025. So I mean, very busy, lots of things to do. But as I said at the beginning, if you can get stuff, so you’ll notice in this book, what have you got at the back?

You sort of see it. You’ve got these QR codes, right? If someone buys a book They get the stickers like scan the QR code. Where do they go? They go to our shop not to Amazon, right? So You know, you can maybe begin to own that the cycle like because on Amazon you don’t you never you never know who’s bought your stuff, right? So you can’t really own the relationship Amazon owns the relationship

Jason Hsieh (24:16)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alex Newberry (24:21)
And so they’re trying to control they kind of locking you down so that you can’t go viral outside of their platform

Jason Hsieh (24:27)
Yeah.

Alex Newberry (24:28)
So at some point you have to try and build footfall to your own shop Which is where you know where Shopify comes in so I’d like to start doing that this year Amazon are taking roughly 30 % of every sale we make that’s a lot You know Yeah, so it’s pretty hard to be profitable on Amazon. I think it’s accepted right? It’s a it’s a wholesale margin in a B2C marketplace. So overall, it’s not a good deal for the businesses. But if they weren’t there, it’s really hard to get anywhere if they’re not there. you sort of accept that, like, Amazon are allowing me to build my brand, right? And that’s what I’m paying them to do. So I don’t feel bitter about the 30 % they take. I’m very grateful for the fulfillment by Amazon because

Otherwise I’d have to employ five people and have a warehouse and all this stuff. Yeah. I think Amazon overall like is amazing thing for an entrepreneur. I think it gives you a platform and if you use it right, you can get a place from which to expand and build a bigger operation. So I think Amazon is great overall.

Jason Hsieh (25:32)
I see. Well, thank you for sharing that as well. As well kind of wrapping up in today’s interview, if you had to share just one piece of advice with someone that’s getting started in the toys and game industry, what would that be?

Alex Newberry (25:44)
Playtest. Simply because it took me five years to make Numberella Deluxe. And after four years, I was ready to put money on and print it. I went into a school and 25 kids played the game. And at the end of it, the teacher had them all write a report on the game, right? And the report, all of them, all of them said, this game would be better if it had coins. Like we love the game we love the game everyone said we love the game This is the you best game we’ve played forever, but it would be better if it had coins and I was like and then it took me another year of play testing with coins To make the prototype that then went into production So you imagine if I hadn’t done that play test? No coins and it wouldn’t have been as successful and the coins now

I’m developing about eight games at the moment and all of them use the Numberella, the Deluxe infrastructure. So the coins, the fortune cards, that world I use for so many different things. Like I’ve got a poker game, which uses the coins. I’ve got a memory card game where I just put chips on cards and it just, makes it so engaging for the kids. And these games do things which Numburella Deluxe can’t do because…

They’re kind of nimbler and they work arithmetic in a way that you know, nothing else can I mean genuinely like we’re talking about Game-changing products that I’m gonna bring to market in the next couple of years. They’re gonna change arithmetic learning They do I do it every day with kids. I’m you know, I see it myself. So I’m very excited about all of that. But yeah, the advice is Play test and when you think you finished you haven’t you’ve got to do another 20 % more play testing do it to death

You think about Tesla and their self-driving. Now Tesla self-driving has been about 99.9 % for about five years. And yet there are so many permutations on the road that things keep happening that mean they can’t get it stamped as safe because there’s always another thing that can happen because there’s so many eventualities. Games are a bit like that.

You’ll figure out the main sequences of gameplay in a month. But the final 10%, that could take years to figure that out. you’ve got to experience them to understand how the game really works. And you have to understand how the game works before you print it. Because otherwise, people will go, this is a shit game.

Jason Hsieh (27:57)
Yeah.

Alex Newberry (28:08)
and then you you won’t sell anything on amazon because you will have terrible terrible feedback, you know, so it’s like You got to be so meticulous invest in play testing invest time in play testing and Don’t be frail Like sometimes stuff doesn’t work and you have to accept that you might think this is such a good idea and like nope It wasn’t a good idea. Okay. I wasn’t I’m not a genius after all, you know. You’ve got to be persistent, you’ve got to be humble, you’ve got to be patient, but you’ve got to be excited as well. You’ve got to have the dream to pull you forward, because if you don’t have that idea that this game could change the world, what’s going to get you up in the morning?

Jason Hsieh (28:45)
Yeah, for sure. Thank you so much for sharing that. is the best place for people to find you online?

Alex Newberry (28:51)
numberellaworld.com is the base and you can go in there and kind of find out all about everything. So yeah, that’s the gateway. Go there.

Jason Hsieh (28:59)
Okay, sounds good. And for our listeners, thank you for tuning in to today’s episode of Toy Business Unboxed Podcast. We hope you have enjoyed today’s conversation and find it insightful and inspiring. If you like what you have heard, be sure to subscribe to our podcast on your favorite platform. So you never miss an episode. We really appreciate your support and we love it. You can leave us a review and share the podcast with your friend and colleague for more resources, tips, and the latest update. We in the toys and game industry, visit our website at toy-launch.com.
Join the conversation and connect with us on social media using #toybusinessunboxed. We’d love to hear your feedback and suggestion for future episode. Until next time, keep innovating, keep creating, and keep bringing joy to toys. This is Jason Hsieh signing off on the Toy Business Unboxed podcast, and we’ll see you in the next episode. Thank you so much, everyone.