Startup City: TeachStreet

Posted by Mary Janisch on
Thursday, April 8th, 2010 at 1:14 pm

From such viral hits as I Can Has Cheezburger to helpful tools like Walk Score, hundreds of startup companies have their roots in Seattle’s thriving entrepreneurial community. This Q&A is the fifth in a series of interviews with Seattle-area startups.

Dave Schappell, Founder and CEO of TeachStreet

1.  What is TeachStreet?
TeachStreet helps people find classes–local or online–in hundreds of lifelong learning topics. Classes run the gamut from Spanish, piano, yoga and SEO to dog training, wine appreciation and more. If you want to learn it, we’ve got teachers and schools for you.

As a marketplace (like eBay), we help teachers and schools get more students by providing them with easy-to-use tools and services to promote their classes. We offer tools so that independent teachers can set up their classes and collect payment. And we also work with large nationwide class providers (such as Kaplan Test Prep) to generate student referrals.

Essentially, we built TeachStreet to create a place for people to explore their passions and help them enrich their lives through learning.

2.  What are some interesting classes offered on TeachStreet?
Go in and search for the craziest things you can think of, and I bet we’ll have classes for you. Poker? Cat training? Hammered dulcimer? Swordfighting? All our learning categories are listed here.

3.  How large is the TeachStreet community?
We don’t disclose actual member numbers (teacher or student counts), but the website’s been live since April 21, 2008, and in just the last month we’ve had more than 170,000 visitors from more than 170 countries. The great majority of visitors are from the United States, since our local classes are currently restricted to the U.S. But online classes (added late in 2009) are starting to attract students worldwide.

4.  What is your business model?
Primarily, we make money when we generate students and leads for teachers and schools. We collect fees in a variety of different ways:

If we sell a class for a large school (like Kaplan Test Prep or Shoreline Community College), we collect a percentage fee on that transaction. And if a teacher uses our TeachStreet Payments platform, we collect a transaction fee.

Starting this month, we will also charge listing fees and “featured” fees. Featured fees allow teachers to get extra promotion on the  homepage and in emails to students.

Some teachers opt for a paid Pro membership, which gives them additional marketing services and lower payment processing fees. Still other teachers pay us for other kinds of leads or transactions. For instance, some pay on a cost-per-lead or cost-per-click model, depending on their needs.

Finally, a minor percentage of our revenue is collected from contextual advertising (Amazon products or Google ads) on the site.

5.  What has been the biggest challenge for TeachStreet?
Probably getting the right team and work environment. Every startup struggles with this, as the team figures out how they want to work together and how they’ll address the inevitable problems and setbacks. As they say, “it’s a marathon.” So it’s great to have training partners and a support crew that you like spending time with every day. You want people who will challenge ideas and convention, but once you pick a plan, get on board and push behind that goal.

6.  How is TeachStreet evolving? Where do you hope the company will be in 5-10 years?

We’re growing every week and figuring out our business model as we go. We always intended to be in the marketplace space, operating in an eBay-like manner and helping to make happy customers. But it wasn’t until July 2009 that we processed our first student-to-teacher payment, and not until September 2009 that we collected our first Pro member fee. And even later than that when we introduced our first affiliate-based schools. So the revenue/business model has only been reality in the last 6 months or so. It’s been great, as traffic and conversion rates continue to climb, and we make more and more teachers happy by delivering students to them.

Our first goal is to get to profitability, which we’re aiming for in the next year. Then probably to just keep growing to become the first place that schools and teachers go to build their teaching businesses.

7.  What do you predict will be the next big thing in digital media?
On the consumption side, the iPad’s going to be huge. I think people are far underestimating the impact of a transition to tablet devices for media CONSUMPTION. And have you heard of this Twitter thing?

8.  What is your favorite gadget or application at the moment?
Favorite gadget’s my iPhone, by far. I truly love everything Apple (iMac at home, MacBook, iPhone). I have a Kindle, but the love doesn’t run as deep, and I’m sure I’ll transition to the Kindle App (on an iPad) very quickly.

Favorite apps are all-things Google. We run our company on Google Apps (mail, calendar, docs, spreadsheet, wiki) and business tools (Analytics, Webmaster Console, AdSense, AdWords, Website Optimizer).

9. What is unique about the Seattle startup community?
I think it’s very supportive and helpful, notwithstanding my $1,000 fee for consulting advice. Really, there’s an incredible network of resources and events, from Seattle 2.0, to Seattle Tech Startups, to Hops and Chops and more. As an example, I just had lunch today with two startup co-founders (Darien Brown and Jon Hickey — Jon’s an MCDM student) to discuss their startup, YongoPal). Their energy’s infectious!

10. What advice do you have for aspiring entrepreneurs?
Be prepared to learn, every day–there’s so much you don’t know. You need to be willing to not have the right answer and still make decisions, learn and adapt. And, be ready to work harder than you’ve ever worked before. Finally, pick something you really love. Because you’re going to be working at it longer than you think. You probably won’t make much money, and ultimately, you’ll probably fail (the first, second and/or third time).  So love it. And be sure to work with people who you like and who like you.

Mary Janisch is a second-year MCDM student and and a former managing editor of Microsoft Encarta.