Amazon and JibJab Alum Dave Schappell will launch his newest startup, TeachStreet, sometime tomorrow. They will also announce a first round of funding: $2.25 million from Madrona Ventures, Bezos Expeditions and a number of angel investors.
The company, a sort of Yelp for real world classes (cooking, dog obedience, music lessons, ballroom dance, foreign language, golf, yoga, etc.), allows instructors to upload information about classes. Users can look for available classes, and read and write reviews on the course and the instructor.
For now the site will be advertising supported. in the future TeachStreet may charge instructors for premium services. They will become particularly good at promoting quality services to users over time, Schappell says, and they can charge for that. They will also be able to direct highly targeted advertising at users – a book on dog training, for example, to users looking for dog obediance classes.
The service is launching first in the Seattle area and has 25,000 courses in 8 primary categories and 70 subcategories. Most search and browsing, however, is done through tags, which allow for the creation of literally any category of classes.
Dutch startup Libersy,which is creating a distribubted booking system for real world services, is indirectly competitive. For now, Schappell says, TeachStreet will not directly provide booking and calendaring services, but it’s a feature they’ll add in the future.
Nice. I wonder how I could start a class on coaching instruction? That would be fun!
I’ve wanted something like this for a while, though I was never quite sure what it was I wanted. This seems to fill the gap pretty well though. I wonder if it’ll be available in the UK?
Congratulations to Dave and TeachStreet!
I’ve been eagerly awaiting this launch, and I’m lucky enough to live in Seattle, so I’m excited to start learning!
I agree that online reviewing is a positive trend. However, as consumers, it can still be pretty daunting to find quality reviews for a given subject. What’s needed is a consolidated reviews website that’s pretty much a portal to the wealth of online reviews out there. Review To You (www.ReviewToYou.com) is a great start at attempting to achieve this. However, I think users need to first realize that the reviews they find on popular search engines like Google are usually paid for or untruthful. Once this realization’s made, then I think more and more users will begin to flock to sites like ReviewToYou.com.
I love this idea – it competes with the bulletin boards of coffee shops and supermarkets, and the inefficiency of word-of-mouth. Lots of challenges in scaling due to the (extreme) local nature of the providers (neighborhood based in many cases) but the idea is a good one. They are in a great position to drive SEO for instructors & service providers who don’t know anything about the Internet and may not even have a website (most don’t).
Congrats to TeachStreet.
Its surprise that these niche “community” sites get the fundings.
interestingly enough, a friend of mine has a pretty decent implementation of something similar as part of graduate class project work !!
http://findguruonline.com/
Try it in firefox/Flock
Well.
Click For lessons, now relaunched as TakeLessons has been doing this for about three years now.
You don’t have to wait. Check it out!
http://takelessons.com/
Gurinder…
Local lesson advertising have been screaming to move beyond hand-scrawled flyers on telephone poles, and TeachStreet sounds like it will be the perfect online solution.
Having had the pleasure of working with Dave before, I have no doubt that his passion, intelligence and user focus will lead to a phenomenal site.
Onward!
If you want to learn or teach anywhere other than Seattle, come and see us at School of Everything (http://www.scho...feverything.com).
Techcrunch UK story here:
http://uk.techc...seed-investors/
We’ve been up and running for about a year and are based in the Minneapolis area.
We’ve built in booking capabilities for individual private lessons, as well as group classes/sessions. Integrated with Google Checkout for payments of lessons to enable the instructors to reclaim much of their income that gets lost in the “i forgot my check this week”, or “Can i pay you next time” cycle.
We’ve booked about 1000 lessons through the site. We’ve had instructors register from San Diego to New York, and soccer, to golf, to educational tutors.
Its good to see others get into this market!
It doesn’t seem to work with locations outside the United States. I tried Montreal, QC and got “We didn’t understand the location you entered.”.
Isn’t that a little geo-retarded on their part?
adding this helps…
http://www.bookalesson.com
@Et: as noted in the article & on their website, they’ve only launched in the Seattle metro for now. other metros coming later this year.
so no, not “geo-retarded”… just getting started.
Why did you delete my earlier comment Michael? There’s no need to be afraid of people pointing out factual inaccuracies in your post. You are about 2 months late to announcing their financing round. Seattle PI and PE Week Wire already covered this.
You want geo-retarded? Try living in a small town in the US…same deal.
Oh, by the way, in the original post, I suspect you meant ‘distributed’, not ‘distribubted’.
Everyone — thanks for the support, and the err… constructive criticism.
#7 — we’re huge TakeLessons/ClickForLessons fans — just trying to expand to even more categories with incredibly deep/broad coverage, and to make it ultra-convenient for teachers and students to connect.
#9 — we like what School of Everything’s doing as well — obviously, we share some common motivations!
#11 — yes, we may be a little geo-retarded… also a little search-confused… calendar-befuddled… and content-creation-frazzled… but we’re working on all of the above… it’s just Day One… tried to focus on a great experience for customers in our launch city, and then will build on feedback from there
Onward!
Hi Everyone,
Congrats to Dave and the team for a wonderful-looking site and for the funding. It takes a tremendous amount of time, effort, and commitment to go live.
While http://takelessons.com and Teachstreet.com does cross paths somewhat, we both have very different business models. Our focus, as Dave mentioned, is very much in the arts. It’s what we know, love, and are good at.
Our model is in the style of Learning Annex. We are more of a national learning center (422 cities) as we physically hire instructors to work for us, do criminal background checks, and manage the business side of things including sales, support, enrollment, tuition, billing, collections, and scheduling for all our instructors.
For those who were disappointed that there was just one city, I’d say to give them some time. Hyper-local marketing is an arduous process. Remember Yelp started in just one city and has done very well by strategically planning their geographical growth.
We’ve been anxiously awaiting teachstreet’s arrival for several months. We think it’s a great consumer tool to gain valuable feedback for the learning community as it taps into the long-tail of the curiosity of the crowds.
Congrats again, Dave.
Warmest Regards,
Steven
Congratulation Dave and your team !
I have just started same business in Japan from this march.
And yes, we have reservation function too.
http://www.yokapro.com
It will be English in May. Now it is only Japanese.
When I first find out this news, I was rushed to translate my site to English.
But day after, I found comment telling there are lots of same kind of site.
It is interesting to have similar sense.
And it was very surprised to see $2.25M funding or other website’s funding.
Maybe I should “Go west” for the gold.
Anyway, give me a favor,
please leave Japan and Asia for me and my website “YokaPro.com”. ^^
And I hope, we will meet someday to collabolate !
Good luck !
Best regards,
Masaki Michael Fukuda
info @ yokapro.com
My service is added on this site was added to this service without my permission or request. In their FAQ:
Can I remove or change the ads on my class page(s)?
Note to Teachers—for now, you don’t have any control over the product placements or Ads on your pages, but if that’s something we get a lot of requests for, I’m sure we’ll be able to figure something out. If you have strong opinions about it, drop us a line.
So it appears the only way to do anything is an active opt out of something I did not ask to particpate in. And while this happens all over the web its a bit sad that this could not have been a true social network populated by willing participants in a quality product instead of screen scrapes of non participants unwillingly associated with a poor and unimaginative UI. So whats to congratualate here? Some one stealing other ads and repackaging as their own to sell more ads on a hastily thrown together platform? A sad business and social model if you ask me.