Today we are happy to announce that we’re joining the AmazonLocal team. Sadly, this means that we will be closing TeachStreet. When we opened our doors on April 21, 2008 we had grand aspirations, to create a place to help lifelong learners find great classes and teachers, empower teachers with robust tools to manage their teaching businesses, and enable schools to more effectively generate leads for their classes. Over the last few years we have succeeded in creating what we think is the world’s largest selection of classes and courses, and one of the richest marketing toolsets for teachers and schools, big and small.

To our valued teachers, thank you for your support and being elemental in making TeachStreet something we can all be proud of. To our investors, thank you. You put your faith in us. We wish we had accomplished more, but know that we sincerely gave it our best. And your investment helped us grow as people, and as a team. We’re forever grateful, and will strive to pay it forward. To our current and past employees, thank you. The last few years have been challenging, but so rewarding for having gotten to know, and grow with, one another. We hope you’ll all look back on your TeachStreet days with some fond memories (and that the beer will help erase the other recollections).

And so it goes.

Onward!

We’ve all heard about Google’s famous 20% time, right?  It always seemed like a nice idea, but wasn’t one that we worked into TeachStreet’s routine.  Then, we got a taste of Startup Weekend hackathon energy, and wondered if we could smash together the 20% time and Startup Weekend ideas, and come up with our own TeachStreet Hack Week creation.  So, we did!

We asked everybody on the team to come up with project ideas that we thought we could create during a 4-5 day hackathon.  Pretty much everybody submitted ideas, and the winner was the OnTheWay app.

It’s a pretty simple idea — that is, when you go on road trips, you almost never know about the great stuff that you’re racing by at 70 miles per hour.  I mean, just in Washington we have the World’s Largest Shoe, The World’s Largest Frying Pan, and much more 🙂  Plus, why eat at a terrible restaurant (the first you could find), when instead you may be passing withing a stone’s throw of a 5-star rated gem, that’s been frequented by many of your friends?

So, we built it — or, more specifically, the team built it (while I dug out of my backlog of email, projects, and more). Of course, that didn’t stop me from lobbing in my opinions at every available instance, but people very quickly told me to talk to the hand.

I’m really proud of what the team came up with.  Go give OnTheWay a try.  Just enter in your starting location, your destination, and then check out the interesting roadside attractions.  We hope you love it!

The last few weeks have been pretty darn exciting for TeachStreet’s teachers and classes — long-term efforts we’ve made have started to pay dividends, as TeachStreet’s organic search traffic has continued to surge, and conversions for teachers (leads, enrollments, contacts) have continued to climb.  Needless to say, it makes it easier to get up and fight-the-good-fight every day:

And last night, we made an exciting announcement, and one that we didn’t make lightly — in the next few weeks, we’ll be implementing another element of our long-term business model, as we start charging modest $3 listing fees for Basic class listings (I explain more about the fee change on the TeachStreet Blog).

Obviously, charging listing fees carries risks, with the biggest being that some teachers will not want to pay, and we’ll lose their classes (and selection, which negatively impacts students looking for hard-to-find classes, and great teachers)

But we learned long ago with Amazon Auctions (and eBay paved the way here) that listing fees have other benefits (beyond the revenue implications, of course). They help to increase the overall quality of listings, and the commitment of those who list items (classes, auction items, etc).  And, while we’ll miss the departing teachers and classes, those who remain will get even more exposure, and hopefully will be even that much more ecstatic about (and involved with) what we’re building.

This change in fees also allows us to be even more open to directly connecting students with teachers — in the past, we thought we could make all of our money on transaction fees (for payments made via TeachStreet Payments), but the market told us very quickly that many students and teachers prefer to pay in various ways (cash, check, etc), and when the transactions happened off of TeachStreet, there was no way for us to be compensated for bringing them together (which is, of course, a big part of the value/service we provide).

As I’ve said, we’re truly excited about the change — the increased revenue will help us to continue to build value for teachers and students over the long-term, and the site should become that much more vibrant, with increasing numbers of amazing local and online classes — I invite you to check them out (and go enroll in a class while you’re at it 🙂 ).

Again, read more about the TeachStreet fee changes on our blog.

Onward,

Dave

http://blog.daryn.net/post/285406425/gbb-molly-sports-her-teachstreet-pride