Local Vertical TeachStreet Goes Live

TeachStreet founder and CEO Dave Schappell and I have been having something of an ongoing dialog about local and how to succeed in the space. He’s now launched TeachStreet, which describes itself as a “website to help students of any age find great local teachers and classes, and to empower teachers with robust online tools to manage their teaching businesses.” Seattle is the launch city with more to come.

The site is providing a range of tools for instructors:

Online Profile Builder: In under three minutes, teachers can create a robust web presence where they can feature photos, sample lesson plans, pricing, and student references;

Search Engine Optimization: TeachStreet was designed specifically to help teachers’ listings be discovered more easily on major search engines including Google, Yahoo! and MSN, providing teachers with an easy way to be found by students; and

Scheduling and Management Tools: To help teachers organize their schedules and manage their workload, TeachStreet offers an assortment of calendering and management tools that let teachers focus their energy on what they do best.

In the latter category the site will compete with “horizontal” online booking services such as HourTown, Booking Angel, GenBook, Libersy and the sales channels that may offer these tools. Online booking is especially well suited to this category of low-risk instruction/classes.

The site is nicely designed and laid out (I especially like the filters). It’s similar in some respects to the already existing TakeLessons.com (which also offers video). The “how-to” segment online is very crowded but not the “Web2Class” vertical, as one might call this.

TeachStreet is in the mold of a social directory (e.g., Yelp) with a very specific vertical focus, but it also provides marketing services (free currently). So it’s both a destination and a marketing tool for instructors.