I had a most pleasant afternoon meeting with Seattle Piano teacher, Anita Manuel today (that’s her in the middle of the picture!) — we exchanged emails several weeks ago, and she agreed to pop by our offices today, share a tea, and talk a little bit about her business and to give us some feedback on what we’re building.

In a nutshell, Anita’s a walking role model for the TeachStreet educator who we’re trying to empower — she’s been teaching for 6+ years and conducts both private piano lessons in her Seattle home, as well as one-to-one and one-to-many classes at Sherman Clay Pianos, here in Seattle. She has a vibrant teaching business, but would love to add 5-10 regular students to her schedule, and isn’t really sure what the best way is to do that. We talked about some of her options, including some targeted Google Adwords and/or increased activity with her existing online activities with Craigslist and ClickForLessons, but she hasn’t really seen a lot of traffic from them as of late.

In addition to her teaching, she’s very active as the Vice President of the Seattle Music Teacher’s Association, and she mentioned that she could see the site as a great place to teach additional things beyond just music — yes, we love that idea!

She had a lot of great feedback for us (we’ll keep that close to the vest!), and more than anything, it was great to get that much more input and energy regarding the need for what we’re building amongst the teacher/teaching community.

If you’re interested in Piano in the Seattle or West Seattle neighborhood, definitely reach out to Anita on TeachStreet– or here’s a link to her page at Takelessons.com, or reach out to us and we’ll put you in touch with her.

By the way… Anita was surprised that she could easily add video to her web sites/presence — I promised to provide her some links with relatively inexpensive digital cameras and memory cards that she could pick up to do just that (hint, those links will do the trick!).