News from Our Founder, Dave Schappell

Posted on April 7, 2010 by Dave

There are a lot of changes coming to TeachStreet in the coming weeks. In a recent e-mail to teachers, I explained some of the upcoming changes and the rationale behind them. In this post, we will explain a little more in-depth these changes in an effort to answer any questions you might have.

For those of you who have not seen my letter, a brief passage is below conveying the main points.

“Since day one, we’ve provided our customers with the best tools and services we could, and offered most of them for free. In order to build on the TeachStreet products and services, produce increasing revenue (so that our business will continue to expand), and attract even more students for our teachers, we’re making the following changes in the coming weeks:

  • For Basic members, class listings will cost $3 each for 30 days or 10 student leads.  Pro Members will get 10 free listings per month with additional listings available at a reduced price.
  • Payment processing fees will decrease to 2.9% (from 4.9%) for Basic listings, and we’ll remove the 2.5% New Student fee.  Payment processing fees will continue to be waived for Pro members.
  • All teachers (Pro and Basic) will now have access to all teacher marketing tools, including our HTML Craigslist templates

We’re confident that these changes will make TeachStreet better for both you and students.  Our entire team is dedicated to keeping TeachStreet the best online marketplace for your teaching business. Onward!”

We believe these changes will make TeachStreet a better place for teachers and students; however, we also want to make the this transition as easy as possible for users. Therefore, we’ve tried to anticipate, and answer, several questions that we think our teachers will have (see below).  We’re sure that you will have additional questions or comments that are not answered below — please feel free to ask your questions in the comment section below or contact us directly at help@teachstreet.com.

FAQs

I thought TeachStreet services would always be free. Why are you now adding fees?

When we first launched TeachStreet, we thought that we could offset free listings by charging transaction fees on payments that we processed on the website. We underestimated the demand from teachers to just handle transactions directly with students, in a variety of ways (cash, checks, existing credit card solutions, or many other methods).  To make these direct transactions work financially for us (since we don’t then get compensated for making the student-to-teacher connection), we were left with either charging ‘per lead’ that we sent to teachers (which is difficult for many teachers to understand, and would incur many customer service problems) or to charge a much more familiar ‘listing fee’.  The latter ‘listing fee’ is much more familiar to teachers, who already pay for other forms of advertising — so, we chose the ‘listing fee’ model, and tried to price it at a level that is far below alternative services/solutions.  We truly hope that it works for you.

Note that Pro members will continue to enjoy free credit card processing, and will also receive 10 free listings per month, with discounted price listings ($1.50) for any beyond 10 each month.

How could listing fees be good for anyone other than you, TeachStreet? Isn’t this all about making money? What about the lost class listings?

You’re right —  we fully admit that the listing fees will help us make more money. That revenue will help ensure that we’re here over the long-term, to enhance our services and assist you in building your teaching business. But this isn’t just about making money — we truly are listening to the needs of teachers — many of you love our service, but wish we’d get more ‘out of the way’ with student-to-teacher communications. So, we’re going to do just that.

And trust us — we’re definitely worried about losing class listings, from teachers who aren’t open to paying listing fees. But if we’re not earning their monthly $3 listing fee, then it would probably be better for them to try alternate marketing tools. Having fewer teachers and listings, in your category, may help YOUR listing get that much more exposure, and more students. So, more listings isn’t always better — rather, we want to build a community that has all great listings, and where all of our teachers are successful, with us!

What does “last for 30 days or 10 student leads” mean?

Each Basic class listing posted to TeachStreet will have a fee of $3 and a lifetime of either 30 days or 10 student leads, whichever comes first. One student lead will be counted towards the Basic listing whenever a student does any of the below actions (for that listing):

  • Sends a message
  • Calls via CallTracker
  • Enrolls for a class

To help measure student leads, the teacher dashboard is being updated to track these actions for each listing and teacher profile. Once a listing has reached 10 students leads (or the end of its 30 day period), it will expire (not visible any longer to students but still visible when a teacher logs in) or auto-renew, if the teacher requested that when creating their listing. An email notification will be sent for listings nearing expiration, and teachers can renew, pause or edit their listing at any time.

What will happen to my current listings that are already posted to the site?

Current listings on the site will stay active for a period of time, that we’ll announce when we fully implement these changes (we’re still working on many of the modifications). This means that your current free listings will be not be immediately affected or paused/taken down when we introduce the new listing fees.

We are doing this to keep good listings on the site, and to give our current teachers time to get comfortable with the new listing fees, dashboard, and other services.

What are some of the other changes coming?

Other changes coming to the site are:

  • Newly enhanced Teacher Metrics Dashboard with better stats to monitor your student visits and leads (enrollments, messages and calls);
  • Placement in search results will no longer be significantly reduced if you do not accept TeachStreet Payments;
  • The ability to Feature a listing in premium locations throughout the site (homepage, bi-weekly student e-mails, search, category pages, and more) for a small monthly fee;
  • And new Manage Listings page that integrates fees, leads and more.

What are the tools I will now have access to as a Basic member?

Basic members will have access to the complete set of TeachStreet marketing tools (that currently are reserved for Pros). These include:

What are you doing to get more traffic to TeachStreet and my listings?

Many of you are not aware of it, but TeachStreet traffic has continued to grow rather significantly, and we’re seeing this growth across ALL cities in the United States (not just the 7 markets that we officially ‘launched’) and across ALL subjects — really, it’s been fairly rapid/high-quality growth from Google, Yahoo, Bing, Twitter, Facebook and more.  You can see what that traffic looks like, and learn more about the site visitors, here:

In addition, many teachers aren’t aware that we also syndicate listings out to other services such as Oodle (www.oodle.com) and Eventful (www.eventful.com), both of which then help get your listings promoted in other places such as Facebook, MySpace, AOL, and more. And, we’re constantly experimenting with other traffic-driving partnerships, such as traffic deals with newspaper websites, link partnerships with sites like Education.com and 1000Markets.com, and more.

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Many things will be changing in the next couple of weeks, and we are still in the process of making and determining the best way to integrate these changes in order to ensure a smooth transition for users. At the same time, we are very excited about this change for TeachStreet and the opportunities it will bring.

If you have any further questions or comments, please add a comment below, or send us a direct e-mail at help@teachstreet.com.

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