TeachStreet Inc. was a website that provided information about local and online classes and teachers to students. It shared data like teacher’s backgrounds, training, and pricing. The website also offered online business management tools targeted towards schools and teachers.
The company was founded in 2008 by former VP of Marketing at JibJab and Product Manager at Amazon, Dave Schappell.
TeachStreet's services were free to use for students and teachers in the early days. Later in 2011, the site charged teachers for listings through different pricing plans. However, the service remained free for students. In the same year, the website lost some of its traffic due to the release of Google Panda which introduced a changed ranking algorithm. Soon after that, Amazon acquired TeachStreet.
Amazon acquired TeachStreet as a talent acquisition with all its employees transferring to AmazonLocal. After the acquisition, the CEO of TeachStreet announced that the website would be closing down on February 15th, 2011. After the closure of the website, the CEO advised customers to use any of the alternative websites such as Betterfly, Cragslist, Skillshare, or others that could help teachers market their classes.
While the CEO of TeachStreet didn’t offer any specific details about his work with AmazonLocal, he did express excitement to be working for Amazon yet again. He believed that this was the best result for TeachStreet, a website that had lost a lot of traffic due to the Google algorithm change. Schappell believed that the team would now have the opportunity to work on products that would reach millions.
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