TeachStreet

» see teachstreet.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

I have never taken a yoga class booked through a website, and in 2008 the idea would have sounded like a joke here, where you found a course through a sign in a window or through somebody's cousin. TeachStreet was built for a country where local commerce had already moved online and the missing piece was the small independent teacher who had no way to be found.

Dave Schappell opened it on 21 April 2008 in Seattle, having previously been a product manager at Amazon and a marketing VP at JibJab. The site was two products stacked on each other. Students searched for classes near them, from language lessons to guitar, and teachers got scheduling and lead tools plus a page that ranked in Google without them having to understand why. That second half was the business, since teachers and schools paid for the listings and the pro subscriptions.

Both halves ran on search traffic. When Google's Panda update landed in early 2011 and started demoting pages that looked like thin aggregations of other people's content, a directory assembled out of other people's class listings was close to the shape the algorithm was aimed at. TeachStreet spent the year after that trying to recover ground it had not earned in the first place. In February 2012 Amazon took the team into AmazonLocal, its deals division, and the site closed on the fifteenth.

~ the record ~

~ the panda year ~

Panda is remembered for what it did to content farms, and TeachStreet is the reminder that it also hit companies with a real service underneath. The listings were genuine and so was the money coming in from them. What made the site vulnerable was that all of it was discovered through Google, on pages that were structurally indistinguishable from the pages a content farm generates.

A marketplace whose customers all arrive through somebody else's index is renting its audience by the month. Dozens of businesses found that out between 2009 and 2012, mostly at the same moment, and mostly too late to build a second way in.

~ the letter on the front page ~

The farewell that replaced the site is worth reading, because it did the thing most shutdown notices avoid. It opened with "Wow. I can't believe I'm writing this." It thanked the customers first. The paragraph for the investors said the team wished it had accomplished more but had sincerely given it their best, and the one for the staff hoped they would look back with fond memories, with a joke about beer erasing the other recollections.

Below that sat an FAQ with the practical answers. No refunds on monthly class listings, because more than thirty days had passed since the last teacher payment. Prorated refunds for annual pro members. Instructions for exporting your class data, and a list of six competitors where teachers could go instead, some of which are still trading today.

~ who was left holding a listing ~

Under two weeks is not much notice for somebody whose enrollments for the spring were sitting in a system that was about to be turned off. The team went to Amazon, which is the outcome an acqui-hire is designed to produce, and the teachers went back to whatever they had used before, most likely a phone number and word of mouth. Between the two groups, only one had somewhere better to be on 16 February.

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