Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By Kevin Leneway
I have a theory. Over the past several thousand years, I’d argue that fundamentally we humans haven’t changed a whole heck of lot. Sure, we have better storytelling methods and more obnoxious efficient modes of transportation , but most of our core needs and wants are surprisingly static. So my theory is that if you want to judge whether or not a startup has potential to reach a mainstream consumer audience, ask yourself the following question: if this service could be brought back in time, would people in that historical period have any use for it?
Now, you have to be a little careful with the assumptions here. For example, if you went back to the early caveman era when people were communicating via grunts and crude gestures, the only site that could get funding would be Digg . So for today’s purposes, let’s go back to ancient Greece. If historians were to excavate Plato’s laptop, what sites would be on his favorites list? Since I’m a blogger, let’s go ahead and start with Twitter. Plato would love it – he could tweet out his latest theories and get real-time feedback. How about eBay? Sure, why not. Plato probably had a few extra copies of the Odyssey or an Apollo statue gathering dust in his basement.
Anyway, you get the idea. And that’s one of the big reasons I chose TeachStreet as the first startup to profile here on the Seattle 2.0 blog. This site passes the Plato test with flying colors. For those of you who don’t know, at it’s core TeachStreet is a place where people can teach or learn almost anything. Users can sign up to teach a class, search for specific classes to take, and discover new and interesting classes being taught in their area. The site launched back in April covering the Seattle market, expanded to Portland in August, and are currently setting their sights on the Bay Area. For more info about the company, check out this great post by John Cook from back when they first launched.
So besides the fact that the company fulfills one of our core human desires to acquire new knowledge, what else are these guys doing that I really like?
Focus on quality over quantity
It must have been tempting back at the beginning to try to come up with an uber-algorithm that would scrape the Internet and pull in class listings from around the world. Instead these guys focused in on one market, hired contractors to create a unique database of known classes, and spent time building a solid community of local teachers. While this model is much more expensive up-front and harder to scale, they are quietly creating a valuable asset (quality class listings) that will become easier and easier to build as they expand out to new markets. Theoretically, as the network effect starts kicking in, each successive class added to the database will be both less expensive and of a higher quality than the class added before it, because they will be relying more on submissions and edits from the people who are actually teaching the classes and less from algorithmic or manual data gathering efforts. How do you know when this happens? When your growth curve looks a little something like this . :)
The world’s best home page
Yes, the home page of TeachStreet.com is beautifully designed, but just like Yelp, IMDB, and Wikipedia, the real front end to this site is Google. Heck, they could throw a Goatse on the front page and they’d probably still keep inching up the SSI . This is obviously a well-known fact within the company, as evidenced by their nicely-formatted URLs and clean descriptions within search results. So far their SEO efforts appear to be paying off, as results for several of the searches I tried listed TeachStreet results above the fold. For some of the more popular searches, they’re also using paid Google links to drive traffic. It sounds like bubble logic to pay for Google ads that take you to a site that is funded with Google ads, but again, each new user advances the network effects, lowers the cost of growing the database, and increases the relevance of the organic search results. They’ve already mentioned plans to move to a freemium model in the future, and have hinted at other monetization strategies going forward.
A healthy dose of humor
Given that founder Dave Schappell used to be the VP of marketing for JibJab (until the Seattle-to-Santa-Monica commute became a little much), it’s no wonder that there is a nice touch of humor sprinkled throughout the site. For example, here’s a snippet from a recent post about 10 ways TeachStreet can help you deal with the falling stock market.
And the number one way TeachStreet can help you out in this situation:
1. We have a wide selection of beer brewing , beer drinking , wine making , wine appreciation , and bartending classes. Let’s face it; sometimes the only thing you can do is drown your sorrows. TeachStreet is here to help. In fact…we might be right there with you.
And they’re not kidding about that. The TeachStreet crew recently helped kick off a weekly networking event at Linda’s on Thursday nights at 6:30pm called Hops and Chops - lots of fun and a good chance to meet some up-and-coming stars of the Seattle tech scene. You can also follow Hops and Chops on Twitter here .
