(Entertainment-NewsWire.com, September 30, 2012 ) San Francisco, CA- Deanna Jump made $1 million by doing what she knew best, making catching and engaging kindergarten lesson plans for other teachers.
Over 15,000 teachers currently attempt to market their materials for teaching through online marketplaces. TeachersPayTeachers (TPT) is the leading marketplace to find and sell your resources for effective teaching. Jump has created 93 separate units and sold over 160,000 of them at $8 per unit.
“My units usually cover about two weeks’ worth of material,” he says. “So if you want to teach about dinosaurs, you’d buy my dinosaur unit, and it has everything you need from language arts, math, science experiments, and a list of books you can use as resources. So once you print out the unit, you just have to add a few books to read aloud to your class, and everything else is there, ready to go for you.”
Deanna is the exception to the rule, to be sure. No other teacher has found the success that he has thus far. However, there are at least two other individuals who have earned over $300,000 through the same system. Twenty other individuals have made over $100,000. Site founder Paul Edelman said, “Of the 15,000 teachers who are contributing, about 10,000 make money in any given quarter.”
Edelman is a former New York middle school English teacher. In 2006, he launched TPT after spending seemingly endless hours preparing for his own classes. “Every night, I would spend two or three hours, at least – and then Sundays I would spend all day and all night preparing and correcting papers,” he says. So to stay ahead of the grind, Edelman began swapping ideas with his co-workers and colleges. When they attempted to utilize online resources, they found the information outdated and lacking in practical use.
“I thought teachers would be more incentivized to post their best stuff and to create even higher quality materials if they had the opportunity to get paid for them,” says Edelman, who now lives in Fontainebleau, France, south of Paris. “I had no clue what I was doing, but I knew it was a really good idea, so I just found my way,” he says, noting he has no tech background. “I read books. I cashed out my retirement fund and sold my car and my motorcycle and got enough money together – around $10,000 – to hire a programmer to build the first version of the site.”
New York-based publisher Scholastic bought the site from Edelman for what he describes as a “low six-figure sum”. While TPT did grow over the subsequent years, SCHL was uninterested in continuing the process, and in 2009, Edelman bought it back.
“Scholastic – being a big, publicly traded company – wanted instant gratification, YouTube-like, explosive growth,” he says. “They were going to close [the site] down, but I fought really hard to get them to let me buy it back.” And from then on, TPT began to gain steam.
“With marketplaces, it’s that chicken-and-egg thing,” says Edelman. “Until you have lots of products, you don’t have lots of buyers.”
Over 1 million members are currently active on TPT. Last month, TPT grossed $2.5 million in sales. That number is a rather healthy increase from its $305,000 in August of 2011.
The site has 10 employees working customer services. The premium membership for the site is 59.95 annually in order to be able to sell materials. TPT also takes a 15% cut of most sales on the site, though it takes a larger cut of non-premium membership sales.
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