An education technology startup founded by a local teacher just secured investment from a fund.
PopPD is a startup with a software platform where educators can post video lessons to help other teachers with professional development in the classroom. Co-founder Alissa McDonald is a former South Glens Falls teacher. She's now based in Saratoga Springs.
The company is in the middle of raising a $500,000 pre-seed round. Beta Boom, an investment fund focused on funding software companies founded by women and underrepresented populations, nearly closed that with its investment of $300,000.
PopPD works as a marketplace where content creators receive 70% of a sale and PopPD receives 30%. The lessons are typically broad concepts on teaching strategies, rather than single-day lesson plans. An hourlong lesson is typically $40-$50.
Since August 2022, PopPD has grown users from 250 to about 600.
With the pre-seed funding, McDonald said PopPD is working on the second iteration of its platform.
"With the investment, what we're aiming to do is almost ready to launch is a learning experience platform where there's more of a goal-based learning experience setup versus just your regular online courses, modules and lesson plans," she said. "This is more of: Choose your goal and then work through some demo videos and some modeling from other teachers so that it's really easy to implement the strategies that you're learning — much more like Instagram style, more social media than what we had originally put out."
Beta Boom also has experience working with software startups, an added benefit for PopPD.
"They really like our domain expertise. We know teachers, we are teachers. And so even though we don't have experience building a startup, I think that they saw that we really know our customer, and that their strength is really in building products. So it's a perfect match up. We work together every week," McDonald said.
The majority of teachers in the U.S. already use websites like Teachers Pay Teachers to purchase lesson plans and activities for the classroom, but that doesn’t help as much with professional development, McDonald said. It can be overwhelming to keep track of good pieces of information in places like YouTube and TikTok, and actually integrate that info into teaching methods, she said, which is why she believes the platform can be valuable for users.
The new version of PopPD will also have more focus on creators and how they can upload content.
"In our platform, she'll be able to pull in a short demo clip and then annotate off to the side and say, 'Here's my play-by-play. Here's what I'm doing here. Notice how I'm inflecting my voice here.' So it's kind of a side-by-side of a demo and her notes. So we think it's gonna be really powerful," she said.
McDonald's path to starting PopPD began in 2019 when she was on maternity leave. To create a new stream of income she started the “Teacher Hustle Podcast” and a series of online courses and workshops aimed at helping teachers understand the power of branding.
Her online following grew to more than 15,000 educators worldwide, which she said led to thousands of teachers launching their own courses and workshops online. During that time, she saw some good ideas not get as much attention simply because the content creators may not have had enough time to market themselves. She thought creating the PopPD platform could be a good way to populate those ideas in one place.
PopPD's co-founder is Megan Kensington, a former high school teacher based in Boston. They met because Kensington was a student in one of McDonald’s classes.
