Alissa McDonald doubled her teaching salary in one year through a side business she started during maternity leave in 2019. After more than 14 years as a teacher at the South Glens Falls School District, she left her job earlier this year to help other teachers do the same.
McDonald is the co-founder of PopPD, a startup with a software platform where educators can post video lessons to help other teachers with professional development in the classroom.
Since the software launch in May, the platform has more than 100 teachers creating content and more than 250 users.
PopPD is one of 12 startups from five countries participating in this year’s cohort of the Techstars Anywhere accelerator program.
“Our goal by the end of this program, which is the end of October, is to have 5,000 users – which is a really huge goal, but we're excited to try to get there. And we would love to reach 10,000 teachers by the end of the year," McDonald said.
The platform 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. One of the best-sellers is a lesson from an art teacher who has a class on how to implement student choice in the art classroom. An hour-long lesson is typically $40-$50.
“It's much more responsive than traditional professional development, which is given by a university or maybe a consultant that's been out of the classroom for a while," McDonald said. "So really just trying to connect relevant topics and inspiring instructors with other teachers who need the support.”
Besides offering the additional income, the platform can give content creators a way to become a leader in the profession, something that isn’t really attainable in a school setting, she 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.
“What happens is that the information ends up being fragmented,” she said. “This is more comprehensive and helps teachers figure out the instructional roadmap from start to finish.”
With increased teaching vacancies nationwide, McDonald thinks the platform could be used to train new teachers, some of which are being hired without much experience.
“We can't solve the teacher shortage; I wish we could," McDonald said. "But what we can do is support teachers who are burned out, teachers who are in new settings that maybe don't have that educational background but just want to be in the classroom. And we can help provide a connection globally that wouldn't otherwise be provided.”
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. McDonald got her first marketing experience when she and her sister owned a boutique furniture shop in Glens Falls in 2012. McDonald led the social media marketing for the business and then helped other small businesses in the area.
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.
