Teach Weave: A Teaching Resource Marketplace That Respects Teachers

Why I Built It

Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT) is the dominant marketplace for classroom resources, but almost every teacher who sells on it shares the same frustrations: the platform takes a steep cut (often 20% to 45%), search is cluttered with keyword-stuffed titles, and migrating an existing catalog anywhere else feels like an exhausting weekend of manual copying and pasting.

I built Teach Weave to test what a marketplace looks like when it actually puts teachers first: keeping creator fees capped at a flat 15% via Stripe Connect, organizing search primarily by state standards (like TEKS, B.E.S.T., and Common Core), and building migration tooling so creators can bring their inventory over in an evening.

Where AI Actually Helps (and Where It Doesn't)

A lot of modern tools slap “AI” on the cover as marketing hype. While building Teach Weave, we learned early on what was genuinely useful and what teachers hated:

• Keeping AI Scope Sensible: We initially tested letting AI rebuild entire worksheet layouts. In practice, teachers hated losing their visual formatting and hand-designed structures. We pulled that back and narrowed AI strictly to reading-level adjustments and language translations, keeping it as an opt-in toggle so creators retain full control.
• TPT 1-Click URL Import: The biggest friction for creators is retyping titles and descriptions. With Teach Weave, creators just paste their existing TPT product URL. The server automatically pulls title and description metadata and pre-fills the upload form in seconds.
• Multi-Document Bundles & Watermarked ZIPs: Real classroom units include multiple files—lesson plans, worksheets, and answer keys. The system compiles multi-file uploads, stamps PDFs with per-buyer watermarks, and streams them as a clean ZIP package.
• Google Classroom Draft Push: Instead of downloading files and manually re-uploading them to Google, teachers push resources straight to their Classroom courses—landing as a draft assignment so they can verify due dates and points before students see it.

Practical Architecture Choices