Last week I told you about Sramana Mitra’s book Entrepreneur Journeys and how it was loaded with cool companies that would be awesome to work for. One of those companies is HotChalk, an educational startup that provides online learning management systems for free. They enable teachers to bring their classrooms online in minutes without having to worry about administration approval or staying within a budget. HotChalk isn’t just tailored to teachers though; HotChalk also focuses on pleasing students, parents, school administrators, and tech coordinators. The simplicity of the whole thing has enabled HotChalk to gain a ton of marketshare—they have over 7 million monthly unique visitors and more than 375,000 teachers using the service. That’s what “free” will do for you.

HotJobs at HotChalk?

The most interesting thing about HotChalk is their revenue model. Instead of building a freemium product where schools can pay for premium services once they’re forced to by teachers who have adopted the free service, HotChalk has decided that advertising is the key to profitability. They offer extremely targeted advertising to each of their user bases—teachers, students, parents, administrators, and tech coordinators; however, HotChalk has strict guidelines about what kind of advertisements can be targeted towards students, and they can never be shown ads during school hours. Now, how about jobs at HotChalk? Their Jobs page says that they don’t have any current openings, but it also says that they “are always looking for talented people.” If education technology is something that gets you excited, you should send a cover letter and resume to careers@hotchalk.com. According to HotChalk’s LinkedIn profile they have 27 employees right now, and they’re split between the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

• HotChalk.com
• Jobs at HotChalk
• About HotChalk
• HotChalk in the News
• HotChalk’s FAQ
• HotChalk’s Editorial and Blogs

Have you ever used HotChalk?

We've identified HotChalk as having career opportunities in the following categories:

• advertising
• all employers
• California
• education
• New York
• social media
• social networking
• software development
• teaching
• web development

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One response to “HotChalk”

1. jbd says:

   December 18, 2009 at 8:13 am

   i worked at hotchalk as a start up (bethesda, md). it was horrible…i walked in day one and they gave me a headset and told me to start calling schools…since i was a director i had to listen in on my employess making calls as well as make 75 a day. the numbers they post on the page are way off….over 90% of the users only logged on 1-2 times and then stopped using the system. i quit after an employess father died and they planned on letting him go when he returned from the funeral.

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