The day after my good friend Greg proposed the idea for Teacher Hub to me, I was sure we had a hit on our hands. 7 months, 1354 lines of code, and one “pivot” later, I called it quits and moved on.

Chronologically, from the beginning

Greg’s wife is an “early-stage” teacher (a few years in), and given the horrendous job-security that newly minted New Jersey teachers have currently, she’s dealt with having to teach entirely new classes year after year. All new classes => all new needs. New classroom supplies (largely teacher-purchased or teacher-subsidized), new curriculums to learn (and inevitably update), and possibly a new school to get used to.

Her itch: wouldn’t life be better if there were an online destination where all those things could be found easily and cheaply? It would be a place where teachers could trade, barter, sell, or share their wares, skills, and advice. A place where teachers could meet other teachers from their area. A place where teachers could write about their experiences — the good, the bad, and the ugly.

A “Teacher Hub,” you could call it.

I loved it. It seemed like a real need in an interesting industry. And I was desperate to step into the startup ring once more (my first startup, back in 2006, was a movie social network called Reel Critics that never launched).

Start coding, talking, coding, talking

First thing I did was start coding the boilerplate and basic multi-column layout. I had been simply writing new SQL code and the occasional unordered list for the past year, and was just excited for an excuse to build something from scratch.

We scheduled weekly meetings to keep things on track (keep on what track? we hadn’t laid any tracks at all), which one of us usually showed up late for. I was 37signals-crazy, shoving all my clients and projects into Basecamp, writing roadmaps in Writeboard, tracking life tasks in Ta-da List. So of course, our meetings were in Campfire. Text-only. So the rate of conversation-to-useful-work was diminished for us by the very nature of our communication medium.

One of our first goals was to get Greg up-to-speed on programming. We weren’t sure how much he could contribute code-wise, but I was hoping to get one more person coding. The last time I was the only coder on a large-ish project, I got tired after a few months. Nobody to talk to and pump me up creates a tough gig.

Let’s get something out of the way. If you’re starting a startup and someone wants to teach themselves programming in the process, don’t expect good results. This is not a knock on those people. My advice is to look at the priorities of the business and the priorities of the person. If either of those points away from a need or desire to be a programmer, then this could be a waste of time for everybody and for the business. There’s a school of thought that if you have a startup idea, you should teach yourself to code, or that everybody in the startup should be able to code, but the fact remains that there is a lot of stuff that needs to be done at a startup, and if someone’s motivations aren’t conducive to programming, don’t get hung up on that. Do something that you can do already, and do it now.

So those first few months, while I was still living in Venezuela (Greg was in New Jersey), we’d spend our time doing the following: coding, setting up Greg’s RoR dev setup, setting up the staging server on my Media Temple VPS, talking about doing research on the industry of teacher-oriented websites, doing some nominal research on said industry, and debating with gusto about the financial aspects to our business model.

Let’s Align our Interests

All of this meeting stuff was an attempt to align our interests to the goal of building Teacher Hub. We were trying to get on the same page so that we could work on the same thing (programming our Minimum Viable Product), but our differing skill sets kept us drifting apart throughout the week and then struggling to re-align our interests and goals during our weekly meetings:

Instead of what we were doing, we probably should have specialized in what we were each capable of already, keeping our end-goal in sight and on the same page, but not concerning ourselves with making sure we were both contributing the same things in the same amount as each other:

Next time on “Startup Gone Wrong”…

We’re only 2 months in, and Edyta and I are about to realize that Venezuela is just not going to work out. Find out what happens to Teacher Hub (and my programming life) as we start our journey back to the USA.

This post was graciously edited by Marc Ubaldi