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As a young sixth-grade teacher at Roxbury Preparatory Charter School in Boston, Alex Grodd was frustrated.
“The core anxiety and frustration that I experienced every night was trying to find good lessons, and ending up writing them from scratch,” he said.
So he decided to form a social media company. Teachers have always shared lesson plans, but Grodd thought they could do it more easily on a bigger scale. With technical co-founder Jonathan Hendler, he launched Somerville-based Better Lesson LLC. The site launched in alpha test mode four months ago with about 200 teachers.
So far, there are about 2,000 lessons and files — an offering that competes with traditional textbook publishers’ lesson plan offerings.
“We’re trying to be somewhere between Facebook for teachers and YouTube for lessons,” he said.
Grodd said the product will be sold on a freemium model, with entry-level capabilities available free and more robust applications and customizations sold under subscription to administrators. He said charter schools such as Roxbury Prep are a target category.
Grodd said he has worked almost exclusively on designing the site with teachers in mind, while Hendler, formerly a developer at a Cambridge design shop, has handled the technology. The two met at a networking event, Grodd said. “The key to a non-technical startup founder is finding the right technical partner,” he said.
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