Yes, in the broadest sense, it had some basic features in common with FB. If we would compare it to similar tools available today, it should have become a mix of jell.com, 15five.com, idonethis.com and Slack. (But we'd also planned some unique features before we ran out of cash.)
Good point, Itai! We'd contacted about 50 VC companies in Germany prior and during our development of teamspir.it. Unfortunately, the response rate was almost zero and we only had one meeting with a wannabe VC.
You're right: We neither had the right connections nor an adequate track record at that time.
I must admit that as a VC guy, I wouldn't had been interested to invest in teamspir.it back then, too. As described in the essay, USP, concept and target group really were not clear enough.
Great post, David! You especially nailed it with the paragraph about disciplined routines and productive habits. In retrospect, we'd wasted more than 10 years in our company by just getting shit done. Our solution to this problem was to keep a simple "logbook" to regularly record and reflect our achievements and experiences in a team context. (We released a public version of our internal logbook tool called "teamspir.it" a couple of months ago.) I must admit that it was damn hard to convince all of our team members that it is really important to write regularly. Even today most of the people I talk about this habit ask "Why the hell should I do that? I know what I've done, no need to write it down...". There are several good approaches for answers to this question in your post!
I've already thought about publishing it as an ebook sometime, but the whole contents have to be translated (currently German) and revised first. This wouldn't be a small project (for me). So the blog series would be a good start if there's enough interest.
Only the browser language is detected on application startup, so the language shouldn't be switched. I'll check this issue, there will be an update today!