Show HN: I learned to code to launch my new startup | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I learned to code to launch my new startup

uncover.com

178 pointsspencerfry140 comments

Please check it out. I spent all of 2012 learning to code to launch what would eventually become Uncover. I'm super excited to announce that we're finally live.

Here's a blog post I wrote on how we got there and a little story behind the startup: http://spencerfry.com/introducing-uncover

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Great job! Looking back, you'll see that learning to code was one of the best decisions you made.

One minor thing - it took me about 7-10 seconds to understand what your product is. I should be able to understand within 2 seconds. You should put in big letters towards the top: "Employee Recognition Program" or something a little more sales-y.

That's good feedback. Definitely continuing to improve the message.

By the way, great URL. I'm sure you paid a pretty penny for it:)

I actually bought it back in 2006-7. I was working on a local reviews site for a few months before working on Carbonmade, which was my last startup before Uncover.

You made carbonmade? I still have a portfolio on there (http://dangayle.carbonmade.com/). The pricing was too steep for me to pay for the full service though.

RE: url Even in 2006-2007 that domain wouldn't have been cheap. Kudos for sitting on it that long without getting ants in your pants.

Yeah. I was one of the co-founders/CEO for ~4 1/2 years or so. My other co-founders have since moved the company from NYC to Chicago. They're two awesome guys and doing great things.

Since most people scan left-to-right you'd probably be better putting your main headline and signup box on the left and the 'reasons' on the right. Even better would be to make the headline and strapline standalone, because at the moment the hierarchy when the user scans implies they are just relevant to that signup box, not the whole site. Great idea.

Left to right would definitely help!

I agree, at first I thought it was a service that taught you how to roll sushi. It wasn't until I read other bits of information spread out on your page that I started to figure it out.

hehe, i also thought that about the sushi...

awesome job! Although can someone else start a company that teaches you how to make sushi...

Haha. Maybe if you come by our office I'll set something up. :)

I thought the same thing about sushi

I thought it was a coffee delivery service. I must have seen a different slide first. Heh.

I got it pretty quick, but it never hurts to test, test, test!

Definitely. Now that we're seeing some traffic. Time to start some 'ol A/B tests.

I'd have to agree as well. The animation introducing "Reason #8" caught my eye (which is cool), but becoming accustomed to that messaging telling me what a company does, had me thinking this was a "learn to roll sushi" service. Took me a while to shake that as I started scanning through the rest.

Ok, I'll say it. I clicked on this because of the "I learned to code..." part. Always feels good to see someone take the bull by the horn and tame it. But you apparently have two years of CS undergrad courses under your belt, in C++.

Congrats on your site (looks good) but your title is (intentionally?) misleading since you apparently have about three years of programming experience and JavaScript wasn't your first language.

Honestly, I don't even count the CS classes (C++) I took well over 10 years ago. I don't remember a single thing from them or any concepts at all. I wish I did as learning to program would have been a lot easier.

Would you mind going briefly into what "I learned to code" entailed? Did you identify the languages/technologies you needed to learn at first? How did you go about learning them, etc.? There's a ton of info about learning languages out there but a lot of it tends to be abstract, I'd be very interested in hearing how you learned within the context of actually launching a product.

Sure. I wrote a little bit about it here http://spencerfry.com/why-and-when-to-learn-to-program and I'll write more about that on my blog in the near future. We're using Ruby on Rails as our backend code and mainly picked that because that's what most of my friends were good in and I knew that I could go to them with any questions.

Given the title of this HN post, you should really be linking to your blog post, not the product itself. I clicked around your site a bit searching for your "learning to code" story to no avail.

I think this is an error on your part, not the OP. The title was set up to show off a product IMO.

I respectfully disagree. A title such as "Show HN: My Employee Rewards Site" would have been more applicable.

However, I don't begrudge the OP, as he's certainly gaining lots of useful feedback for his site.

I just can't help but feel slightly gamed ;)

Not my intention. I'll follow up with more how I learned to program posts. I have some from a few months ago. See http://spencerfry.com/why-and-when-to-learn-to-program for example.

I agree. Call me crazy, but it just seems intuitive that the title "I learned to code to launch my new startup" should be about, ummm, learning to code.

I also think that the blog post would have been much more pertinent to the OP's experiences and conducive to good feedback. Conceivably he chose the title because he wanted feedback on his experiences while learning to code, yet he got feedback about the product in general. If he was looking for advice about the site in general, a Show HN would have been more appropriate.

"I learned to code to launch my new startup" .. and here it is. That's implicit to me.

I did the same thing but it doesn't really matter. It's on the frontage which I'm sure was his goal. I'd say mission accomplished.

Awesome, thank you 8]

Great work on the look and feel of the portal. Looking forward to read your story on the blog.

Not sure why adsense at my place of work blocks your blog for the reason: Not allowed to browse Anonymizer category.

Here's my blog post on our launch: http://spencerfry.com/introducing-uncover

Congrats for launching! Smart idea and certainly solves an existing problem.

Would love to read more about your pathway towards the launch, e.g. how your coding came along, etc.

Me too! I am currently learning to code to (re)launch my startup!

But I am on the struggle, "is this worthy", full of doubts stage. I hope I can learn a thing or two from you...

It gets better with time. I'd really recommend getting something out there as soon as possible, so you can breathe a sigh of relief.

Spencer is my hero, really.

I'm learning how to program, and I am doing so, so as to get into the business of starting a startup, and he started a startup, and coded to fit into it. Amazed.

Well, Spencer, if you ever get to read this, please answer a few questions for me:

When did you begin writing programs/web design? Like, when did you get from 0 to where you are now, programmably?

What did you use to learn? What documentation/videos/resources?

Where now? Now that you've designed this, do you feel a sense of accomplishment? Do you feel you have SO MUCH MORE to learn or did it fit the purpose you needed it for?

Thanks, congratulations, and good luck!@#

Thank you, muster!

Happy to answer your questions.

1. I've dabbled in web design for a longtime, although I did not design Uncover's marketing site. jakeprzespo.com did that. I did work with my partner Mike to design the internal pages of the site.

2. I started learning to program in February, 2012 and have gotten progressively better since then. I launched the original version of Uncover completely on my own at the end of last year.

3. I wrote a blog post on what I used to learn to program: http://spencerfry.com/programming-resources

4. Definitely feel a sense of accomplishment. I couldn't have done it without the other two folks I've been working on Uncover with: Mike and Jason. We've all worked very well together and done awesome work to get Uncover out in such a short period of time. None of us believe in waiting for that "perfect moment".

he forgot to mention two years of under graduate computer science courses

Well, to be perfectly honest... I don't remember a single bit from any of those classes. Also, they were in C++.

Very nice work!

Could you maybe test switching the left and right part of the above the fold part?

When I visited I started reading something about Sushi making and assumed you were teaching sushi classes.

Hah. You bring up a good point. We'll definitely do some A/B testing as we begin to have more visitors to our website. As we only went live an hour ago, we didn't accumulate enough homepage data to begin testing our assumptions.

you've just went live and already have testimonials?

The OP probably referred to the site presenting the app, rather than the app itself.

Correct. We've been in beta for about four weeks. Only went public about two hours ago.

I'm going to go against the grain here and say that I immediately recognized what the service does. The "Reward Your Employees" text caught my eye fist because it was on the page before the rest of the content faded in, so I read it first. I never once thought the site was about making sushi.

Still, it's probably a smart idea to do your A/B testing as others have mentioned. Design is clean and the concept is very cool. Congrats on launching!

Thank you, Wesley. I'm happy to hear that. We'll definitely make some adjustments to the header portion. It may also be that the copy of some of the reasons aren't clear enough to indicate what the app does.

Just going to spit out what first came into my head:

- Pretty nice looking website for rolling sushi! - I can sign up to reward my employees by learning to roll sushi? Something is not right... - Oh, employee rewards program - cool! - Hmmm, I wonder if they break rewards into categories like "Developers" so I could redeem things like GitHub, DropBox or MT/RackSpace plans.

All in all, nice looking site and pretty impressive for a first go at coding.

Best of luck!

Hah. You're the second person to think we help you learn to roll sushi! Totally valid feedback. I think we need to experiment in shifting the sign up to the left and presenting what we do a lot clearer.

As to being able to breakdown benefits/rewards into Groups of employees, that's on our roadmap. You can currently reward one or more people for going the extra mile, but we'd like to do more.

My only concern with benefit programs like these is if I'm earning less income because the company is allocating money for benefits I may not need.

chances are that money wouldn't have been spent on your income, because of taxes (income tax, payroll tax). it would have been spent on something else that falls under the category of "nice things" but is tax-deductible.

We also only charge the employer for benefits the employees actually use.

Yes, this would be a complete turn-off for me.

This is not how Uncover works. The employer is only charged for the benefits the employee uses.

This is not how Uncover works. We specifically designed it to avoid this. The company is only charged for benefits that the employee uses. Therefore, if an employee doesn't care to use one or more benefits then the company is not charged for them.

That sounds even worse. The company is aware if I don't use a benefit, such as spyware from Spotify? Perhaps not if the same gifts are awarded to multiple people at the same time.

My personal concern when I looked at the site was it reminded me of a time when a boss gave me a gift card, and I was infuriated because I hadn't had a real raise or a proper employee review in years. It felt like a cheapshot.

I could see the program working in certain businesses, but managers need to be trained to use it correctly, especially in creative fields: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

How does the company name relate to the service itself? Do you help uncover "hidden gem" employees? Or does a client need to do that themselves, but you only help in arranging the reward? If you don't help to identify those who go above and beyond, the name is a little distracting as it's the kind of name that makes it seem like there ought to be this functionality.

That might be a good direction to consider going in the future. Have an API which companies can integrate into their existing systems to push metrics your way (whether they do the integration themselves or through IFTTT, Zapier, etc.) with thresholds set on your side to "Uncover" the star performers in the organization. A manager can then periodically go into their dashboard, review who the system has uncovered (exceeded the thresholds), and pick and choose who gets rewards.

What's behind the company name is the idea of uncovering your company/employees potential. We are working toward helping you do just that, but you have to start somewhere and we have a lot still to learn.

I love your idea of creating an API to integrate into their existing systems.

Shoot me an email (in profile) if you want to get up and going on Zapier, I can help you work through an MVP API or what kinds of integrations might be popular.

Thanks! I'll shoot you an email to make the connection, but I think we're still a bit of a ways away from doing so as we just launched and are still iterating.

> What's behind the company name is the idea of uncovering your company/employees potential.

This crucial point about your brand isn't conveyed anywhere in the homepage copy. Making that connection to unify the solid URL with your core benefits in the copy will go a long way toward telling a cohesive story about not only what you do, but why you do it.

Checked out the site and some of your blogs, congrats on launch! I have a similar path so far, with no formal coding education (biz background) but a front end dev job which is going great.

Question: Did you and your 2 partners quit your jobs all at the same time completely to build this? Would love to hear more about the work/money/time side of things that allowed you to get to this point. Best of luck.

Thank you!

We're bootstrapped for now. I have had some previous exits with TypeFrag and Carbonmade, so financially I haven't had to work another job while bootstrapping Uncover. Mike and Jason have been doing contract work to pay their bills while working on Uncover.

Happy to go into it more privately (email in my profile) or I can potentially write a bigger blog post on it.

Where do you talk about the 'I learned to code' part? I don't see any mention of it on your site or your blog...

Here's a post on learning to code:

http://spencerfry.com/why-and-when-to-learn-to-program

I'll follow up with some more code posts in the future. I wanted to keep the "Introducing Uncover" post to be focused on the startup.

Cool, thanks. To be honest I am more interest in that part than Uncover :)

Small quibble, but I don't like that you mentioned Game of Thrones along with Netflix and Hulu. Those online services don't have Game of Thrones. The only way to watch any HBO show is to have a cable subscription or buy the episodes directly.

Fair point and good catch. We'll swap out Game of Thrones for a different streaming title.

Like Arrested Development!

Similar to BetterWorks? http://www.crunchbase.com/company/betterworks

I remember Paige Craig was working on something similar. There was a business there but then when they scaled up sales it didn't seem like the model worked (not enough demand). Maybe there's something different here or will be executed on better?

Either way, it looks nice and it's awesome you learned to code to start your startup! I'm only in the beginning stages of learning to code, but it's already helping me interact with the developers and designers I'm working with. It's hard to juggle learning with working.

Thanks for the support. We're trying to solve a similar problem as BetterWorks was, but with a completely different approach. If you're unfamiliar with BetterWorks, you can read more about them here: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/betterworks

Interesting. Along the vein of similarity to other services, your approach looks kind of similar to AnyPerk. From what I can sort of gather, you are going the approach of providing on demand perks, for individual recognition, and not an ongoing perk? Is that an accurate assessment?

Well, AnyPerk and similar services are discount based. From our what we believe section: "Discounts aren't effective. There's a difference between "here's a discount" and offering something special."

With Uncover, you can provide both ongoing perks as well as individual recognition. We call those two products "Benefits" and "Rewards".

The site and service look absolutely great, nice work.

One thing that caught my attention and raised a red flag though was the $5 per employee mention on the how it works page. Why not state that upfront elsewhere, maybe even having a pricing page?

Thanks, tannerc! We're going to put up a Pricing page. We wanted to release as quickly as possible, so a few pages didn't make the marketing site: Pricing, About, FAQ, Customer Stories, etc. They'll be there shortly, though.

You are certainly serving as my inspiration. I am a IT-Business Strategy guy learning Scala and Play. I realized I don't enjoy functional programming - but like you, I have a product in mind and want to see it shipped :)

What were the coding steps you took? as too what did you learn first and etc.

I'll follow up with a more detailed post, but here's one from a few months ago:

http://spencerfry.com/why-and-when-to-learn-to-program

I started learning to code in February, 2012 and have been going at it ever since. I've had great mentors and it's taken what feels like a long time to get to where I am.

One minor suggestion that I think is super important. Smile in your headshot photo man. No teeth = no confidence, which means people are less likely to put their trust in you. Great site. Good job.

As everyone's said, site and idea look great!

suggestion - I'm not sure if you have this as a feature (I'd suspect you do) -- but allowing employees to vote on their perks would be great. Like if when company HR managers (or who ever sets team budgets) set the budget, they could go to your site, input that data, and know how many "points" (essentially dollars) worth of perks they can afford. Then employees could log on, and vote for which perks they like the most, and that's how the company could decide their perks plans

Thank you. I really appreciate it.

That's a very interesting idea. We've had some similar thoughts that I think we'll begin to start incorporating over the next few months. We want employees to have more involvement in the benefits, but at the same time make sure that the employer can customize Uncover for the type of culture they want to create. For example, we have some beta customers that have books clubs at their company and are now using Uncover to facilitate that.

right, so you can give ultimate approval/denial possibility to the HR teams, and you can even do something like separating HR-driven or Employee-driven perks (employee_group_points = total_points - hr_driven_perks)

That would fit in perfectly with the book club -- employees who want to fund something like that have two avenues -- get their club recognized by HR in the budget, or if interest is high enough they can get enough votes to put it in the employee perk budget.

I think "the reason thing" changing pictures all the time is an inconvenient/annoying distraction. Cool effect but it doesn't help to explain your service at all (neither sells it). Besides I don't need a zillion random reasons, I need ONE good reason to use the product. To find this one good reason, you need to put a lot of effort thinking and iterating, maybe with the aid of A/B Test. But I like the concept and the product, congrats for your launch.

Thank you. Why we chose to rotate reasons was to project the fact that Uncover can be used for many different things and that you can customize it for your company. You can't really get that across to the user by just displaying one example. That's just our thinking anyway.

Love the idea. Only suggestion: on the How it works page (https://www.uncover.com/how-it-works), the tooltips for the details cover up the other buttons - maybe have the tooltips for the icons on the top row show above, while the tooltips for the lower icons show below?

Fair point. You think hovering over them blocks you from seeing what's there? We also wanted to make them wiggle slightly when you first load the page so you know that there's a hover on rollover.

This is very cool and a problem worth solving. Rypple is first the startup I heard of that focused on making employees feel good rather than simply tracking them but it only handed out compliments. This seems like the next logical step - to give perks that are tailored towards each person.

Thanks a lot. I'm familiar with Rypple, but I haven't used it to be honest. We're definitely working on something similar, but with a slightly different approach.

We have a feature called Rewards that allow employers to reward employees for going the extra mile. With that feature you can reward one or more employees and tailor the gift and message to them.

That sounds awesome too. One thing you might want to experiment with is the opposite of Rewards - randomly timing perks so that they're unassociated with performance. This approach is shown to work on everything from mice to casino gamblers, otherwise a predictable pattern of wins just become the new normal.

That's a really neat idea.

Nice work! I thought it was pretty obvious what the startup does, thought I might put the headline "Reward Your Employees" left, or top center, where it's likely to be the first thing someone reads, rather than the reasons, which were the first thing my eye gravitated toward.

I have no idea what your website does.

That's no good!

Does this help? https://www.uncover.com/how-it-works

Yes, that explains it. This kind of info should be front and center, not sushi..

What code , i just see a website.....

OP learned how to code in order to launch said website. The blog post about the experience is linked elsewhere here in the comments.

I would swap the left/right sides of the homepage. You were giving me "reasons" for your product when I didn't know what it was yet, and I had to look around to figure out what it was.

With that said, fantastic job, and way to take the initiative to see your idea through!

Thanks a lot. Seeing that feedback a lot in the comment thread here. I think we'll definitely give it a shot.

Love this service/idea, because i think (at least here in sweden) employee benefits lacks precisely this, cheap but qualitative benefits (which are not only discounts), like a great cup of coffee or a month of Spotify. Great job!

Thank you! That's part of what we believe: "Discounts aren't effective. There's a difference between 'here's a discount' and offering something special."

Looks fantastic! I find myself wishing the message boxes under the 'Reason ##" were clickable to a new tab, especially the first time I saw them because I wasn't sure whether they were social media sharing icons or clients

You should be able to see most of the rewards without signing up.

You can see them here:

https://www.uncover.com/how-it-works

Scroll over the top left image.

Nice job! Did you learn to code on both the front and back end?

Neat stuff! Can you tell us a little more about what inspired you to build this specifically (in other words, why was this the idea you chose over other ideas you had)?

Thanks! I go into that here: http://spencerfry.com/introducing-uncover

I didn't really grok your product until my eyes crossed the envelope with the card in it. Put that sucker front and center with "Employee Recognition Program" somewhere.

Thanks for your feedback. We'll definitely work on making the product message clearer now that we have more eyeballs to our homepage.

Great App! I can't figure out how to Zoom in/out or enlarge the map view. I often map 60-100 mile routes so the ability to zoom in to see the roads selected.

Congratulations! You'll never regret this decision... unless of course you get so immersed that you begin to hate computers because nothing ever works.

the truth is, coding is just a tool. i tend to piss off people around me when I say that. and I will surely piss off a few here, but like you i earn my money with it. and it's great because I can go anywhere and solve these complex things while doing it.

but, the complex part is not the piece of code that someone else has already solved. The complex part is usually something unrelated.

I must disagree.

As a coder, your tools are your computer, the compiler and user interface. It takes skill, knowledge and understanding to use these tools effectively.

I own saws, hammers and power tools, but I'm certainly not a carpenter.

I really like the idea for this company. Seems cools.

In the true spirit of "Show HN" though, how about sharing some code?

You got it wrong: you should be providing feedback

True spirit?

Congrats Spencer! Really a great idea!

Really sharp! I've been developing for years and a lot of my stuff doesn't look this sharp... =/

Neat Idea. Intrigued with motivating employees with recognition tailored specifically to them.

Thank you. We have a Rewards feature where you can send a gift and a personal message to one or more employees for going the extra mile.

Awesome. I did however expect a blog post covering how you learned to code, etc etc. Good luck.

Here's one from a few months ago:

http://spencerfry.com/why-and-when-to-learn-to-program

I wanted to keep the most recent blog post solely focused on Uncover. I'll follow up with more coding posts shortly.

That's an awesome domain name! Did you acquire it for this project, or did you already have it?

Thanks! I actually bought it all the way back in 2006-7 for another project I launched. It was a small local review site I was working on for a few months before beginning to work on Carbonmade.

Just a question: how did you get those vendors to partner with you. Did you approach them?

I love the simplicity of this website! It also tackles a good problem employers have.

Thank you. We hope so.

Kudos. Since this is a work related site it might be a good idea to use Linken Oauth.

Interesting idea. We'll look into that. Thanks.

Can you get Subsonic in somehow for the music streaming? Subsonic is fantastic.

Not familiar with Subsonic. Are they on Rdio or Spotify?

Are benefits like these taxable? My gut feeling is yes.

It depends on the category, but we provide a convenient CSV file for you to download to calculate any additional taxes.

My impression is yes, but employers will use this to get around taxes. Also it will help them imagine they've done something significant to reward their employees when they've done something insignificant.

Any non-startup or non-online clients?

We'd love to work with non-startups and non-online clients. I think that'll be a big part of our market as we continue to grow. During our beta it was only online startups. We only launched publicly within the past hour.

And if you want to learn to code, join my apprentice program:

http://codeapprentice.org/

Liked the pimped Bootstrap!

Brilliant!

great looking site!

Thank you!

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