

Show HN: I learned to code to launch my new startup - spencerfry
https://www.uncover.com/
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.<p>Here's a blog post I wrote on how we got there and a little story behind the startup: http://spencerfry.com/introducing-uncover
======
MatthewB
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.

~~~
colkassad
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.

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

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

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

~~~
davidcristello
I thought the same thing about sushi

------
eaurouge
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.

~~~
spencerfry
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.

------
princess3000
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.

~~~
spencerfry
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.

~~~
wmat
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.

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

~~~
wmat
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 ;)

~~~
ruswick
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.

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

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

~~~
stfu
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.

~~~
soneca
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...

~~~
spencerfry
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.

------
muster
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!@#

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

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

------
peterjancelis
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.

~~~
spencerfry
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.

~~~
jacktim
you've just went live and already have testimonials?

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

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

------
WesleyJohnson
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!

~~~
spencerfry
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.

------
beebs93
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!

~~~
spencerfry
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.

------
JoeKM
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.

~~~
spencerfry
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.

~~~
benatkin
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.

------
biot
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.

~~~
spencerfry
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.

~~~
mikeknoop
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.

~~~
spencerfry
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.

------
wallawe
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.

~~~
spencerfry
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.

------
resu
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...

~~~
spencerfry
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.

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

------
3minus1
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.

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

~~~
3minus1
Like Arrested Development!

------
jonathanjaeger
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.

~~~
spencerfry
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>

~~~
randomdrake
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?

~~~
spencerfry
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".

------
tannerc
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?

~~~
spencerfry
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.

------
hbharadwaj
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 :)

------
a_1
What were the coding steps you took? as too what did you learn first and etc.

~~~
spencerfry
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.

------
Hilyin
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.

------
hardwaresofton
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

~~~
spencerfry
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.

~~~
hardwaresofton
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.

------
devgutt
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.

~~~
spencerfry
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.

------
octernion
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?

~~~
spencerfry
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.

------
alabut
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.

~~~
spencerfry
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.

~~~
alabut
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.

~~~
spencerfry
That's a really neat idea.

------
lsemel
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.

------
btbuildem
I have no idea what your website does.

~~~
spencerfry
That's no good!

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

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

------
debian69
What code , i just see a website.....

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

------
matthuggins
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!

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

------
klintcho
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!

~~~
spencerfry
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."

------
taternuts
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

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

~~~
spencerfry
You can see them here:

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

Scroll over the top left image.

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

------
aashay
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)?

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

------
gfodor
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.

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

------
israelforst
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.

------
sigmavirus24
Congratulations! You'll never regret this decision... unless of course you get
so immersed that you begin to hate computers because nothing ever works.

------
rjzzleep
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.

~~~
meigwilym
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.

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

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

~~~
umsm
You got it wrong: you should be providing feedback

------
ryangilbert
Congrats Spencer! Really a great idea!

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

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

~~~
spencerfry
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.

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

~~~
spencerfry
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.

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

~~~
spencerfry
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.

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

------
swat535
I love the simplicity of this website! It also tackles a good problem
employers have.

~~~
spencerfry
Thank you. We hope so.

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

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

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

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

------
h1srf
Are benefits like these taxable? My gut feeling is yes.

~~~
benatkin
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.

------
orangethirty
Any non-startup or non-online clients?

~~~
spencerfry
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.

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

<http://codeapprentice.org/>

------
drorweiss
Liked the pimped Bootstrap!

------
mharis
Brilliant!

------
cjreyes
great looking site!

~~~
spencerfry
Thank you!

