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

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 · 13 years ago

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.

kfields · 13 years ago

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

ishener · 13 years ago

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

spencerfry · 13 years ago

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

fredsters_s · 13 years ago

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.

MatthewB · 13 years ago

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

ereckers · 13 years ago

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.

benjamincburns · 13 years ago

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

spencerfry · 13 years ago

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

matsandre · 13 years ago

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!@#

spencerfry · 13 years ago

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".

angryasian · 13 years ago

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

spencerfry · 13 years ago

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

eaurouge · 13 years ago

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.

princess3000 · 13 years ago

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.

wmat · 13 years ago

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.

fab101 · 13 years ago

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.

Awesome, thank you 8]

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

stfu · 13 years ago

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 · 13 years ago

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...

muster · 13 years ago

peterjancelis · 13 years ago

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.

jacktim · 13 years ago

you've just went live and already have testimonials?

WesleyJohnson · 13 years 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.

beebs93 · 13 years ago

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.