HN user

spencerfry

2,464 karma

My homepage: http://www.spencerfry.com

My startup: https://www.podia.com

Twitter: http://twitter.com/spencerfry

E-mail: email [at] spencerfry [dot] com

Posts90
Comments353
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www.groovehq.com 9y ago

How We Built an Online Course That Generated $120,679 in 5 Days

spencerfry
6pts0
blog.withcoach.com 9y ago

Building your audience: a step-by-step guide

spencerfry
3pts0
www.spencerfry.com 11y ago

How Happiness Affects Work

spencerfry
3pts0
www.sweattheproduct.com 11y ago

Sweat the Product Interviews Noah Kagan, AppSumo

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1pts0
www.sweattheproduct.com 11y ago

Interview with Jack Groetzinger, SeatGeek

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1pts0
www.sweattheproduct.com 11y ago

In-depth Interview with Brian Wang, Fitocracy

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2pts0
www.sweattheproduct.com 11y ago

Interview with Adii Pienaar of WooThemes and Receiptful

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1pts0
www.sweattheproduct.com 11y ago

Show HN: A collection of stories from people who build products

spencerfry
38pts5
spencerfry.com 11y ago

Announcing Sweat the Product

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2pts0
spencerfry.com 11y ago

Building a Landing Page for Sales

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2pts0
www.forbes.com 12y ago

From Business Professional to Programming Founder and CEO of Uncover

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spencerfry.com 12y ago

Prioritizing Your Product Features

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2pts0
spencerfry.com 12y ago

The Domain Market is a Mess

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52pts48
spencerfry.com 12y ago

Trials and Tribulations of the New Uncover

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1pts0
www.groovehq.com 12y ago

5 Early Wins That Got Our SaaS Startup 1,000 Beta Users

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spencerfry.com 12y ago

I'm Writing a Book on Startups and Bootstrapping

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spencerfry.com 12y ago

How enterprise startups differ from consumer startups

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spencerfry.com 12y ago

The Pros and Cons of Iterative Development

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spencerfry.com 13y ago

Sales or Die

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5pts0
spencerfry.com 13y ago

Just Launch

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2pts0
blog.teamtreehouse.com 13y ago

How Learning to Program Got Me A Technical Co-Founder

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spencerfry.com 13y ago

Introducing Uncover

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www.uncover.com 13y ago

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

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178pts140
spencerfry.com 13y ago

I Sold My First Code

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3pts0
spencerfry.com 13y ago

The State of Human Resources

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www.getharvest.com 13y ago

Bring Time Tracking Into Your Application

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53pts3
spencerfry.com 14y ago

From Business Guy to Programmer

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83pts45
www.groupon.com 15y ago

Groupon Acquires Pelago

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2pts0
www.skillshare.com 15y ago

I'm teaching a bootstrapping class in late April (NYC)

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2pts0
spencerfry.com 15y ago

Hiring for a Boostrapped Company

spencerfry
25pts6

Biggest marketing win for https://www.withcoach.com/ has been using our own product to create and promote free content.

Since Coach is an online course platform, we're not only giving people a demo of our product, but we're also providing value through content.

For example, we giveaway a free eBook on selling more online courses & digital products: https://coach.withcoach.com/level-up-your-sales

We also run a free email course on launching your next digital products in 10 days: https://coach.withcoach.com/10-day-product-bootcamp

Both have driven thousands of leads to our product.

We're hiring Engineers and Product Designers at Coach. REMOTE OK

Coach makes tools for tutors to help them promote, build and manage their businesses as well as earn additional income. With Coach, tutors can create their own website, use our scheduling tools to book time with students, create and sell courses with our course-builder and accept online payments.

We’re a fast-growing, New York-based company looking to build our team with passionate, like-minded people who want to help us change the education industry through innovation.

https://www.withcoach.com/jobs

I completely understand how domain name transfers work. I've done plenty of them. Just because you're a big slow company doesn't mean that we as consumers should just shrug it off as "business as usual". The domain market is a mess specifically for the reason that nobody has built a better solution in ten years. When I purchased https://www.uncover.com back in ~2004 it was the same process as it is today. That's just not right ten years later.

Looking to see if the domain is listed with the registrar as well is a really great tip. I didn't check to see if it was in GoDaddy's marketplace before purchasing it through Sedo. Next time I'll do that if I find myself in the same position.

Author here. I think Fred Wilson said it best back in 2011:

"I believe that a good domain name is an important success factor in building and launching consumer web services. It's not in my top ten but it could be. It's certainly something we think about a lot when making investments and working with companies post investment."

Check out his article to read his reasoning.

http://avc.com/2011/04/finding-and-buying-a-domain-name/

I've grown https://www.uncover.com (a simple tool to give employees perks and rewards) in various different ways. A lot of it began with telling my network of friends who run startups. Getting them signed up. Then getting them to tell their friends how much they liked it. Once that source was depleted, I began to do a lot of content marketing. I started writing for a lot of different blogs, websites, etc. That helped get out name out there and brought in about a third of our current customers. I'm now beginning to experiment with buying ads. It's still too early to tell how well that will work out, though.

Launching is very overrated. I mainly emailed friends, family, and shared https://www.uncover.com via social media. Luckily, it got picked up by Hacker News and some other outlets. We got some great traffic in the beginning, but a "good launch" alone isn't going to make or break you. It's about the longterm value you can offer your customers.