Spencer Fry Blog

I’ve been doing a lot of user research lately at Coach and I’ve got what I think is a great system for conducting and analyzing the interviews.

The other day I asked Twitter: “Why are some entrepreneurs scared of talking to users and doing user research?”

Before I get into the story of Coach (its founding, where it is today, and where it’s going), let me tell you what it is: Coach is an online test prep company offering students video lessons, practice questions, access to GMAT experts, and more.

I’ve had an up and down past twelve months stretching all the way back to when I wrote Follow Your Heart back in November.

Exactly one week ago, I launched Sweat The Product, a growing collection of stories from people who build product.

Today is the day that Sweat The Product is live, and I couldn’t be happier.

Around the time we released the new version of Uncover at the end of April 2014, I knew it was time to refocus our work around sales and increasing customers.

Because Uncover is a bootstrapped company, our resources are limited and we constantly need to prioritize what we work on.

About six weeks ago, I had an idea for a side project that I wanted to build.

OMG is the best way to describe how I feel right now.

It's been a while since I wrote a new article for my website — over three months in fact — and I'm sorry about that.

One of the things I've been trying to figure out recently is how I can find more time to do the things I love doing.

Paul Graham wrote a very influential article in July 2013 entitled Do Things That Don't Scale.

I'm eager to let you know that I started writing a book on startups and bootstrapping in June.

Uncover launched publicly on May 8, 2013.

When I began working on Uncover in 2012, I knew that I was entering a market that I knew little about.

Iterative (or incremental) development is what's meant by doing only a little bit of product development at a time so that you can learn from the work you've done.

Make sales or die.

Getting your first customer is a milestone, it's the first time you can breathe a sigh of relief.

A few months back, as we were gearing up to launch Uncover, I wrote an article called Startup Launch Checklist.

It seems like forever since I've publicly launched a new startup and today I'm happily announcing that Uncover has arrived.

As I wrote in From Business Guy to Programmer back in April 2012, I wanted to shake up the business guy persona I had and contribute to the codebase of whatever my next project would be.

As I get ready to launch my new startup Uncover, my team and I created a GitHub Issues List of what we need to check off.

I started learning to program in earnest at the beginning of February 2012.

Back office work is one thing I've had a lot of experience in doing while running TypeFrag, Carbonmade and other companies.

I can only share with you what worked for me.

Since I began writing several years ago, I've written exclusively about the business side of startups; my most popular articles being What's a Non-Programmer To Do?

I don't think there's a more difficult or stressful job than being an entrepreneur.

With the emergence of more and more people wanting to be entrepreneurs, there are naturally more people pitching their ideas.

Some of you know this already, but most of you probably don't.

At the end of the day, you have to build a service that people want to use or no amount of marketing or advertising will help.

A quick Google search for "bootstrap marketing" brings up a bunch of useless nonsense.

Wesley Verhoeve and I got into an hour-long debate at SXSW with two guys from San Francisco about the meaning of the word "startup."

Creating jobs is my second favorite thing about startups, next to having customers using the service.

Last January, I wrote a piece entitled Carbonmade: A Year in Review covering some of the things we did in 2009.

My friend Vinicius Vacanti wrote an article back in August entitled How New Ideas Almost Killed Our Startup.

When you think of Carbonmade, it goes something like this: "An online portfolio system for creative people to show off their work."

Responsibilities change as the size of your organization grows.

One topic that's often overlooked — and certainly not much discussed — is what goes on behind the scenes when you launch a new update of your existing web app.

As the Business Guy at Carbonmade, I'm always thinking about business metrics, and particularly last week I was thinking about ways to reduce churn.

I admit to having ridden the social media bandwagon from the start — mainly because I had to see how things would play out — but I've always been skeptical about its impact.

"Good ideas are a dime a dozen" or "execution is everything" are popular phrases entrepreneurs roll off their tongues when asked, "Do ideas matter?"

People ask me why I spend the time to write essays.

Because the idea of a freemium business model is fairly new, not too much has been written about how to approach it.

Twitter last week announced they'd stop allowing 3rd party developers to embed advertisements in their streams.

My friend Anthony Volodkin of Hype Machine once said to me: "Tech coverage is nice for showing your mother."

In my 10+ years of running Internet companies, I've never raised a single dime, yet I've still gone on to sell three profitable companies and am currently on my fourth, Carbonmade.

A substantial part of my job — and the job of any CEO and face of the company — is to be out there and get to know as many of the right people as possible.

Professor and CEO/Managing Director of FirstMark Capital, Lawrence D.

To the best of my knowledge, it was investor and entrepreneur Chris Dixon who popularized the term Normals (Caterina Fake suggested “muggles”) to signify your everyday person.