Alternatives
Products that do what Startup sci-fi novel that took me 5 years to write does
It started after reading Stephen King's "On Writing" where he likened the art of writing as the unearthing of an archeological site after you stumbled upon a unique bone of a story. His advice was to choose a domain you are deeply intimate with. For me, I've been a struggling startup founder for 15 years—enough material to inspire a novel. A 1,000-word writing exercise turned into a complete 125k-word manuscript over the course of a year. In year 1, I learned the sheer joy of unencumbered creative flow and authentic expression. A similar flow I used to get from coding (and more recently vibe…
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Just about a year ago, the concept for a sci-fi book popped into my head. I instantly knew I have to see it through despite not having any writing experience (and a pretty demanding job). Over 2025, I attended writer circles, improved my writing, and structured the story. Here is the first chapter. I hope you enjoy it :)
Jan 2026 · docs.google.com
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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
2013 · uncover.com
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How we went from 0 launches in 5 years to 9 in the last 2
2016
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4 months ago sucked. Our technical co-founder quit after 6 months and we still had no product. My co-founder and I had been 'working' on our startup for 8 months. I say 'working' because as the "business people" - there wasn't a whole lot we could do except philosophize. We had gotten really awesome intros to some of the top VCs and entrepreneurs, but had nothing to show. And now we felt stranded. Had we wasted 8 months of our lives? Identity crisis? Check. So we did what any rational person would do - we ran to the mountains. Literally. In Boone, NC - we talked about why we started Knowit,…
2012
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I am a non-hacker "idea guy" with zero discernible talent. Like most, the story starts with me doing things the hard way. I dreamt of a tool that would save me countless hours. Like most of my ideas, it was supposed to die in a couple of hours, but this one had some legs.... "If I needed this, surely others did too" kept looping in my head. Could I get this built? Could I build it myself? Nah...too lazy to learn how, but before I did anything, I had to promise myself one thing: No more ideas! If ideas were sit-ups, I would have a six pack instead of this tire. It was a constant mental…
2012
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I’m done. I’m bowing out of the startup rat race.
2017
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I built constellational.com two days before November began, hoping it would help me write. It's just a blank canvas. The url updates itself as you type. You can send a different version to different people or bookmark the latest url for yourself.
2013
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I just published my first book, Means and Motive. ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GYCZJVGX ) As a software engineer, I approached writing like a software project. I used familiar tools (Emacs and HTML) for the primary writing. I built my own tool (EPublish) to transform the HTML manuscript into an .epub file, the source for the ebook version. And I wrote shell scripts to reliably and repeatably transform the .epub version into PDF files for the printed editions. I wrote 'design' and 'architecture' docs, describing the world, key actors, and timelines. I kept a task list of…
May 2026 · frequal.com
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