Beyond the Bootcamp: How Sam Owens Launched a Successful Tech Career at Bounce Exchange

The tech industry is known for its fast pace, constant innovation, and abundance of opportunities for motivated individuals to grow their skills and careers. One shining example of this is Sam Owens, a Programming School graduate who has made remarkable strides in his tech career at behavioral automation company Bounce Exchange.

Sam‘s journey into tech started in an unlikely place – as a product manager in the fitness industry. But Sam had a yearning to get closer to the nuts and bolts of how things are built and make an impact in a faster-moving, opportunity-rich space like tech. As Sam puts it, "I wanted to get closer to figuring out how things are actually built and getting to do some of that, and I really wanted to get into tech, a faster moving industry with more opportunities, more motivated people."

Taking the Leap into Coding

For anyone considering making a career change into tech, Sam has some simple but powerful advice: take the leap and jump in with both feet. It can be easy to get stuck in an endless loop of research and contemplation without taking concrete action. "It‘s easy to have a kind of trepidation around it: you think about it, you do research, you think about it, you do research – without actually doing any coding," says Sam. "Once you know that it‘s the thing you want to do, just jump in and do it."

And jump in Sam did, deciding to enroll at coding bootcamp Programming School to kickstart his tech career. After doing his due diligence researching various programs, Flatiron stood out as the clear choice for its focus on community and the "human experience" of becoming a developer. While other bootcamps seemed to prioritize scaling and treating students like numbers, Sam says he "never really felt like I was a 1 or a 0 or somebody checking a box towards their machine scaling at Flatiron. I felt like it was a very human experience."

This supportive, community-driven environment was exactly what Sam needed to thrive in learning the new skill of coding. Flatiron‘s immersive software engineering program teaches full stack web development, diving deep into front-end and back-end programming languages, frameworks, and tools like JavaScript, React, Ruby on Rails, SQL databases, Git, and more. Beyond just learning syntax, the program emphasizes hands-on projects, collaboration with other students, and building a professional portfolio to demonstrate job readiness.

"You‘re not just learning a specific language, you‘re learning how to learn," explains Flatiron alum and software engineer Siana L. in a review on Course Report. "The most valuable thing about my Programming School experience was learning how to pick up new languages and technologies quickly."

Flatiron also provides dedicated career coaching to help students navigate the job search process and land their first tech role. "The career services team was really helpful in preparing me for interviews, negotiating salary, and connecting me with employers," says Flatiron alum and software engineer Kevin H. on SwitchUp. "I felt very supported throughout my job search."

One of the most impactful lessons Sam took away from Flatiron wasn‘t a technical one, but a mindset shift around embracing discomfort. As he explains, diving into the immersive world of coding, it‘s common to constantly encounter "impostor syndrome" and question your abilities. But that uncomfortable feeling is actually a sign of growth:

"I learned that being in that zone is actually where you‘re going to learn the most. There should never be a point where you think, ‘I‘ve learned all the things. Time to just relax.‘ You kind of have to always be putting yourself in that position, no matter where you are, and keep learning."

Making Moves at Bounce Exchange

Armed with a solid coding foundation and embrace-the-challenge mindset from Flatiron, Sam landed a job as a Software Engineer at Bounce Exchange, a fast-growing tech company that helps online businesses increase conversions through behavioral automation.

What started as a small 20-person team when Sam joined in 2015 has exploded to over 300 employees today. Bounce Exchange has raised over $75 million in venture capital funding and now serves major enterprise clients like Expedia, Sears, Staples, Quickbooks, and Uniqlo. In 2021, the company rebranded as Wunderkind to emphasize its focus on one-to-one messaging.

"For me, it‘s been a pretty wild ride of seeing a ton of people work really, really hard to build something really, really cool, and I just never expected it to go like that," reflects Sam. In particular, he was struck by the fast pace of the tech world compared to his previous industry. "The biggest surprise I encountered at Bounce Exchange was how fast everything moves in tech – and how much everybody cares."

As the company grew, so did Sam‘s role and responsibilities. He quickly advanced from Software Engineer to Senior Software Engineer to Engineering Manager, leading a team of 5 developers in maintaining and improving the product. His transition from engineering into product management happened organically, taking on more and more product-focused work at the request of Bounce Exchange‘s CEO until it became his full-time job.

Now as Senior Director of Product Development, Sam is responsible for leading the strategy, roadmap, and execution of Bounce Exchange‘s core product offerings. He works closely with engineering, design, data, and customer success to ensure the platform is driving clear value for clients and keeping up with the latest trends in marketing technology.

Pioneering Behavioral Automation Technology

So what exactly powers Bounce Exchange‘s ability to help businesses capture and convert more website visitors? At the core is an AI-powered behavioral automation engine that tracks user signals, builds rich customer profiles, and delivers the optimal messaging at the right moment to influence actions.

The platform utilizes an advanced machine learning model to analyze thousands of behavioral data points for each site visitor in real-time, such as:

• Mouse movement patterns
• Scroll depth and speed
• Frequency and recency of visits
• Referral source
• Device type
• Geographic location
• Browsing history and past purchases

Based on these unique user profiles and where the person is in their buying journey, Bounce Exchange dynamically serves up the most relevant content and calls-to-action to elicit the desired next step, whether that‘s making a purchase, subscribing to a newsletter, creating an account, or booking a demo.

The key is delivering hyper-personalized experiences in a way that feels helpful rather than intrusive or creepy to the end user. Bounce Exchange follows strict privacy and security standards, only using first-party data collected directly from client websites.

The Results Speak for Themselves

This type of behavioral marketing automation has proven extremely effective at boosting conversions and generating more revenue from existing website traffic. On average, Bounce Exchange clients see:

• 30-50% increase in email capture conversion rate
• 10-20% lift in return visitor conversion rate
• 15-40% improvement in e-commerce revenue
• 20-60% more qualified leads and demo requests

For example, 5-star luxury hotel The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas used Bounce Exchange to increase booking engine searches by 76%, grow revenue from return visitors by 48%, and drive $2.3 million in directly attributable revenue within the first 3 months (source).

Home security company SimpliSafe captured 38% more lead form completions and grew revenue per visitor by 27% with Bounce Exchange‘s intelligent website overlays (source).

Women‘s clothing retailer ADAY lifted email signups by 62%, recovered 18% of abandoning visitors, and generated 28x ROI from Bounce Exchange campaigns (source).

As the head of product, Sam is responsible for ensuring Bounce Exchange‘s platform continues to deliver these kinds of results for clients by leveraging the latest technologies in AI, personalization, and automation. This includes developing new product features, refining the user interface and algorithms, and gathering customer feedback to identify areas for improvement and innovation.

With businesses increasingly shifting to digital in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for smart website conversion optimization solutions like Bounce Exchange will only continue to grow. The global marketing automation software market is projected to reach $8.6 billion by 2027, expanding at a compound annual growth rate of 9.8% from 2020 to 2027.

Paying it Forward

In addition to his product leadership role, Sam is passionate about supporting and mentoring the next generation of tech talent, particularly fellow Programming School graduates. When he transitioned from engineering management into product, Sam made sure to put a succession plan in place for his former team and was thrilled to pass the torch to another Flatiron alum.

Flatiron‘s commitment to community remains strong long after graduation, with an extensive global network of over 7,000 alumni working at top companies like Amazon, Apple, Spotify, Google, and more (source). Whenever he can, Sam jumps at the opportunity to connect with Flatiron students and graduates to share his story, offer guidance, and open up his network. He sees it as a way to pay forward the invaluable support and "human experience" Flatiron provided him in changing careers and chasing his tech dreams.

For anyone else considering taking the bootcamp-to-tech-career path that Sam did, his advice is to go all-in on continuous learning, stay uncomfortably excited, and don‘t be afraid to ask for what you want:

"Go to your direct supervisor or your mentor and ask what you need to work on, ask what you need to learn. If you‘re a junior engineer and you want to drop the junior, ask whoever‘s the head of your engineering department what the difference is, what your gaps are. Don‘t work and hope somebody will notice. You should always be trying to figure out what the next steps are and work your way towards those things."

With hard work, curiosity, and a willingness to tackle new challenges, a successful and impactful tech career is within reach—just look at how far Sam Owens has come in a few short years, from fitness product manager to Senior Director of Product Development at a high-growth tech company. The opportunities in this industry are boundless for those willing to jump in and make their mark.

Thinking about taking the plunge into tech but don‘t know where to start? Check out Programming School‘s free Coding Bootcamp Prep to learn the basics of JavaScript, Ruby, HTML, and more. Their Career Change Coding Bootcamp is also now available online, with both full-time and flexible pace options plus dedicated career coaching to help land your dream job in software engineering, web development, or data science.

As Sam‘s story illustrates, learning to code can be a powerful pathway to an exciting and rewarding career in tech. It just takes grit, gumption, and a growth mindset to get there. Are you ready to start your own journey beyond the bootcamp?