Steve Fischer's Random Blog

Category: Origami

  • Origami Risk Recognition

    First an award from Business Insurance, and now Risk & Insurance recognizes Aaron Shapiro as one of the “Deserving Six” in Risk Management.

    Why six? No clue. But congrats to Aaron. Origami is filled with award caliber folks…

  • Origami Risk Wins BI Innovation Award

    Origami Risk was one of the winners of Business Insurance’s 2011 Innovation Award. This is obviously a very big deal and we are all very proud.

    Our always brilliant Aaron Shapiro conceived and wrote the award application. Our always exceptional Linus Concepcion built some killer features. And some random talking head did some videos to explain how it works.

    We rock. Let the celebration begin.

  • Origami UI Impresses Yet Again

    Doing some work at my local pub (WiFi, free popcorn and really good beer – doesn’t everyone work at the pub?).

    A friend in the finance industry was looking over my shoulder at Origami. “I really like your UI”, he said.

    Well duh…

  • Need a Vacation

    We’re about to head up to Cape Cod for vacation. We’re going to the same beach house we’ve rented the last two summers. Everyone is excited.

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    I do need this vacation. It’s different than at other jobs. I don’t need to get away from the work environment. I still love Origami, love the team, love the dynamic. But with a startup, there’s definitely stress.

    Early on the stress was, "will we get enough clients to make this work?". That’s some big stress. And that was a real question for a while, certainly longer than we hoped.

    The interesting thing is how quickly the stress shifted to, "holy crap, we have a bunch of clients to implement". This is much better stress to have, but it’s still stress. And I am primarily Service Dude at the moment, so most of the implementation work is mine.

    I don’t think implementations are more or less stressful than development work. But I’m more used to development work. As a more known quantity, development is less stressful for me. Since we haven’t done a lot of implementations, each one seems like a new adventure. But so far we have really great clients and I am enjoying working with them.

    So I’m hoping to get some real relaxation in. The beach with the family really couldn’t be better. And I need to recharge. Because Origami is selling like hotcakes.

    We’re going to be working our butts off the rest of the year…

  • AdWords

    We recently started advertising OrigamiRisk with Google AdWords.  Nothing much, just an experiment to see how it drives traffic. If you aren’t familiar with AdWords, this is what puts a “sponsored link” next to your search results. The most fascinating thing about AdWords is the data. Google is great with data. And since you only pay if a user actually clicks on the ad, the costs are not much (and if you are paying a lot it’s because your ad is working).

    You can create multiple text versions of your ad. Google will automatically detect which one is getting more clicks and show that one more often.

    You can let you ad run and later Google will suggest other keywords that you might want to include in your ad. And Google will show you exactly how many searches you might get per month with that keyword. And how much competition there is to advertise.

    The most fascinating part about it is the whole algorithm for how it works. Every time Google displays ads it is running a mini auction. Every advertiser has specified how much they will pay for a keyword ad. Or you can let Google optimize your bid to the auction (and your budget). Then with a combination of the auction price and what Google views as your “quality score” (Google doesn’t want to be serving up ads that aren’t relevant) your ad will get placed higher or lower depending.

    I’m not sold on the “content network” though. You can advertise on Google search and you can include their “content network”. The content network includes web sites, blogs and gmail. But you have less control because Google is just trying to detect relevance. I recently turned off the content network because none of the sites really seemed relevant. We are in such a niche market.

    And one of the best things you can track is a “conversion”. That means that the ad actually got someone to click where you want. So if we are trying to get people to sign up for a free demo, we can track if a user who clicked on our ad actually went to the demo page.

    It’s quite fascinating, but again the best part is the data. I know how many times each of our ads was displayed for each keyword and how many times someone clicked on it. And based on the data I can modify the campaign on the fly.

    Kind of fun actually…

  • Twitter followers

    The way some Twitter accounts follow you immediately following a single tweet continues to amuse me.

    We just cranked up the Origami Risk Twitter account. We don’t have real followers yet, but Twitter references help with the search engines and our momentum is building.

    We also just revamped our web site, particularly the product section. We have added so many new features, plus video help, that we needed a major update (as a quick aside, with no bureaucracy to worry about, the site revamp took exactly one day).

    So the new web site was an obvious tweet topic. I believe tweets should try to be amusing, so the tweet was:

    Origami Risk unveils updated web site. More articles, video and celebrity gossip (OK, 2 out of 3).

    Immediately, Origami Risk gains followers in the celebrity gossip world. Hilarious. They’ll be a bit disappointed if my next tweet is:

    The real cause of Tiger’s accident: Reading loss triangle while driving.

  • Origami Risk in Business Insurance

    Dave Tweety may just be trying to drum up RMIS vendor selection business, but it’s our first mention in the press. It’s not a particularly good article but it does have an amusing disagreement on what cloud computing is. My take is in my previous post…