Hello world!
This is our foray into the blogging world.
I’ve been told that if you aren’t good at writing a blog, you should just start writing and eventually you will get better. So here goes. I hope it isn’t too painful.
Blue Giraffe has existed for a number of years, mostly as a side business of mine. I would do little projects for people on the evenings and weekends. Usually it would go something like this: A friend at a party would say, “I’ve got this cool idea, you should build something for it.”. Or sometimes a business would ask for a brochure website. That was good fun, and I had a day job at a local software company, so it wasn’t like money was a problem. It was just my time.
But working on those projects was exactly that, it was just a fun little thing to do. It didn’t have a real impact on people.
One day I met up with a friend who told me about a problem he was facing at the manufacturing company he worked for. That night we were able to nail down the real pain points he was facing. This wasn’t just some toy project, I had the potential to save his company a lot of money per year. I came up with a very basic solution and we started beta testing it. We kept cycling: test, talk about pain, make improvements, repeat. We deployed to a small section of their company as a trial phase. And that was the beginning of MortarQ. Right now MortarQ is still a work in progress, but it’s helping real people make smarter decisions with information that would have taken them weeks at a time to gather.
Until recently I was working for another software company doing web and mobile app development. Things were good there, but it was time to go off on my own. So I brought Blue Giraffe back into the fore front and I’m doing it full time.
I’m splitting my time between MortarQ and custom software development. I’ve got a number of clients in the manufacturing and service industry (who aren’t displayed on this site just yet - coming soon). Most of my clients are companies with 20+ employees who have some blocker in their business process. I really enjoyed working with clients. It’s so great to come into someone else’s industry and be able to provide a solution that improves their life.
It’s been 1 week of only working on Blue Giraffe, and it’s been great!
