StoryofaStartup.com

We were acquired a couple months back   We did a follow up interview here.

It’s something that we’ve talked about for a long time, but we finally have a presence in the Francophone market with our new deal site, TrenteSous.ca! With our recently launched US coupon site up and running as well, the only place left for us to tackle in North America is Mexico! Well… maybe sometime in the future.

Just a quick note, the Future Shop 2009 Boxing Day Flyers, the Best Buy 2009 Boxing Day Flyers and the Dell Boxing Day 2009 flyer have been released into our Boxing Day flyers section!

Boxing Day is in full swing at RedFlagDeals.com!  We’ve started posting the first boxing day flyers!

In other news, we’ve got over 400 coupons now listed on MrsCoupons.com.

Busy, busy, busy!

One of the benefits of building your own platform is that you can easily adapt it for other projects.  We had that in mind when we built our Coupons platform for RedFlagDeals.com and we’ve now used it to launch a US coupons site, MrsCoupons.com.  We’re going to spend the next few months building out the online coupons database and if things go according to plan, we’ll add additional features to the site.  It’s been a fairly quick site to launch and it should be an interesting one to watch.

If you didn’t see the press release that went out about a month ago, we’ve partnered with United Sample to build a Canadian online survey panel.  It’s an interesting project for us, because usually we’re on the other side of the white label with our various PriceCanada.com co-brands.  We’ve worked with United Sample over the past year to offer paid surveys to our readers on an ad hoc basis, but this new panel will allow us to have an ongoing relationship as well as offer our advertisers the opportunity to offer surveys to our panel.  It will be interesting to see how it goes.  There has certainly been an appetite within the community for paid surveys in the past.

Much of what we’ve been working on over the past few months has been making the various sections of our site more modular and platform based.  For example, we’ve redone the credit cards comparison section so that it can operate as a white label solution (we added a credit card payment calculator as well) and we’ve created a self serve coupons platform that local advertisers can use to add coupons to our coupons section.  Unfortunately, since much of this had to be built from the ground up, the changes aren’t always immediately noticeable to users, but they should pay off as they allow us to scale and add further functionality.

The Future Shop Beat the Clock thread on RedFlagDeals.com isn’t a pretty place… basically FS is running a promo where they have a great deal at a specific time that they announce on Twitter.  There are only a few actually in stock at the promo price though and the flood of people they are sending at once is breaking their check out, which means a lot of people are getting their orders canceled.  I’m guessing the marketing folks didn’t give a heads up to the tech folks…  I wouldn’t want to be in their CS department right now.

A couple of short notes.

We’ve been working with some content partners and have added over 200 GTA restaurant coupons to our Coupons Section.  Worth a look if you’re dining out in Toronto.

We’ve decided to focus the RedFlagDeals.com blog on ecommerce news and consumer issues.  We plan to update it more often too.

We’re sponsoring CaseCamp next week.  It’s going to be a very busy week for us, but we’ll be there for at least some of the conference.

Derek was on BNN earlier this week (despite being on vacation in Las Vegas) discussing loyalty programs and you can check out the clip here.  We’ve done a number of media appearances lately, including a spot on Canada AM last week.

The big news today is that we’ve launched the redesign of our deals for women subsite, Scarlett Lounge.  I’m not directly involved with the project, but I’ve watched our team work hard over the past several weeks to conceptualize, build, and launch the site.  Congratulations team!  I think the new design is much improved, so go check it out!