StoryofaStartup.com

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.

We’re currently in the process of reworking our Deals Newsletter on RedFlagDeals.com and as a part of that process, we have been evaluating various e-mail marketing products/services.  Among the ones we’ve considered are iContact, SonicMailer Pro, and Constant Contact.  They each have their pros and cons, but right now we’re leaning towards iContact.   What e-mail marketing software to do you use?  If you have experience with any of the above, it would be appreciated.

Last Sunday we held our first big “real world” event for the readers of RedFlagDeals.com: The Bargain Hunter’s Picnic! It was a big success with about 500 people showing up to enjoy, fun, food, and prizes. We also managed to raise about $1500 for the Starlight Starbright Children’s Foundation!

We learned a lot from the event and had our fair share of hiccups, including a rental company that was a no-show with a bunch of our equipment.  It was great to see how diverse the crowd was; we had people of all ages, including a few dozen kids, and it really highlighted for me that RedFlagDeals.com is really about community.
You can check out photos from the event here: Bargain Hunter’s Picnic Photo Gallery

I didn’t see it and judging by the box office numbers, neither did you. So what did we learn from Snakes on Plane’s lack of breakout success? Well, hopefully something we already knew, being a hit with bloggers doesn’t mean you will be a hit with “real people.” As countless Web2.0 companies have found out and many more will, being featured on TechCrunch et al won’t make you a success by itself. With the help of trackbacks, comments, and aggregators the blogosphere can act very much like a feedback loop. The biggest audience for most blogs is other bloggers.

I think a lot of people misread the hype around this movie. Having buzz is great, but when the buzz is “man this looks dumb” you have to wonder how that will correlate to success. We like making fun of bad movies, but most of us don’t like actually watching them. There were lots of jokes about Gigli remember, but no one saw that either.

I wasn’t looking forward to the stream of crappy movies that Snakes being a blockbuster would have brought anyway.