StoryofaStartup.com

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.

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.

Typically at Clear Sky Media we spend the first 7 or 8 months of the year in active development and then the last quarter of the year is a blur with Back to School, RedFlagDeals.com’s and PriceCanada.com’s anniversaries, and then Christmas and Boxing Day.  This year we’re hoping to really buildout a lot of the existing features/sections on our properties.  We want to build out our Free Coupons section as well as our Warehouse Sales section and we will be expanding our covered product categories on our price comparison site, PriceCanada.com.

If this year is anything like the last few, most of the projects we end up working on will emerge from opportunities that we aren’t yet aware of.  The web is a dynamic market and things like the Facebook platform can come out of nowhere and change the game quickly.  Google seems to making that a quarterly habit these days.

All in all it should be an interesting year.  We’ve had the advantage of running our business through what have been more or less boom years online and in the economy.  Because much of the tech business is US based, it will be interesting to see what effect the downturn in the US economy has on Canadian based tech/online companies.  We still have a lot of room to grow, so I expect our growth will outpace any larger downturn.

I posted some December/Boxing Day statistics to the RFD Blog.  Take a look.

We recently instituted a version of Google’s 20% time at Clear Sky Media and the first fruits of that policy are a number of Facebook Apps.

Our first app was our Canadian Coupons app powered by RedFlagDeals.com that you can try out here.  (Facebook account required of course)

We then released a Canadian Freebies app, again, powered by RedFlagDeals.com.  Click here to try it.

Then most recently we’ve released an American Online Coupons app that is powered by our new site, GetMyThrift.com.

We’ve wanted to move into the coupons space in the US for some time, but we wanted an interesting way to do it.  The Facebook app is an interesting backdoor.

RedFlagDeals.com really is a community, so we decided to make July Reader Appreciation month. The big event during the month is our 1st Member Awards. Right now we’re in the nominations phase, so members are currently nominating each other for awards like Best Hot Deal Forum Poster, Best Freebie Forum Poster, and Most Helpful Member. It’s going to be interesting to see how it all pans out, but my hope is that it will highlight the members who go the extra mile to help out and inspire other members to get more involved.