StoryofaStartup.com

I was utterly exhausted by the time DemoCamp began last night, so I apologize to anybody I forgot to say ‘hi’ to.  To make up for my diminished ability to pay attention, here is some link love for the presenters with my very brief comments in italics.

1. WildApricot – Easy webpage and database management for small organizations.  (Looked interesting, I don’t know much about the space and it’s hard to tell what their key points of differentiation are in a 10 min demo.)
2. JobLoft.com - Google maps-powered job board for young people looking for retail/service/hospitality jobs.  (Looks to effectively serve the niche.  I’m curious as to how much they charge for job listings.  They were featured in today’s Metro and they’ll be advertising on RFD in the near future. ) 
3. Filemobile – Power tools for bloggers, letting users videoblog and moblog with ease.  (I think they tried to show too much in the demo and the slow internet connection didn’t help.  Unfortunately they got cut off just as the revenue model was to be discussed.)
4. Languify A not-yet-released tool from the Nuvvo team & NicolaasHandojo to manage translating your user interface to new languages.  (Interesting but very early in development.  I think they should get some good feedback from the presentation.)

Mike McDerment from FreshBooks.com finished up the night with a presentation on developing and analyzing a funnel for web based services.  This is probably the biggest challenge Web2.0 services face espicially those that start out as free services.  Really, I think the topic would have lent itself better to the more collabrative BarCamp scenario, but hopefully it gets some attendees thinking about analytics.

Other happenings:

Dave and Jay have thrown down the gauntlet and are challenging the Toronto community to step up and organize the Toronto chapter of BarCampEarth. Unfortunatley, August is going to be a very busy month as we work towards the relaunch of RFD, but we’d be happy to sponsor the event again and help out in any way we can.

AmberMac and Leo Laporte are looking for Toronto tech companies to interview during September for their PodCast.  If you’re interested, you can contact Amber through her webpage.

I’m back on the job and other than readjusting to business hours things are going well.

• I read The Long Tail and JPod over my vacation.  I’ll post reviews later in the week.
• Tuesday is going to be a crazy day.  We have a meeting with our advisory board in the morning and DemoCamp8 in the evening.
• Is anyone doing anything interesting in Ottawa?  We have an interview opp out that way, but in of itself it isn’t big enough to head up there for.  Drop me a line if you’d like to get together sometime during the next 4 weeks or so.

Running a startup isn’t particularly good for your health.  The hours are long, the stress level is high, and as a result your health can become a secondary concern.  Every once in a while you have to take some time off.  So, I’m taking next week off.  It’s my first real vacation in about 3 years.  (When we were in school, summer was when we finally had time to work on RFD without worrying about anything else.)

There is value in taking a vaction beyond the personal.  It gives you a chance to take a step back from the day to day obligations of the business and hopefully gain some perspective then return to work reenergized.

I’m not going anywhere exotic.  I moved to Toronto last fall and since things have been so busy, I haven’t had a chance to really check it out.  So please send in your personal “Toronto must-sees” and let me know if anything fun is happening.  I’m going to try to avoid my work email, so write me at mckegney@thedomainnameofthisblog.com

I may blog while on vacation so keep your eyes on the feed.  

Maybe this will be a regular feature. At this point I’m willing to try different things and see what sticks.

Here’s what’s going on in my network of friends and acquaintances:

• Popular tech vlog, commandN, has turned one! PriceCanada.com is sponsoring a contest for their birthday. Running contests with smaller community based sites can be a very cost effective way to advertise. It builds good will in the community, smaller sites are usually so excited to have a contest sponsor that you’ll be charged little if anything to run it and you get exposure. It’s fun too.
• Rocketboom is back with a new host. Check out their traffic ranking on Alexa. This controversy could be the best thing that ever happened to them.
• It was revealled today that our neighbors from down the hall at Radiant Core are developing the default theme for FireFox 2.0. Congrats! Very cool!
• Apparently Microsoft thinks that the TorCamp regulars are so cool really get it, so they’re willing to pay to put us all in a room with an open bar and then not give a presentation of any sort. Interesting approach to industry relations, but I’m not complaining. I think we’re cool we get it too.

Flashback to January 2005.

Derek and I were still in school, but graduation was in sight.  December 2004 had been our best month ever with RFD and it was clear that we were going to be able to work on RFD full time once school ended.  There were still a lot of things to work out, but we recognized that this was our shot.

Most of our “business meetings” back then took place at a local burger joint called Stooley’s.  We’d grab a burger, maybe a pint, and try to hash out the shape of this business that had grown out of what had begun as a hobby site.  Up until then most of our planning had to do with at most the next month or two ahead, but suddenly we were looking at a timeline that didn’t have to accommodate exams and summer jobs.  With this suddenly infinite canvas, we wanted to launch something that we had talked about on and off for more than year.  We knew that it would be a big project, but we wanted to launch a Canadian shopping comparison search engine. 

I’m not a web designer.  I’m a bit of a perfectionist with such things though and as a result I tend to hate templates.  I don’t like this WordPress theme much, but for the time being it will have to do.  In all likelihood when you read this I won’t be using the theme I’m currently referring to. 

So, why did I decide to start blogging? It’s something I had intended to do for some time and a few weeks back I decided to just do it ™.

A lot has changed at Csky over the past year. We went from having two employees (Derek and myself) to having about nine (it changes quickly, hence the about), we moved to Toronto, we launched a new site, PriceCanada.com, and we found our first and second offices. It’s been a crazy ride and hopefully it’s just beginning. This blog will document, from my POV, our past, present, and future.

It was almost exactly a year ago that we moved into our first office in Toronto. That was a major turning point in many ways, but the biggest impact that move had was that we were able to join the community of developers, marketers, and startups in Toronto. Because of that move I’ve met so many great people (David, Ken, Sutha, Jay, Albert, Bryce, Rohan, to name a few). I hope that this blog will be one way that I can interact and give back to this community.

The catalyst (aka kick in the pants) that finally roused me into action was Bill Sweetman’s post at One Degree about his recently launched blog. Sometimes you have to commit yourself to action and I did that by commenting on his post with the soft announcement of this blog.

So the experiment begins…

Sutha Kamal at Ambient Vector has a new blog at the Globe and Mail’s website called “90 Days in the Life of a Start-up.”  Ambient got VC a few months back from Celtic House and they are working on a mobile social networking platform.  I’ve met Sutha a few dozen times, but I can’t say that I know a whole lot about what he’s doing, so I’ll be watching the blog intently.

Who am I?  Well let’s avoid the existential, this is a business focused blog and I’m ten or fifteen years away from my midlife crisis.  My name is Ryan McKegney.  I’m 24 years old and I live in Toronto.  I have a degree in English Literature from Queen’s University.  My official title is Vice-president of Business Development at Clear Sky Media Inc.

Who is Clear Sky Media?  Well we describe the company like this on our webpage:

Clear Sky Media is a Toronto-based firm that provides unique online channels for marketers to reach consumers with its sites: RedFlagDeals.com and PriceCanada.com.

RedFlagDeals.com harnesses the power of community to scour Canada for all of the latest shopping information. The site is a valuable resource to consumers and provides unique marketing opportunities for advertisers. According to Alexa.com, it is one of the 100 most popular sites in Canada.

PriceCanada.com is a shopping comparison search engine and Clear Sky Media’s newest site. The site allows users to search dozens of online retailers, compare products, and then make a purchase. It gives retailers the opportunity to generate highly qualified leads at a greater ROI than traditional search engines.