StoryofaStartup.com

Our Mother’s Day deals section is up as is our Mother’s Day contest.  If you’re looking for gift ideas, it’s worth a click.

I like the graphic we did for this contest:

Our garage sales section is humming along as well.  I expect May will be the biggest month.  I’ve been asked a couple of times about how we plan to make money with it.  In this case, we built it because we thought it would be useful for our community.  There is no monetization aside from the regular IAB ads that appear on site.  As I’ve mentioned before, it was built off of our warehouse sales tool, so there wasn’t much additional work.  We’re all about community service.

In other news, you can catch Derek and I presenting at CaseCamp next week at Circa.  We’ll be talking about how we grew the site and doing a short case study on our boxing day coverage.

Lastly, it was nice to see TripHarbour.ca leave the dry docks smoothly.  Congrats Stu!

I attended the Mesh Meetup last night.  Well, my body was there at least.  I’ve been dealing with a bad cold/cough the last couple of days.  There was a lot of talk about the new event this year, MeshU.  Haven’t heard about MeshU?  Well that might be because the grey-on-grey link on the Mesh homepage is kind of hard to see.

MeshU is a series of design, development and management focused workshops taking place the day before Mesh.  The registration is separate from the regular conference registration and although that seems to be controversial to some, it makes sense to me.  MeshU looks like it will be a great event for developers and project managers to learn, interact, and network.  A conference can’t be all things to all people and the type of sessions that will appeal to developers, won’t appeal to the biz dev people and vice versa.  An event like MeshU can compliment a camp-crazy city like Toronto because it has the resources to bring in dev-stars like Dan Burka and Avi Bryant who probably couldn’t fly into Toronto for an unconference.

I’ll be at Mesh and not MeshU because I fall more onto the biz dev side of things, but I think that there will definitely more than $240 worth of value for the dev crowd at MeshU.

We’re currently in the testing stage of a new feature on RedFlagDeals.com that allows you to use Google Maps to list your garage sale and find garage sales in your area. It’s pretty neat, but the success of the feature will be determined by user adoption.  We adapted it from our Warehouse Sales section, so it wasn’t much additional work.  Sometimes throwing things out there and seeing what sticks is a valid (and fun) way to do things.