StoryofaStartup.com

It’s been a busy year!  There were actually a couple posts that I made that were lost when the server the blog is hosted on failed.  Here are a few highlights of the past year:

• We had our biggest boxing day ever with over 50 million pageviews in December.
• We completely redid the front and backend of our free coupons database.
• As a result of the recession, there’s been a lot of media interest in RedFlagDeals.com.
• We have nearly 1800 followers on Twitter now.
• Our 3rd Annual Member Awards are currently being voted on by our members.
• We redesigned our Credit Card Comparison section.
• We moved to a new office closer to downtown Toronto.  We even have banners up.

Work continues on the Coupons section, particularly as we start to focus on more local coupons.

We recently launched a new section at RedFlagDeals.com that auto-generates a page that lists all of the one day specials that have become so popular with Canadian online retailers.  You can check it out here: Canadian Daily Deals.  It features deals from retailers like Dell, Sears, HomeDepot.ca, Well.ca and more.  There’s also an RSS feed you can subscribe to.  It wasn’t a major project, but it’s turned out to be pretty useful and pretty popular, so I thought it was worth a mention.

To follow up on an older post, our Garage Sale section proved to be popular this year.  We had over 1200 sales listed and over 100,000 pageviews during the season.  Not bad for a project that took a few days to build.  We’ll make some refinements for next year’s garage sale season now that we have a good base to work with.

We’ve put on a photo gallery from our BBQ on August 23.   It was a lot of fun

The now annual RedFlagDeals.com BBQ is taking place on August 23 in Toronto!  We’re hoping for about 700 people.  You get find details and buy tickets here.

We’ve also launched our Back to School deals page and contest.  Our students forum and buy, sell, and trade textbooks forum have seen the usual increase in activity.

The first half of the year is long over now and the sprint towards boxing day is on.  Work on upgrades to our coupons system and classifieds continues.  With a little luck we’ll also be launching a new section for women this month as well.

Busy, busy, busy!

Well it looks like it’s official: Newegg is coming to Canada!  They’ve updated their Newegg.ca domain to announce it – previously the domain just redirected to Newegg.com.  This isn’t the first time that this has been rumoured.  Two years ago I spoke with their head office about their plans in Canada, but those fizzled when there was an internal reorg and there was never an official announcement as is there is now.  There is lots of discussion about the launch on the RedFlagDeals.com forums.  Our users have high expectations of the launch.

Online retail is a very different game in Canada, so it will be interesting to see how Newegg is able to compete with established sites like FutureShop.ca and NCIX.com.  It will also be interesting to see how closely their prices reflect the prices on their US site.  TigerDirect has both .com and .ca operations, but the prices often vary widely.

I’ve got a bunch of invites to the AskItOnline.com beta. Want one? Just post a comment to this entry!

What is AskItOnline?

AskItOnline is a powerful online survey creation and deployment system. Our intuitive survey builder lets you design and create your surveys in a fraction of the time.

With our powerful reporting options, we help you make sense of all that data from all of your respondents. With more advanced and powerful options just around the corner, AskItOnline will soon offer the most sophisticated survey reporting options available online!

Update: It’s probably easier to get them through the Mashable Invite page. 

The best deal I’ve found through RedFlagDeals.com (in recent memory) is the free Xbox360 that I received from Dell and Bell for signing up for a 1 year subscription to Bell High Speed Internet.  It wasn’t anymore expensive than the Internet service I was paying for from Rogers and I was unhappy with Rogers anyway, so I basically got an Xbox360 for making a switch I probably would have made anyway.  The deal is long over, but here’s a link to the original thread.  That’s my best deal ever!  See you on Live!

Well, technically the nominations are for Most Helpful thread, but Thread of the Year makes a better headline.

The Nominated Threads are:
rn – Hot deal for Rogers Wireless Customers
Red_Army – Anyone need Plumbing help or advice
Jeff-TheBiz – Ask Me Anything About Buying a Mazda at a Dealership
Monsieurmaggot – Auto – WOW —- New cars from US up to 30% cheaper (cost to import under $200)
ainsane – Best Computer Stores in the GTA – Recommended by RFD users
Ebola – FAQ About Cross Border Shopping / CBSA
nepean19 – How to get a free HD PVR from Rogers
Hellfire – I’m a Personal Credit Underwriter – Ask away
phillbert – Tell us a secret you know because of your work that others might not know…
patrob – The OFFICIAL Hardwood Flooring Thread

All of them are great resources and are very deserving of their nominations.  If you have a RedFlagDeals.com account, you can cast your vote here.

Our 2nd Annual RedFlagDeals.com Member Awards have begun!  The nomination period runs until the end of June and the voting takes place between July 1st and 15th.

We’re also beginning preparations for this year’s BBQ.

Busy busy!

It’s been a busy May!  We went to the Mesh conference last week and it was among the best conferences in Canada, as usual.  We’ll be at the Store Conference, which we’re sponsoring, next week and SES a couple weeks after that.

In other news, we may have found an actual useful way to use Twitter. More news about that soon.