StoryofaStartup.com

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.

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.