Derek Szeto: RedFlagDeals.com A Case Study On When To Exit Your Successful Startup
Bibliographic record
Abstract
RedFlagDeals.com (RFD) is a daily virtual destination for over 450,000 Canadian consumers seeking and sharing coupons, promotions, and deals. Founder, Derek Szeto, created the website because he saw an unmet need in the Canadian market and did not hesitate to create something that is ten times better than spending hours each week clipping coupons on his kitchen counter. From the beginning, Derek and his team bootstrapped their way to the top. He built the business out of nothing in his parents’ basement, with zero outside capital. He and his two employees funded the project themselves, without any external assistance. It was not until they had reached over a two million unique visitors that outside investors approached them to offer expansion funding (Naked Entrepreneur, 2013). Notwithstanding, Derek declined all offers of investment from outsiders. February 2010 marked RFD’s most rewarding milestone to date. Derek made the decision that he would sell to Yellow Pages Group Canada. After the transaction, Derek moved over to work under Yellow Pages Group Canada (YPGC) in the position of General Manager-Deals, Coupons, and Shopping. In late 2011, RFD was one of the 100 most popular websites in the country (Szeto, 2011). To this day, RFD attracts more than 2.5 million monthly readers by providing coupons and promotions across 14 categories (RedFlagDeals.com, 2013).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".