What is Red Stairs Inc.?

Red Stairs Inc is a software development consultancy that focuses on building and maintaining Web Apps for clients. There are many software shops that try to be a one-stop solution for design, websites, web applications, mobile, and infrastructure. Instead of taking that approach, I focus on my strengths as a coder to build web apps and web APIs. Many small to medium sized businesses need internal or customer facing applications for sales, document management, or internal tools. Red Stairs builds the web portions (interfaces, apis) and works with other designers and developers if an additional puzzle piece, like a smartphone app, is required.

What Products/services do you provide?

As a consulting company, Red Stairs helps augment dev teams, or takes on projects for companies who don’t have the time or ability to handle the work in-house. I’ve worked with startups who were in the early stages of building their product, established companies that are falling behind on their workload, and at this time even the development department for an established set of medical clinics throughout Ontario.

In the last year, I’ve built apps for:

– An analytics company to track customer behaviour across social media, ecommerce, and retail POS transactions.
– A chocolate maker in Texas to improve efficiency by generating accounting reports
– A group of medical clinics to store, esign, and efax medical documents in a compliant manner

Anything new and exciting happening within your company?

Yes! I am trying to hire my first full time employee. If you know a software developer who focuses on web technologies, I’d love to talk to them.

What tech gadget or resource (i.e. blog, magazine, online tool, app, Youtube video, etc) has played a role in growing your company?

Since the industry moves so quickly, it’s important to constantly be learning about and building with new technologies. I have had a thousandfold return on resources that teach me about tech and entrepreneurship. My favourite software dev sites are laracasts.com and codeschool.com; these sites both have monthly fees, but are well worth the cost. And I love reading Amy Hoy’s blog on running a business at unicornfree.com

What idea do you have to help accelerate our local Tech community. Tell us in 140 characters. We’ll tweet it!

Being a parent, spouse, and businessperson is hard. I’d love a periodic meetup for folks to discuss balancing work and family.

Where can people find you online?

All I’ve got is redstairs.ca, and right now it’s just a placeholder page. A new updated page is coming soon!