Connect
To Top

Meet Kristina Corcoran of Denver Free Fun in Metro Denver

Avatar photo

Today we’d like to introduce you to Kristina Corcoran.

So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
Denver Free Fun and Find Free Fun were actually started from a period of hardship. I had been working in the financial industry for several years and was trying to shift into the real estate market with a person who did fix and flips and rental properties. This same person told me they could get my townhome refinanced despite that my HOA was in litigation with the builder which made it a difficult loan process.

I went to work for him for a modest salary and discovered I had a real affinity for the industry despite housing prices quickly increasing. I had five potential renters lined up and several houses under contract at well below market value that just needed a few repairs and updates. Resale would have netted hundreds of thousands after the repairs were completed. Contractors were in place and the earnest money was in, but I had still not received any of the salaries that I had been promised. There were always plausible excuses why the money was not there and the refinance was not through. There were even calls from the bank telling me that the money was transferring.

Then, one day, an earnest money check that I had dropped off bounced at the bank. By this point, I was pretty sure I was being taken for a ride and sure enough, that day the Colorado Bureau of Investigation approached me to tell me that my new boss was a crook and that he and his business partner were under investigation for mortgage fraud and theft. Both were convicted and I discovered they had stolen from many people including the refinance fees they had taken from me.

At this point, my pipeline in financial planning had dried up, I had nothing to show for my time in the real estate market and my refinance had never happened. After a week of feeling very sorry for myself, I started Denver Free Fun on Facebook as a way to keep track of all the fun things the kids and I could do and enjoy on a very tight budget.

The page exploded practically overnight and in a little over a month, I had over 2000 people following the page and the events and deals I posted. I realized that I might not be the only one who was feeling the pinch of Denver’s dynamic economy. At that point, I began to explore what it would look like to build this as a business and met with a web designer to begin building our first website. I registered and trademarked the name, purchased the domain names and had the foresight to include Find Free Fun for future expansion purposes.

I did a market analysis and saw that people were charging high advertising prices for simply a web ad or print ad and that pricing seemed very disproportionate to their market share. I wanted to run the business very differently. I decided that I wanted to be accessible to small businesses and priced my advertising accordingly. In addition, I made complete marketing packages for my advertising sponsors that included a full spectrum of social media advertising including Facebook, Instagram, email and blog articles as well as an advertisement on the website for each advertiser. I also included events and custom events in those marketing packages for those advertisers so that we could highlight those businesses and help them create exciting events that drew in new customers to their businesses. Then I kept my pricing for everything at around a quarter of my competition’s.

Today, we are coming up on our second anniversary and the page is followed by thousands of Denver residents and visitors to the city. We average around 10% growth every month. We have a large, active following on Facebook, a rapidly growing Instagram page that has garnered the attention of some of Denver’s top celebrities and Instagram pages and is currently working on getting expanded into other cities and states.

We also felt it was very important to give back while we were building Denver Free Fun and created Find Free Fun’s Feed the Fam at the same time. Feed the Fam helps homeless and in-crisis teens and their families. During my son’s high school years, he had some difficulties and several of his friends ended up being homeless despite still being minors. These kids often slept on couches or in their cars and we took in a few to help them get through high school.

We also had some court issues from a MIP ticket that ended up being a long drawn-out process since my son was his own worst enemy during that time. I ended up sending him for treatment for his 18th birthday. During that period, a counselor asked me how I was doing. After going on and on about how positive I felt this was for him, she stopped me and told me that she hadn’t asked about him, she had asked about me. I burst into tears because no one had thought to ask me during all this time.

Since that time, we have pushed to have Feed the Fam provide help for these kids and their families through legal help, drug rehab, counseling, schooling and more. We have had two very successful holiday drives that have raised thousands for these kids and are going into our second back-to-school drive right now. We are also planning a very special panel for these teens and their parents in July that will have speakers that had difficult teen years and made good. This will include my son, who is currently in the financial world. We are still in the process of obtaining our 501C3 and currently pass our donations along to Urban Peak and other organizations, but hope eventually to be able to provide services and housing for these kids directly through Feed the Fam.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc. – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Starting a business on a shoe-string budget is never easy and we have fought to build and grow. Initially, the website that was supposed to take two weeks to build ended up taking nearly four months and then it had a lot of flaws so we were unable to market it immediately. My web designer was not completing the fixes and was not putting up the ads we had in a timely fashion. She also charged us for a logo that I later learned was not an original logo. Needless to say, that business relationship did not end well when I had to pay another designer to fix the entire website. But it drove me to learn how to do the web design myself.

Building a sales team was also a chore. I had several people who asked to come on and do sales for the business, but it was a straight commissioned job and while I paid well for those sales, it takes a special person to see the value in that.

My father died very unexpectedly at our one year anniversary and as a thing was ramping up with the business and events were being planned, work for me came to a grinding halt beyond basic maintenance. We discovered that my mother’s dementia was far more severe than we had realized and scrambled to find a home for her. My sales team at the time told me not to worry and that they had the sales and events under control.

I discovered a week before our first event that they did not. To add insult to injury, during that event several locations that we had planned on visiting were closed due to the cold. While I did not lose money on that event, we certainly did not earn the kind of revenue that we should have if it had been planned properly.

While I have been self-employed for over ten years, this foray into Denver Free Fun has been a new experience and as we have grown there have been tears, questions, and mistakes. They become fewer and fewer with each day and as our experience grows, we work to make sure our clients grow with us. I am very blessed to now have a very driven sales team, an amazing admin assistant and a new event planner working with me. They have made the struggles much easier to bear and they see what this company can be. Now, thanks to my team, we are fortunate enough to be rebuilding the website in a different format that will be available for nationwide use, we are expanding into new cities and states and we have a brand new logo that will transition into future cities as well.

We’d love to hear more about your business.
Denver Free Fun is the place to find all the free and cheap stuff around town. Find all the festivals, concerts, movies, food and more happening with budget-friendly pricing. With Denver Free Fun, you can still have a great time while saving money. With the rising prices in Denver, it has become more imperative than ever to find cost-conscious options and Denver Free Fun was established to assist in those endeavors.

We also build events just for our clients such as the event we did in May with our client, Blue Mountain Self Storage, that brought the Rocky Mountain Wildlife Foundation with their wolves for an educational event with vendors and food trucks, the Pinup Parties we have done for Denver Free Fun sponsor, Sandy Puc Photography and much more including a Kids’ Entrepreneurial event, an upcoming Kids’ Science Fair, Dinners for Furloughed Government Workers and several other events.

As a company, I am so proud of the way we have grown and that we provide so much to the community and the businesses we work with. We receive several accolades every week from people who appreciate everything that Denver Free Fun offers and often they let us know that we are their go-to when finding things to do around town. Denver visitors also regularly come to us to find the best things going on around town on their trips. We have won several awards including the 2018 and 2019 Best Free Service in Denver from Westword, Feedspots Top 50 Blogs in Denver and we have been up for several other awards as well. It is very gratifying to watch a company that was built from hardship grow into one of the largest and most respected companies of its kind in such a short amount of time.

What were you like growing up?
Growing up, I was an introvert. I was in the gifted program, traveled extensively, was a reader, was a little socially awkward and was a born salesman. Once I even sold “Make Your Own Pet Rock” kits that included a rock and two crayons to all the neighborhood kids. It did not go over well with the neighborhood parents though when their kids had no allowance left. I even did door to door sales then throughout the neighborhood.

In college, I transferred my attention from being a veterinarian (which was probably smart since I have animal allergies) over to Psychology and Journalism. I received a double major in both with an emphasis in Public Relations.

I had intended to go into psychology, but quickly discovered a bachelor’s degree in psychology translated to a minimum wage job on the night shift. I decided to pursue marketing instead and spent several years doing marketing for construction and financial companies.

When the Denver economy collapsed, I left marketing and went through an ugly divorce losing everything in the process including my job and my family’s construction company where all my money was invested. Going from an affluent lifestyle to a complete do-over was educational for me and I found that not only could I stand on my own two feet, but that I was driven to succeed.

I spend so much time in the public eye, dealing with people and working 24-7, that when I do get a moment, in my spare time I like to escape. I love to go riding, I frequently grab my husky, Sammie, and go hiking, I enjoy reading and I really enjoy cooking from scratch. I try to love the gym and running, but I am still working on both of those. Fortunately, my cooking tends to be very healthy, so spending so much time working hasn’t caught up with me yet.

Pricing:

  • Basic Marketing Package $800 Annually – Includes all social media advertising/inclusion in four events a year
  • Extended Marketing Package $1600 Annually – Includes all social media advertising/four custom events per year

Contact Info:


Image Credit:
Pinup Photos by Sandy Puc Photography

Getting in touch: VoyageDenver is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.

Related Items

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

More in