What you get
Every other member near you telling the truth about what you're good at, in a place these things get read. Not one voice. Twenty. And as the map fills in, the streets around you doing the same.
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The neighborhood
The idea
One shop is a listing. A street is a source. A country of streets is a network.
A page about you, written by you, counts for almost nothing. Every business has one. No assistant has ever been talked round by it.
What actually moves the answer is other people saying it. Not once — consistently, in writing, in a place a machine can read. You cannot buy that on your own at any price. It only exists if the shops around you are doing it too.
So that's what you're joining. Not someone who writes about you. A group of local businesses who make each other findable — you vouch for them, they vouch for you — built one street at a time, and meant to run in every neighborhood in the country.
The deal
What you give
The same, back. One honest recommendation a month, for a business you'd genuinely send a customer to. That's the part of the membership that isn't money, and it's the part that makes the whole thing work.
Why we fill one street before starting the next. Twenty shops on a few streets should beat two hundred scattered across a city — when something has to answer “where's good round here”, what ought to count is how much honest, readable material exists about those particular few streets. We believe that and we have built around it, but we haven't proved it yet and we're not going to pretend otherwise: it's the main thing the first neighborhood is there to test. So twenty isn't the size of this, it's the unit. Fill one neighborhood, then the next, then the city. There are hundreds of thousands of small businesses in this country getting outbid on every keyword, and every one of them is a voice the others don't have yet.
Where this goes
We're choosing the first neighborhood now, with partners who already have the local networks — which is why early members matter more than the ones who come later. You help decide what your category even gets judged on. Nothing about it changes at size: twenty per street, over and over, is what a national network of small businesses looks like. It's the only kind of scale a corner shop ever gets to be part of.
And it isn't only about being found
Members turn out to be worth something to each other in the ordinary way, too.
01
Real terms between members
Members give each other actual terms — a trade price, a standing discount, first call on a booking. Whatever's normal in your line.
02
Referrals that go both ways
The recommendation you write isn't a favor. It's how the person reading it ends up in their shop, and how theirs ends up in yours.
03
A street that knows each other
Twenty owners within a few blocks with a reason to talk. Most of what comes out of that is none of our business, which is rather the point.
It's also why the recommendations are true. Members really do use each other and really do give each other terms, so when one member says another is good, they're describing something that happened. That's the difference between this and the link-swapping schemes, and it isn't a small one.
Start here
Find out what they're saying about you.
Send us your name, your website and your town. You'll get the actual answers from three assistants and a plain read of what they got wrong about you. Free, no strings, and the report is yours to keep even if you never speak to us again.
Prefer email? Write to [email protected].