In the wake of these hard economic times for local businesses, it excites me to be working on a couple of projects that are targeted to help small, local businesses compete with the big guys.
Some of you know that last year I started a program called “Business with a Heart”. It is a three pronged program.
- To set the example ourselves by making a commitment to help small business by offering them a sliding scale of fees to keep our services affordable. It is our belief that giving back must be more than just the token things like sponsoring the local little league team.
- To challenge other companies to do the same thing in their communities.
- To celebrate the people who are going above and beyond by working together to spread the message.
As part of the “Business with a Heart” mission I have been fortunate to find others who at their core really do want to help small business.
The first project I am working on is a utility called “Triplefy”. The mission of Triplefy is to give small businesses some tools that can help them compete with big national brands.
With Triplefy, a business can sign up and create deals and gift cards for their site as simple as cutting and pasting some HTML.
The HTML can be pasted on a website, in an email, or on Facebook so that it encourages people to shop online at local places. The money for the purchase of the card goes directly into the retailer’s Paypal account.
Triplefy tracks the value of each card for the merchant. When someone purchases a gift card they can print out or email the gift card to the recipient. The person receiving the gift can simply bring in their smart phone to the retailer to show the email, or a show a printed copy of the gift card.
The idea and programing of Triplefy was from the mind of Mike Morris in New Haven, Connecticut. According to Mike, statistics show that of $100 spend at a big box store, about $14 stays in the local community. Of that same $100 spent at a local retailer, about $45 stays in the community creating a “Triplefy” effect.
Triplefy also has a “deal” component that gives the local retailer a much fairer way to create and publish deals. With out heavy fees and heavy discounting found with deals offered through Groupon, Mike hopes to create a system that will build loyal, happy repeat customers instead of people who will just me looking for the next deal. You can learn more about Triplefy at: http://triplefy.com
The second project I am working on is called “PizzaGram” with Randy and Rudy Danowski. Rudy came up with this cool idea of being able to send a pizza to anyone in the country.
Mom and Dad will be able to send a pizza to their kids in college. Grandma will be able to send little Jimmy a pizza to say congratulations for winning a soccer game. We combined the ideas of Triplefy and PizzaGram to make the system work. PizzaGram uses the Triplefy engine to fuel the transaction. You can learn more about PizzaGram at: http://ItsAllAboutPizza.com
