Photo: MyLocal teammates Jack Yun Chia, Attila Aros, Affan Sajid and Thusenth Dhavaloganathan.
Can you imagine a downtown core that’s connected by one app?
Independent businesses in downtown Kitchener are thriving and one local company is uniting them. MyLocal Inc., a Kitchener startup co-founded by Thusenth Dhavaloganathan and Attila Aros, is working with many of Kitchener’s independent businesses and the City of Kitchener in new ways.
With what they call the “Communities Product,” they’re using their customizable website service, back-end dashboard and corresponding mobile app to make it easy for local independent businesses to stay connected with the community. They can post content and updates to their website and social media sites in a “post once, publish everywhere” manner. They will also be able to post to the new Downtown Kitchener website coming in a few weeks.
“It’s about discovering businesses in downtown Kitchener for people who didn’t know about them,” Dhavaloganathan said. “A lot of people still have this negative stigma of going downtown. So this is a way that they can explore and know what’s happening in the shops, get to know the owners, get to know the employees of these places without having to leave the comfort of their browser. What you get is a smorgasbord or Pinterest-style board of what’s happening inside the business.”
The MyLocal concept originated while Dhavaloganathan was working part-time for his father’s restaurant in Guelph.
“I used to be the guy who updated his website, made sure it was up-to-date, posted to social media,” he said.
After graduating from Wilfrid Laurier University, Dhavaloganathan landed a full-time job as a product manager at BlackBerry, where he met his future co-founder, Aros. While keeping up with a professional life in Kitchener, he found that he didn’t have time to devote to posting updates of his father’s restaurant on social media or the website. He wanted to find a way to help his father in a more effective way.
Dhavaloganathan found the answer in MyLocal. He and Aros developed an app with easy-to-use functions that make sense for business owners. The app can be accessed anywhere using a mobile phone, tablet or desktop computer. There is also an option to send an email that will post to social media automatically, instead of using the dashboard.
MyLocal incorporated in December 2012, and officially rolled it out in January 2013, with Dhavaloganathan’s father as their first customer.
“We decided to create something that would enable him to send an email using his BlackBerry PlayBook, which was pretty much all he knew how to use,” Dhavaloganathan said.
When a business owner sends updates to a designated email address, the app reads and extracts its content. It then posts that information to the company’s custom website and social media feeds. Typical updates include daily specials, new inventory and photos of menu items, staff and events. Business owners are able to send content on the go, and posts are automatically linked back to their websites to drive traffic.
“We always make sure that we’re driving the kind of reactions that make sense for an independent business,” Dhavaloganathan said.
So far, MyLocal serves about 70 customers, plus the Downtown Kitchener Business Improvement Area. The largest of these is the Charcoal Group of Restaurants, but Dhavaloganathan and Aros plan to target smaller companies.
“We focus on small ‘Ma and Pa’ local businesses. We’ve had the opportunity to work with bigger franchises; they can afford to pay us more, but our focus is really the more independent, mainstream businesses,” said Dhavaloganathan, adding that
Aros’ family owns two small businesses in Alberta. “We grew up in independent businesses, so it’s kind of knowing what comes out of owning a local business,” he said.
That’s not to say MyLocal isn’t growing in other ways. BlackBerry’s App World has adapted some of their small business websites, after Dhavaloganathan worked with Brian Zubert, BlackBerry’s former Director of Development Relations. As a result, about half-a-dozen MyLocal clients have a BlackBerry-compatible app to use, including King Crab Oyster Bar and Grill and Imbibe Food and Drink.
“MyLocal actually had some of the best websites,” said Zubert when asked why MyLocal was chosen as a company to work with BlackBerry App World. “It was the perfect fit for an app.”
Zubert thinks that the pay-as-you-go pricing structure MyLocal uses for their website, dashboard and app package is a unique asset to the company, adding that “some of these businesses don’t have the budget, so that’s where the pricing model is a great fit for them.”
MyLocal’s next steps are to raise a seed investment round within six months, reach out to other BIAs such as Toronto’s Yonge Business Improvement Area, and continue to grow their client base, which Dhavaloganathan explained isn’t the easiest thing to do.
“Independent business owners are probably the hardest people to sell to because they’re hit up all day, all night,” he said, adding that his father receives an average of five calls a day pitching the ‘next greatest’ product, from SEO to advertising. Although that makes it easy for business owners to just say “no,” Dhavaloganathan isn’t giving up.
“We’re really focused on building those one-on-one relationships with all of these individual businesses through our app and through our product, and trying to get more people and more businesses using it.”
