It is developing… Thank you for your continued support, patience and understanding

Hello everyone; it is a new year with new vibes. I hope you are all feeling great!

I sip on a cup of English breakfast tea as I write this, I want to express my gratitude for your continued interest. The support we have received has been overwhelmingly positive and is very much appreciated by myself and the team.

After hectic months of development, marketing, user feedback, and deploying the site for the alpha release, we decided to scale back, suspend our marketing campaigns to make updates, and fix some of the reported issues based on user feedback for the alpha release. It was a tough call as much effort, costs, and time have been expended into planning, marketing, and development activities.

It has been a rocky ride with some hiccups in development as we encountered some technical issues; these included server issues, performance issues, and system availability for users (Apologies for the tech speak). We received user feedback on our onboarding process and are inculcating those into the beta release.

Despite the challenges, the encouragement we have received, the potential benefits of the platform for respective communities, and the team’s belief continually motivate us to keep going, and we will!

Over the holidays, many technical issues are being fixed, which is instrumental for us in this final phase before the beta release. All the pieces are slowly coming together, and we are excited for the following weeks ahead! (No timelines for beta provided yet)

What have we done so far?

• Revamped our onboarding process based on user feedback, reducing the onboarding process time from 10 to 4 minutes

• Resigned our platform for optimal user experience

• Updated our homepage and relevant screens

• Upgraded our servers

• Implemented google maps integration for quick user directions

What to expect for the beta release?

• A platform with a simplified UI that enables you to locate businesses quickly with advanced filtering capabilities will allow you to filter businesses.

  • By the exact services or products you want

  • By the business presence (if the business has a physical location or is online only)

  • By Community

  • By Business Type

  • By Notables (Offers Pickups, Offers Delivery, Women-Owned, Payment methods)

  • By Tags

  • By Location

• Ability to feature your business on the platform.

What is next after our beta release?

After the beta is released, we will monitor and gather user feedback for improvements, include additional functionalities and implement our resource module. The resource module will allow users to find small business resources in Ontario; these include but are not limited to grants and small business opportunities.

Once again, thank you for your continued interest and support, we understand the importance of our initiative, and we will deliver

Our mission is to increase visibility to black-owned, indigenous-owned businesses, service providers, brands, and small business resources within Ontario communities via our online platform and interface.