Free platform helps small businesses go digital

Described as ‘The World’s Easiest Website’, Tauranga-based Like Your Local is designed to help small Kiwi businesses thrive in a Post-COVID world.

Like Your Local founders, Mark Murphy and Joshua Terrington, would not be where they are today if it wasn’t for COVID-19.

Before the world locked down, Murphy and Terrington were in Melbourne, a couple of weeks away from closing their second funding round for an online ticketing platform they had built. Event organisers could plug their ticketing service into a platform, and customers would receive a URL to a webpage that dished out app-like experiences. But when COVID-19 hit, all events had to stop, and their funding round followed suit.

Murphy and Terrington wanted to do something to help the situation, so they repurposed their ticketing technology to provide gift cards as a way for customers to pay-it-forward to local businesses.

To help small businesses into the future, Murphy and Terrington hypothesised what the Post-COVID world may look like. To experience a possible future today, Murphy moved from Melbourne to Tauranga.

“Here, we can see what the rest of the world will be like after they come out of COVID-19. It gives us an amazing advantage in what will happen next,” Murphy explains.

Post-COVID, Murphy believes that the sentiment to support local will continue to be high and small businesses will continue to look for ways to diversify their revenue.

To help businesses do both, Murphy and Terrington created Like Your Local, an online platform that makes landing pages for small businesses that showcases all the ways you can support them in an incredibly simple way. It’s free, and all businesses have to do is plug in their most important links, such as their website, social media, or online store.

Like Your Local generates a unique URL and QR code for the business to take their supporters to their page. Companies can also choose from custom posters and point of sale materials.

Like their ticketing platform, the result is an app-like experience that customers don’t need to download.

This month Like Your Local is launching a private feedback capability, which event organisers received tremendous value from on their previous platform. Premium options are also on the way, including analytics, customer check-in and supporter payments that allow regular customers to ‘subscribe’ to their favourite small business.

Although it’s early days, Like Your Local is thinking local but acting global, with sights set on scalability, so they can help small businesses everywhere thrive in a Post-COVID world.