Searching for the perfect wine glass for Grandma’s birthday? Booking a weekend getaway? Skip Amazon and Expedia, and instead try out a new marketplace of local businesses near you. Rob Monster launched DigitalTown in 2016 as a cloud hosted Smart City platform that brings cities into the digital age, making it easier for residents and visitors to search, connect, and buy local. The solution works for any city of any size.
“DigitalTown is a catalyst in helping cities to implement formal strategies to improve local online competitiveness and improve community quality of life,” Monster explains. “With DigitalTown, a city website becomes the preferred homepage for patrons, and provides every merchant an online storefront to sell services as part of our fast-growing 23,000+ city global network.”
Each city becomes an interoperable part of a global network which connects the cities with a single-sign-on and a unified mobile application that drives transactions to local businesses. Citizens can roam seamlessly from place to place on web and mobile devices with a portable identity and reputation.
At the core, DigitalTown is focused on working with local government to make cities smart by providing a unified digital platform for both the public and private sector. Within the private sector, the solutions powers the “6 pillars of local commerce”: retail, dining, lodging, property, services and transportation.
In addition to working with private partners, DigitalTown works with city managers, county administrators, state governors, federal agencies, trade associations, chambers of commerce, Destination Marketers, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who may be influencers or budget sources in the effort to bring standards and efficiencies across population centers.
With one unique DigitalTown portal for each city, licensed exclusively to either the municipality, or local stakeholder, our readers can take part in this franchising opportunity. “We have a great platform,” Monster says. “Instead of someone spending 6 figures on a franchise with high fixed costs, they can own for perpetuity a platform with little or no fixed costs, and generate recurring revenue from transactions, sponsorships, and advertising.”
The licenses are perpetual, exclusive and assignable, making it straight-forward to sell each City license to another buyer, including the municipality itself. Other logical end buyers of developed city sites include Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs), Chambers of Commerce as well as private developers. For more information, visit http://digitaltown.com/franchise.
