Here’s what nobody should lie to you about. ㅤ The hard part of the shared postcard business isn’t making the postcard. ㅤ Printing is easy. EDDM is learnable. Design can be outsourced. There are templates, printers, mailing services and tools that can handle almost every technical part of getting a postcard from your laptop into 5,000 mailboxes. ㅤ That stuff might seem intimidating when you’re starting, but it’s really just process. Do it once or twice and you’ll figure it out. ㅤ The hard part is getting somebody to give you money. ㅤ More specifically, getting a local business owner who doesn’t know you very well to look at your postcard, understand the opportunity and say: ㅤ “Yeah. I’ll give you $250 for that.” ㅤ That’s the business. ㅤ And strangely enough, that’s also the best news I can give you. ㅤ Stop Hiding Behind the Easy Stuff There is a very seductive form of procrastination that happens when you start a local advertising business. ㅤ You work on the logo. ㅤ Then you tweak the website. ㅤ Then you redesign your rate sheet. ㅤ Then you spend two hours comparing printers because one of them might save you eleven cents per postcard. ㅤ Then you decide your prospect spreadsheet needs another column. ㅤ Suddenly you’ve spent three weeks “working on the business” without asking a single human being to buy anything. ㅤ I understand why. ㅤ All that other stuff is comfortable. Nobody can reject you while you’re adjusting a Canva template. ㅤ Selling requires you to put the offer in front of somebody and let them make a decision. ㅤ That’s uncomfortable. ㅤ But if you want to become a Town Publisher, that is the skill you need to develop more than any other. ㅤ You Don’t Have a Postcard Problem. You Have a Sales Problem. Let’s say you create a shared postcard going to 5,000 homes. ㅤ You’ve got an advertising spot priced at $250. ㅤ Your job is now incredibly simple. ㅤ Find a local business that could benefit from reaching those 5,000 households and explain why spending $250 to do it makes sense.

Everybody wants a sales system that doesn’t require them to actually talk to anybody. They want the perfect cold email. The automated Facebook message. The magical funnel that brings local business owners running to them, credit card in hand, while they sit at home drinking coffee. And listen, I get it. That sounds great. Unfortunately, local advertising usually doesn’t work that way. At some point, you are probably going to have to pick up the phone, walk into the business, introduce yourself, and ask somebody to buy something. I know. Terrible news. But here’s the good news: almost nobody else wants to do it either. The “Easy” Sales Channels Are the Crowded Ones People talk about cold calling and door-to-door prospecting like they are horribly crowded, outdated sales methods. Are they really? When was the last time a local business owner had five different local publishers walk through the door in one afternoon? Probably never. Now ask that same owner how many emails, Facebook messages, texts, SEO pitches, website offers, and “quick questions” they received this week. Their inbox is a landfill. Half the messages start with some version of: “Hey, I came across your business and absolutely love what you’re doing…” No, you didn’t. You found them on Google three minutes ago and pasted their business name into the same message you sent to 75 other people. Business owners know this. They can smell a bulk message immediately. Cold email feels less crowded because you don’t have to witness yourself being ignored. You press send, close the laptop, and tell yourself you prospected. Technically, you did. But nobody talked to you. Call Reluctance Is Usually Procrastination Wearing a Nice Shirt Nobody likes rejection. I’ve been doing local advertising for 30 years, and I still don’t wake up excited about interrupting a stranger and asking for money. Anybody who claims they love every second of cold calling is either lying or a little strange. The goal is not to love it. The goal is to stop letting the discomfort run your business.

I’m looking for a handful of entrepreneurial people who want to launch City Games in their own market this fall, and we’re building a pretty compelling way to get started. The launch strategy is built around football season and local bars. Instead of trying to introduce City Games to an entire city all at once, a publisher can start by building a network of participating sports bars, breweries and restaurants and running a season-long football promotion that gives people reasons to visit those locations, play local games, complete challenges and compete for prizes. That creates three things every new City Games market needs immediately: Players. Participating venues. Recurring advertisers. The bars get something much more interesting than another social media ad. They become part of an interactive local promotion running throughout football season. The publisher gets a natural reason to walk into bars and say, “We’re launching this across the city for football season. Want your bar to be one of the locations?” And once those businesses are inside City Games, the opportunity extends far beyond football. They can become ongoing Venue Partners while you expand into restaurants, retailers, suburban Side Quests, seasonal promotions and other local experiences. You don’t need to launch with 100 businesses. Start with 6 to 10 great bars. Build something people want to play. Then grow the market from there. City Games provides the platform, game concepts and business model. You build the local relationships and own the opportunity in your territory. If you’ve been looking for a local business you can actually build, this football season gives us a very natural starting line. Interested in becoming one of the first City Games publishers? Comment “CITY” below or message me.

I’ve gotten some questions about how I’m building City Games, here in Grand Rapids. So… What, exactly, is City Games? City Games is a hyperlocal gaming platform that turns a town into an interactive game. Residents play free challenges connected to local places, businesses, history, events, and culture. They might answer a trivia question about a landmark, identify a location from a photograph, solve a puzzle, visit a participating business, complete a Side Quest, or compete in a seasonal promotion. The goal is not simply to entertain people online. The goal is to get residents paying attention to their community and interacting with local businesses in a way that feels more like play than advertising. City Games is not live trivia, although trivia can be part of it. It is not a one-time scavenger hunt, although location-based challenges can be included. It is not primarily a coupon app, although businesses can offer rewards. It is an ongoing local media product built around participation. How the Audience Side Works Residents join their local City Games platform for free. Once inside, they can play games, complete challenges, earn points, unlock rewards, and participate in larger seasonal competitions. Some challenges can be completed from home. Others encourage players to explore the community, visit a location, attend an event, or interact with a participating business. The content can include: - Local trivia - Photo-identification challenges - Puzzles and riddles - Predictions and polls - Location-based challenges - Business-sponsored mini-games - Themed Side Quests - Seasonal competitions - Prizes, rewards, and achievements - This creates something most local advertising products do not have: active participation. A resident can scroll past an advertisement without thinking about it. City Games asks that person to make a choice, answer a question, watch a short video, visit a place, or complete an action. The advertiser becomes part of the experience instead of sitting beside it.