Since 2008, I have focused 100% of my time and resources on my 'baby', www.ShopCity.com.

ShopCity is a network of 7,500+ local marketplaces that connect local residents with the small businesses in their community.

Each city's site is accessed via a ShopCity domain name such as ShopNewYork.com, ShopBoston.com or ShopMidland.com.

ShopCity began in my hometown, Midland, Ontario, Canada back in April of 2000.

At the time, I was frustrated that despite the internet's ability to provide information in real-time, whenever I wanted information about local businesses, I needed to look up their phone number and then call in to speak with someone.

It didn't make sense that this information wasn't published on the internet and that people were being forced to leave the comfort of their computers to get on the phone. I knew how 'phone shy' many people were and how much they loved surfing the web - if the information were online, we could more easily support local businesses.

It also didn't make sense that by forcing people to use the phone, their business decisions were being limited to regular business hours, despite the fact that the internet was available 24/7, including the off-hours when most people had a chance to research their purchases.

I couldn't help but think about how much business was being lost - primarily by the small businesses that didn't have extensive websites like the big chains did. There had to be a better way for businesses and their customers to connect.

I'd been building websites for small businesses since 1997 and had thought several times that it'd be great to have a local directory with profile pages for the area's independent businesses. These profiles would contain the business' email address, their hours of operation, methods of payment, products & services offered, a description that highlighted what made the business unique and what the owners were like, and a link to their website.

I'd contemplated putting a site together a few times, but kept figuring that since it was such a great idea, that someone else was probably working on it, and that I'd just use their site when it came about.

Years had passed since that first thought, and yet no one had emerged to collect and organize local business information and make it accessible on the internet. It was as if there was a black hole and small businesses were at the center of it.

By the turn of the millennium, the idea was nagging at me every day and I was really considering giving it a shot. It just seemed to be too big an opportunity to pass up.

The tipping point came one weekend while I was away at school and was heading home (2 hours away) for an event on Sunday morning.

It was Saturday evening and I realized that I needed another set of NiMH batteries for my new digital camera (which ate batteries like crazy!). I was hoping that I could just buy the batteries in Midland from the local Radio Shack whose owners I knew, but I wasn't sure if they were open on Sunday or if they had the type of batteries I needed.

I checked the web and couldn't find their hours anywhere, let alone the products they carried. I phoned them - knowing they were closed, but hoping they would at least have their hours of operation included in their answering machine message - no luck there. I phoned my parents and brother to ask, but they weren't sure either. I waited until Sunday morning and called them one more time before I left Oakville, hoping someone would answer - again, no luck.

I had a decision to make - I could either hope for the best and assume they were open and that they carried what I needed, or I could stop at a big box store called Future Shop on the way home to grab them. They had their hours listed online as well as their inventory - I knew they had what I wanted. I made the choice and I went to Future Shop.

It turned out that the electronics store in Midland opened at the same time, and they did have what I needed, but because the information wasn't made available online, my business went to the big box store.

It was at that time that I decided to make it my mission to connect local businesses with their customers online through a local marketplace that would be advertised offline in the community so that everyone would know about it.

I spent the rest of the day wracking my brain trying to come up with the best possible name for the site. I tossed around names like 'MidlandOnline.com', 'MidlandBusinesses.com', 'FindMidland.com' and a slew of others, I came to the conclusion that 'ShopMidland.com' was the best possible name as it was short, easy to say and spell, indicative of the site content and a call to action for people to support local businesses.

I ran the idea past my college roommate, Ryan Markham - a good friend I'd met in high school who was also attending Sheridan College in Oakville - and he agreed that the idea had a lot of potential and that ShopMidland.com was indeed a great name.

I went ahead and spent $70USD to register the domain on April 9th, 2000 and set out creating the site.

As summer was approaching and both Ryan and I needed to make money to pay for next year's college expenses, we decided to team up on operating ShopMidland.com.

I already had a registered business - DC Dynamics - that was building websites so we used that name and launched ShopMidland.com as a service - with me building profile pages and managing the site, doing the marketing collateral and the accounting and with Ryan primarily handling sales.

I'll never forget the day that Ryan and I were discussing how many businesses there might be operating in the Midland - a recreational community of 16,000 that is best known as the gateway to the 30,000 islands of Georgian Bay. We guessed that there might be 2-300 in total in the area. Not content with a guess, we decided to hop in the car and start counting.

We were blown away when we were already at 300 just within the downtown core. That didn't include the rest of the main street, the dozens of other business areas, the contractors that worked from their vehicles, the professionals working in health care, etc., etc. To give you an idea of how far off we were, the ShopMidland.com database now has more than 2,500 active businesses listed.

What we realized mainly was how little we knew about the companies operating in the area, and about the choices that were available to us. We began discovering things that were available that we'd been driving an hour to buy elsewhere. We thought 'if only people knew'. The importance and relevance of ShopMidland.com became more apparent with every new business we uncovered.

I spent about two months building the first version of the site which included classified ads, a business directory, a photo gallery, links to local news sites, showtimes and maps. It was pretty basic, but it did the trick. At the time, I didn't know how to do any programming or work with databases, so the site was purely static and updates had to be made offline in Dreamweaver and then FTP'd to the server.

We joined the Chamber of Commerce and did presentations for the Rotary Club and Town Council to get support for the project. They were very supportive and pleased to see young entrepreneurs taking initiative. They especially loved the name 'ShopMidland.com' and everything it represented. With their endorsements, we were ready to begin sales and marketing.

We saw enough success with our summer long campaign that a decision was made to secure domain names for nearby communities and to start developing a platform to enable the model to be scaled - the bottleneck at the time that limited sales growth was building out profile pages and making changes to the site.

To be continued...