I am pleased to report that our company has achieved significant progress within a short span of two years, all while operating on a bootstrap budget. In 2021, we successfully developed an initial storefront and sold a pilot, followed by a redevelopment of the storefront into a website solution that our customers had requested, which we also sold as a pilot in 2022. Now, in 2023, we are excited to expand and scale our operations.

Our company possesses a strong product, efficient production workflow, and paid Merchant Ambassadors who are putting Main Street online. Furthermore, our mission resonates with our audience, and we have a unique outsider team that has made our product possible. However, to truly succeed and grow, we need to evaluate whether our product can work at scale.

We see ourselves as the 21st-century version of the Yellow Pages. Walmart, Dick's, and McDonald's are well-known because they are listed, but local merchant stores are not. We aim to make these stores visible by listing them online, a task that two out of three such stores currently do not undertake. Google lacks the data to learn about what is available locally, which is where we come in. Our database of thousands of keywords is crucial for Google, which consistently indexes and returns our storefronts for all kinds of keywords related to local businesses.

Our company solves a persistent, 20+ year problem that even the biggest corporations have been unable to solve, and we do so with the lowest cost, fastest delivery, and least amount of work. Our code is built from the ground up to handle hundreds of thousands of orders, and our website app at Virtualstorefronts.com is optimized for creating Android and iOS native apps in a fraction of the time it would take to build those from scratch.

While we have listed one small area, we aim to get the entire country listed. To do so, we need to put basic scaled infrastructure and marketing budgets in place, along with marketing, sales, and production strategies. With these pieces in place, we can determine if there is strong demand in our 20 million customer primary market and over 20 million customer secondary market for our $199/year or $18/month subscriptions, as there has been in our pilot, where we sold 8 out of 10 storefronts.

Overall, we are confident that our unique approach to solving a persistent problem will resonate with our audience, and we look forward to expanding and growing our operations in the coming years.

"The reason I've been procrastinating on making my website."

- Timi Godin, Curiosity Shop Books & Gifts

Follow This Campaign on Tobin's Public Facebook Posts

As Seen In:

Virtual Storefronts Coverage At Seeking Alpha

Virtual Storefronts Coverage At Yahoo! Finance

Virtual Storefronts Coverage At Market Watch

Full Pitch

The Problem: Main Street Is Not Online

We have found in our pilot in Cherokee County, North Carolina that 2/3 of rural businesses simply do not have a website for their shop. This makes them nearly invisible to Google local results; locks them out of search engine results; and makes what they offer nearly impossible for local shoppers to figure out without actually walking in the door.

Big tech solutions have failed basic usability tests and are not widely adopted. Google My Business, Square, Squarespace, Wix, Shopify and Etsy have all provided solutions that demand too much time and technical knowledge of the local business owner.

Review sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor don't offer control and are nearly universally disliked by business owners who are held hostage to the reviews and ratings of an increasingly angry and loose-cannon public.

Facebook can return some search results based loosely on what a shop posts, but generally provides a 'pay to be seen' model and a page format that is impossible for the shoppers who are willing to go on Facebook to find clear information.

Main Street businesses need a solution to a problem 20 years in the making without a clear solution.

The Solution Is Putting Main Street Online

Virtual Storefronts aims to be one of the easiest and fastest combined Website & SEO Solutions available. Being found online is what being in the yellow pages and what having a prominent store-front used to be pre-internet. It’s as important as having a phone line. 68% of our customers didn’t have a website before signing up with VS. Now they not only have a website solution, they have an SEO and local shopper solution — all for only $199 a year or $18 per month.

Merchant Ambassadors build every Storefront with a set of "Storefront keywords" Google crawls to learn what the business offers locally.

Since Oct 30, 2022, links to just 73 Pages ("Storefronts") on Virtualstorefronts.com were displayed 5,990 times in Google Search Results featuring many of the 5,500+ published keywords linked to Storefronts on Virtualstorefronts.com (Published December 27, 2022)

Virtual Storefronts gives local shops a push-button solution for SEO. Our entire ecosystem is built specifically for local, owner-operated businesses. We work with Owner-Operated Businesses because they understand a smart buy when they see it — it’s why 80% of them buy into Virtual Storefronts on the first presentation.

Watch how anyone with no technical skills can create a website in 5 minutes.

Virtual Storefronts Save Local Business Owners Major Costs And A Huge Headache

Question: It's 2022, why aren't business owners making a website?

Answer: It's 2022, everyone knows what a pain in the butt it is to run a website.

You can probably skip this part if you already know the headache of making a website:

Here are a few of the things a local business owner might have to do to run their own website in 2022: Find a domain name that works. Find a domain name that's not taken. Register that domain. Never forget to renew that domain every year. Find a company to host their domain. Pay extortion prices for basic services like a Security Certificate from their commercial host. Find a web designer to build their website. Work with web designer to create accurate and compelling content on their website. Change your web designer's work. Approve your designer's work to be published. Pay someone to optimize your site for Google Search. Field five unsolicited calls a day on your business phone from robot callers selling their plan to "make you the #1 search result on Google." Field calls from 3rd party sales teams selling e-commerce solutions for Main Street shops. Buy that product and spend the next three months uploading your inventory so you can sell merchandise online. Fail to compete with the massive and perfectly optimized e-commerce equivalent of your business. Lose money. Attempt to get your web designer to update your page. Figure out you need to pay a site administrator every month to keep your website current. Log into your WordPress site and spend the next 3 hours creating a blog post that doesn't display ridiculously sized fonts when it's published.

A Side-By-Side Comparison Of Website Costs For Our $99 Pilot Customers In 2021. Virtual Storefronts is now $199/yr and $18/mo Retail in most markets.

As Executive Director Sherry Raines of The Cherokee County Chamber of Commerce put it:

"With Virtual Storefronts you don't have to follow the ever changing rules and protocols that are coming down the pike because the internet is always changing. You clean out the cat-box for your customers."

Leading Economic Developer Scott Hamilton, President and CEO of North Carolina's Golden LEAF Foundation said about Virtual Storefronts:

"Store owners using your platform as their web presence certainly has a real impact on their bottom line."

Our Customers Love Our Solution To The Problem Of Website Creation, Technical Maintenance & Search Engine Optimization

Note our pilot rate was priced at $99

With VS, Main Street Shops Work Together To Gain Their Corporate Competitors' Advantage: Sheer Size

The amount of time, money and effort that can go into a single website is massive. And when you're finished, you are still just a single drop of water floating in the ocean of the internet, waiting to be discovered by search engines.

With Virtual Storefronts, you don't just create a website loaded with the keywords search engines love, but your business works together with every other business on the network to create one GIANT website of exclusively Main Street businesses.

You Get Real Ownership In A Private Company (This Recently Became Possible), And You Get Paid Cash Each Year We Distribute Profits (Old School Ownership)

This is the very best time to buy shares in our company.

A handful of years ago, you'd have to be a millionaire to own shares in this company. This is an extraordinary opportunity to invest in Main Street instead of Wall Street, where retail investors have been stuck until now.

As an investor, you are buying real equity that pays dividends every year if we distribute profit to shareholders in the future.

Capturing 30% of the available core business market in the United States shows $422 million profit on $2.6 billion in sales. Our extended market also includes churches, civic organizations, veterans organizations and non-profits, all currently represented in our pilot program.

“​​An investment of $2200 (220 shares) would collect $46,420 in a year we distribute $422 million in profits, a distribution of $211 per $10 share.” (Important Disclosure: This projection and all projections we make about potential future profits is a future projection that cannot be guaranteed.)

Today, you may claim ownership of your own shares of Virtual Storefronts as we offer over $1,000,000 in equity to the public at $10 per share.

Working With Economic Developers & Digital Marketing

A prototype promotion for the Putting Main Street Online Fundraiser. Each QR code is a link directly to that shop's storefront. Any town with Virtual Storefronts can create this.

Our base of sales operations in Andrews, North Carolina is uniquely located just two hours from four major metro areas in the fast growing Southeast U.S.: Chattanooga, Knoxville, Asheville and Atlanta. North Georgia, including rapidly developing small towns such as Blue Ridge, Blairsville and Young Harris is a natural expansion market right next door.

As we begin regional outreach, we have partnered with economic developers in neighboring counties and towns such as Robbinsville's REVVED UP, Sylva's Main Street Program and Clay County's Chamber of Commerce to bring Virtual Storefronts to their memberships.

We are also coordinating with developers from state-wide organizations, such as the North Carolina Main Street Program, to expand our reach across North Carolina.

In March, we have been invited to introduce Virtual Storefronts to hundreds of economic developers across the region and representatives of over 80 North Carolina downtown Main Street programs at the annual NC Main Street Conference in Statesville, NC.

As we partner with local economic development organizations, we will approach local merchants online with targeted digital marketing to bring sales of Virtual Storefronts right onto their screen.

Putting Main Street Online Is A National Story

When Virtual Storefronts had just 20 shops online in May 2021, we had already had our first full-length national news feature on a top 100 news podcast.

In November 2021, a British business journal featured Virtual Storefronts.

Earlier in 2022, the online journal of record for rural America, The Daily Yonder, did a feature on our pilot program.

The problem of getting Main Street online is persistent and anything but solved.

What all these writers, editors, podcasters, economic developers, and fans of Main Street understand is that, upon careful examination, Virtual Storefronts is designed to get the job done.

The #1 reason Virtual Storefronts will succeed is that Main Street shops want to participate and join us because they see in us something they have never seen before.

Virtual Storefronts gives the people who care about Main Street a way to achieve the goal of rewiring the economy to favor local businesses and funneling piles of cash into local job creation, local education, local infrastructure and local prosperity.

Virtual Storefronts is a story for every stakeholder to embrace and make their own.

We Aim to Hit $500,000 In Revenue By Expanding Into The 18 Counties Of Western North Carolina, Including North Georgia

Our expansion positions us to begin offering and monetizing Upgraded Feature sets to our client base such as:

• Keyword tier upgrades
• Tech solutions for existing owner marketing problems like Google My Business setup - a frequently requested service
• Upgraded Storefront features like the image-rich Highlights and Feedback sections we are already beta testing
• Area Live Feeds, launched at the end of 2022 in Andrews and Murphy, offer each Storefront 3 Posts per week. We plan to sell upgrades to increase the number of posts a Storefront can share per week.
• Live Feed licensing locally and to tourist tech like Airbnb
• Local keyword search insights to inform what local shoppers are looking for
• We have an entire secondary market of Local Organizations who are qualified to purchase Virtual Storefronts - including organizations already on Virtual Storefronts
• Strategic Partnerships with businesses and technology networks currently working with our merchant demographic will be developed as our footprint expands.
• While we started our pilot with a geographic epicenter, our market is not limited to geographic expansion. Any business in the U.S. can benefit from a Virtual Storefront, as we have learned from Bangor, Maine to Tampa, Florida. With our Search Engine results and digital marketing to expand as needed, the door is open for Virtual Storefronts to fluidly scale into large market segments.
• We are developing Sales and Ambassador teams to onboard in our region and in select markets across the Northeast and Midwest regions.

An Edge In The Market

• We are one of ‘first-to-market’ for technology that puts Main Street businesses in their own network and in control of their online presence.
• Because of wide adoption and recognition of the value of our product by a broad-range of business owners, the Total Available Market in the U.S. is open to us - about 20M local businesses.
• A passionate and growing team of volunteer and part-time Merchant Ambassadors are training to do on the ground work in new markets
• A growing network of local leaders is embracing our vision, including many leading economic developers in North Carolina and across the United States
• Our costs are lower than most tech companies because we eliminate or limit the most expensive costs in the industry - specifically out of control publishing by the public (hence our company name Unpublished Space LLC trademarked USPACE®).
• Local businesses love us for this because it saves them online work and Online Review Attack headaches.
• Virtual Storefronts enables what is currently a scarcity: Real life relationships with real humans, not more screen time and isolation - which we have in abundance.
• Our company can to grow into the next generation of tech because Main Street businesses are aligned to build consumer technology that respects customer privacy. Because local businesses have relationships with their customers in real life, they don't need to spy on their customers online. Either do we.
• As a bridge connecting online Shoppers to offline Shops, Virtual Storefronts is the right tool to serve the mission of every single person who wants Main Street to succeed.
• Our business is to serve our customers; listen to feedback and make a constantly evolving product. We believe being servants to our customers is the path to success.
• Virtual Storefronts deliver a truckload of solutions to the businesses that are the economic backbone of our country with an awesome product that is no-hassle.

For Hannah Johnston of https://Virtualstorefronts.com/HomespunHobbies, her business technology is a major headache. Virtual Storefronts helps her complete her dream life because as she says here, "I like technology without the work."

Read testimonials from local and state leaders at PuttingMainStreetOnline.com, including Mayor of Andrews, NC James Reid, Mayor of Murphy, NC Tim Radford, Director of Cherokee County Chamber of Commerce Sherry Raines and President and CEO of North Carolina's Golden LEAF Foundation Scott Hamilton.

Video Music: "Unfoldment, Revealment, Evolution, Exposition, Integration, Arson" by Chris Zabriskie