#059 - Today we talk to Charlese Banks, the creator and founder of The Town Experience, a platform that highlights the cultural events and as we call 'em, the town experiences that happen around the city.  She is hyper-focused on featuring local businesses, specifically black and brown businesses - letting the public know about grand openings and celebrations.

Charlese took a platform from one event and turned it into a business.  The inspiration of the platform came about when Afrotech, a conference for Black tech workers, came to Oakland.  Charlese was inspired to build around that weekend’s activities so that visitors could connect to locals and figure out how to do things that were outside of the conference and be able to take in the entire Oakland experience.

Charlese knows that Oakland is an experiential city.  People come here on vacation or a visit for some other reason and Oakland touches them.  Next thing you know, within a year they move here.

“everything about the city that makes it great - it is not something tangible. You have to come here to experience the city to get why people don't leave and why we choose to stay here.”

Charlese’s goal was to build a platform for visitors, but was surprised that the data showed most of her followers were locals who were not tapped into what’s going on around the city.  This was the interesting twist - she set out to develop an app for visitors, she ended up developing one for locals.

“A lot of the feedback I get - they're like, I love it because I'm finding all kinds of things that I don't necessarily see promoted in Oakland on your platform.”

“So that was the surprising pivot - I was trying to figure out how to make this a platform appeal to people that weren't from here and then turned out the market I needed to tap in was the localized market first because we weren't actually taking advantage of our backyard.”

Be sure to listen to the whole interview to hear about how Charlese’s key partnerships with companies like AirBNB and Visit Oakland have grown her business.