A pilot in Asheville became three cities and $500K in trades.

ReSource was building a credit system for local economies, run on the blockchain. Before any of that mattered, it had to prove that local businesses would actually use it. The test was a pilot network in Asheville that launched in May 2021.

Every barter network hits the same wall: nobody wants to join until there's someone to trade with. Nearly every owner I talked to understood barter, and plenty of them already traded with people they knew. Very few wanted to join a network. The reasons were the same every time. There aren't enough businesses in it yet, the accounting sounds complicated, and I need cash.

The Asheville network.

I was one of three people on the team that built the first network, and two of us did most of the hands-on work. My job was getting businesses in the door and making sure they had something to spend their credit on once they were in. Two rules guided who we went after. The first I called Noah's Ark: get two of each type of business, so every member has a choice. The second was the Domino Effect: when someone joins, find out what they need to buy next and go sign that business.

Events.

Events brought members in faster than one-on-one pitching. For a stretch we ran smaller networking events every week, plus a large event about once a quarter. At the big ones we set up massage tables around a local event space, with live music, food, and drinks. Service providers worked on site in exchange for network credit, so new members could watch a trade happen before they'd made one themselves.

More cities.

I launched the Chattanooga network by myself, built around the same food and health core as Asheville. I oversaw and supported the Austin launch, where we hired someone local to run it. I also did exploratory work in Berkeley, California and a few smaller towns in Western North Carolina, each built around a local food hub. None of those launched before the money ran out.

Marketing.

In spring 2022, after the original cofounders left the team, I stepped up to Head of Marketing and Business Development. That added responsibility for marketing, our CRM, and the website, and I worked closely with the rest of the team on a website revamp.

Most barter networks in the US run on professional services: accountants, printers, marketing firms. We found a different engine by accident. Food was always the most requested thing in the network, and once we signed food providers, trades started moving on their own.

Here's one chain I still remember. A friend of mine who owns a local business got a massage from a high-end massage therapist after a sports game and paid in credit. The massage therapist spent that credit on groceries from a local food hub that only sells goods from local producers. The food hub paid one of its employees in credit, and that employee spent it on health services inside the network. Three businesses and an employee, and no dollars changed hands.

The pitch changed along the way. The original pitch spent a long time on crypto, the blockchain, and why a barter network needed them. That was mostly time lost. What worked was calling it a barter network and showing people what they could buy. Our best growth came from people who were already bartering with each other. They moved onto ReSource because it made tracking value easier, and it gave their barter dollars a bigger network to spend in.

If I did it again, I'd start there. Find the barter that's already happening in a community and be the tool it's missing, instead of selling the idea of barter from scratch.

I left in August 2022 when ReSource ran out of funding. The company isn't operating today and probably won't come back. One of the original cofounders carried the work into a couple of other entities, but it has since become a different idea with a different team.