For Businesses
Get tagged.
Get chosen.
Get a customer base of your own.
Pledgers tag the businesses they want in their town. Sign up, offer real rewards and jobs, and you're competing for a spot.
[Image: Spice Tray corridor — cafés, pedestrians, stone buildings, no road]
The feedback loop
Demand puts you here. Demand keeps you here.
There is no application fee and no landlord to convince. The community signals what it wants, that signal decides who is eligible, and the same signal decides where you sit and whether you stay.
- 01
They tag you
Pledgers signal organically — tagging and pinning the places they want near them. You don't buy this. You earn it.
- 02
You appear in the graph
Those tags resolve into demand clusters: how many people want you, and precisely where.
- 03
You cross the line
Five endorsements makes you eligible to pledge. Non-pledging businesses have no path in, ever.
- 04
You compete
You pledge jobs and offer rewards to earn the vote. There is no other way in — non-pledging businesses have no path into town commerce.
- 05
You get placed
Your location is set by endorsement proximity, not by bidding for the best corner. You land among the people who asked for you.
- ↻
You re-earn it
Every December, stewards vote your lease. Serve well and it renews. Momentum carries forward for you too.
What your signal decides
Who opens
Five endorsements makes a business eligible to pledge. Non-pledging businesses have no path in, ever.
What gets built
Architects submit under their own name, and pledgers rate every design. That rating is a term in the architect's design fee — the fee formula is brand-blind, not the submission.
How it's laid out
Spice Tray layouts are chosen by minimising the distance between cohort demand signal and the achievable building mix.
Where things sit
Placement inside the town runs on endorsement proximity — what you asked for lands nearest to you.
Which doctors practise here
Your household signals the medical specialties you want in town — never by individual, so nobody's health history is exposed to build the roster. The clinic is staffed to a higher-than-national-average doctor-to-resident ratio, and that signal shapes what those doctors focus on.
Where you travel
Tea Leaves scouts hotel locations from organic social signal, then stewards ratify before any acquisition.
Who your neighbours are
Selection weighs profile and preference fit, not pledge size. The cohort is assembled from the same signal.
Nobody buys their way in. The town decides.
Your customers, right around the block
Up to 25,000 residents, all within a 5-minute walk. Car-free, so all of it is foot traffic.
Win your spot with rewards, not rent
Offer real perks to pledgers during the raise. The stronger your offer, the more customers and employees choose you before you even open.
Pay your people well, cost less to compete
The better the jobs you bring, the cheaper it is to pledge them.
Deliver consistent quality, keep your spot
Stewards vote annually. Deliver consistent, high-quality service, and you stay.
First in line, permanently
Pledge during a raise, and you keep priority for that town's future vacancies for good — ahead of any business that shows up later.
Attract your people, legally
You can't pick who lives here. But better rewards mean pledgers who want what you offer are more likely to be among those selected. Your generosity is the lever.
How you get in
Tagged by pledgers. Then it's your move.
It starts with pledgers — they tag the businesses they want to see in their town, on social, same as everything else here. Get tagged, and you're in the running: sign up, verify with a quick EIN check, and start offering real rewards and job pledges. From there, pledgers rank you two different ways — as a place they'd actually spend money, and as a place they might want to work.
See the Mainstay system →Getting on the list
Five endorsements makes you eligible. Nothing else stands in the way.
There is no application form and no business development team to get past. Eligibility is a threshold, and pledgers cross it on your behalf by tagging you.
5 endorsements
You become eligible to pledge. Below this you are not in the pool at all — not rejected, simply not yet surfaced.
Real-time dashboard
Your endorsement count updates live. Watch it, and pledge the moment you qualify.
0 ways to skip it
There is no path in for a business nobody asked for. Non-pledging businesses have no route into town commerce, ever.
[Image: job pledge dashboard — salary band, pledge fee, formula breakdown]
[Image: aggregate demand dashboard — anonymised metrics, no individual data]
How rewards actually work for you
You can't choose them. You can attract them.
There's no picking individual customers or employees here — every business competes on the same open floor. What you do control completely is what you offer. Stronger rewards get ranked higher by pledgers, which improves your own odds of winning a spot.
Demand metrics are pledge-gated — pledge jobs to unlock aggregate, anonymised data about the pledger pool. Every number you see is aggregate; URBAL never shows a business individual-level pledger data.
See the pledge formula →