Young Entrepreneur Puts Belizeans Businesses on Map

lo Finding a local business online could soon become much easier. Twenty-five-year-old entrepreneur Brianny Palacio has launched Find It 501, a searchable digital directory that connects consumers with companies across Belize. Palacio says her own challenges as a business owner inspired her to create a platform that gives businesses greater visibility and a wider reach.

 

Brianny Palacio, Founder, Find It 501

“I had a small business, my dessert, counter business, and the issue that I had was trying to find, like, packaging resources, different things that I needed for my business in itself. So that’s where the idea came about with Findit501.com. A centralized base where businesses can be found and searchers and shoppers can find what they need pretty much all in one space. Putting this together, I needed, I know, building websites is a lot of money. So I had to learn it myself. I’m an entrepreneur, so learning skills, learning different things is just like what I do. And so this has been one of the hardest things that I’ve had to learn code, learning how to build websites, learning how to do all of that, but it was definitely worth it, worth the time and effort that it took. We have all businesses on the site. All categories are spanning across all districts, island, everything. If we don’t have your category, you can definitely send us a message and we’ll include that.  When it came to sourcing the businesses, it’s all from public information  available. So Google, Facebook, all the different channels of finding public information for these businesses.  Some of them were super hard to find. Even businesses that have been listing with us, searching their name by Facebook or anything in regard to that, it’s super hard to find them. So we definitely had a struggle with that, but it was just searching, finding, spending months of just getting all these businesses online.”

 

The platform is free for users to browse, and businesses of any size can list their services at no cost.

 

Attention readers: This online newscast is a direct transcript of our evening television broadcast. When speakers use Kriol, we have carefully rendered their words using a standard spelling system.

 

Watch the full newscast here: