Photo by Tyler Nelson
Sterling Tian, Patton Nguyen and Jordan Tian of SmallNeighborhood.
Tier1 Gaming Lounge (4350 S. 27th St.) closed its doors earlier this year due to the pandemic, but that left owner, Jordan Tian, with a lot of time on his hands. After seeing small restaurants going through the struggles of operating in a virtual world, he decided to do something with the skills he’s learned and all that extra time.
SmallNeighborhood is Tian’s idea for helping restaurants and other small businesses who aren’t as fluent on the world wide web get noticed. They create websites for businesses, for free, run search engine optimization and have even created online ordering platforms for their clients.
Tian worked in IT consulting and cloud computing for a couple local companies until he decided to commit fully to his new startup.
There are four basic members of the team at SmallNeighborhood. Jordan, his brother Sterling, Patton Nguyen who moved here from Vietnam 10 years ago and Linelle Liu who is responsible for a lot of the front-end engineering and design. Three of the four members of the team graduated from a local Milwaukee coding boot camp, I.C. Stars.
“We wanted to do this for people who don’t have access to technology because of a language barrier or socio-economic barrier,” says Tian. It didn’t hurt that he could use his mom’s restaurant as a test-run for his platform.
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When restaurants use services like GrubHub or UberEats, the customer is charged a fee, along with the business being forced to hand over a percentage of the sale. SmallNeighborhood extends that cost to only the customer, starting at five percent of the sale, up to $0.99. Paying one dollar is a small price to pay for convenience, right? That’s what Tian and his team are banking on.
“We can make a better model, and that’s what we’re trying to do,” says Tian. “It’s cheaper to use us, rather than Wix ($20-30 per month) or some other software that can cost you up to $150 per month and you don’t know if it will actually get you any money or not.”
SmallNeighborhood provides tablets to businesses that integrate with their website and keep track of orders, so the businesses don’t need to worry about re-vamping their current systems to adopt the ordering platform.
Their first order was completed on September 22 and they’ve slowly been building a list of clients, which stands at about 14 right now. Tian’s mother’s restaurant may have been their first customer, but that gave the brothers Tian a chance to see their work in action.
“Once we (Tier1 Gaming Lounge) closed, I was like, ‘I’m never gonna play video games again,’” says Tian. “It left a bad taste in my mouth.” The team members brought all the fixings for a rock band to the workplace and now bond over playing music together in downtime or when they need a break.
Photo by Tyler Nelson
Sterling Tian (bass), Patton Nguyen (drums) and Jordan Tian (guitar) pass time and bond playing music.
Tian is working with local organizations that promote Black businesses like MKE Black and Project Onyx to make a platform called Urban Eats MKE that only lists Black- and Latinx-owned small businesses in Milwaukee. He's hoping to launch that in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!
Check out their website and if you know of a restaurant or small business that could use some extra help, check out SmallNeighborhood’s services!
