Five apps a resident already uses, in one that pays the neighbourhood.
Pelican is a community-owned local commerce and wellness app in which only locally owned businesses may be listed. Built on Bhairav, launching in Carlsbad and Encinitas, then across Southern California.
Local, playful, proud, and owned.
Only local
No chains, no franchises, no national brands. The founding rule, and the reason residents trust it.
Play, not ads
Quests, points and status do the work a media budget would otherwise have to do.
The home team
A local sports team's crest could one day carry a local app across a region.
Owned locally
Spun out of DigiDoGG into the hands of the businesses it serves.
Five apps in one.
Offers
Discovery restricted to locally owned businesses.
Quick commerce
Delivery, with the margin staying in the county.
Community
A social layer anchored to real places and real owners.
Publishing
Businesses and residents both write; the dogs amplify the best of it.
Rewards
The loyalty engine that makes the other four compound instead of decay.
The Coastal 7.
| Day | Action | Earns |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Walk the coastal trail | 100 points + 1 entry |
| 2 | Buy from a locally owned coffee roaster | 100 points + 1 entry |
| 3 | Book a wellness service at a local studio | 200 points + 2 entries |
| 4 | Surf, swim, or take an ocean dip | 100 points + 1 entry |
| 5 | Eat clean at a locally owned kitchen | 100 points + 1 entry |
| 6 | Try a wellness check at a local studio | 100 points + 1 entry |
| 7 | Record your thirty-second “why I live here” and tag three friends | 300 points + 3 entries |
Seven days, seven small acts of local life, one journey, designed to work for a thirteen-year-old and an eighty-four-year-old alike. With a home-team partner, the same seven days could run to the stadium instead of the sea.
Three currencies, kept deliberately apart.
Points
Spent at any partner business. A neighbourhood currency, not one more punch card.
Entries
Not spendable, not transferable. Entries go into the seasonal draw, which will always have a free way to enter.
Status
Shown publicly on the Fiero Wall, named for the pride that follows a hard-won triumph.
A gamification stack, not a points programme.
Published as an open playbook, free to use and free to teach, because the framework is not the moat.
- Vision · McGonigalWhat future is this community designing toward, and does it feel real enough to act on?
- Motivation · ChouWhich of the eight core human drives does each element activate, and is it white hat?
- Environment · ThalerHow are defaults, salience, friction and social proof arranged so the right choice is the easy one?
- Habit · EyalWhat is the internal trigger, the first micro-action, the variable reward, and the investment that locks it in?
The last institution with total reach in an American city.
Not the newspaper, which has shrunk. Not city hall or the chamber of commerce, which are trusted but cannot reach every household. The team is the last shared story: its logo on cars, on bar walls, on babies.
Total emotional reach
Yet most days of the year it earns nothing from that reach, and its app is opened on game days only.
Sell to its own neighbourhood
No sales force can profitably serve hundreds of small local accounts one at a time.
Supply chain and workforce
The route into the neighbourhood, and the people to serve it. That is a labour problem, not a software problem.
Owned by the ecosystem it serves.
Pelican is a separate Southern California entity. DigiDoGG licenses Bhairav to it and holds a founder stake; founders, local partners and the community hold the rest.
The founding thirty. Up to thirty locally owned businesses per market join as founding partners, each with a founding stake in Pelican.
Why give the app away? Because the businesses are not being recruited into a pledge; they are being recruited into ownership. A merchant with a founding stake in her town's app does not churn in month nine, and she brings the shop next door.