About Citytize

Why I’m building this

I’m James. I’m 22, and I built EverythingCola.com — Columbia, South Carolina’s city discovery site. It runs in production today, with paying businesses on it. Citytize is the platform underneath it, packaged so other operators can run their own city brand on the same software.

I didn’t start with the goal of building a SaaS. I started by trying to make Columbia feel less invisible. I wanted a single place where someone new in town — or someone who’d lived here for ten years and still didn’t know what was happening on a Saturday night — could open their phone and actually find their city. The directory tools available to do that were either generic and ugly, or expensive and slow. I’m a developer, so I built what I wanted to use. Then I lived with it. Then I broke it. Then I rebuilt it. The version on EverythingCola today is what you get when one person has spent three years iterating on a single problem.

When other operators started asking me how I’d built it — operators stuck on Brilliant Directories, on aging WordPress sites, on platforms that hadn’t shipped a meaningful update in years — it became obvious that the work was reusable. So Citytize.

Why a young solo founder is an advantage here

I’m aware of the obvious objection: why trust a 22-year-old with your platform? Two honest answers.

First, you’re not betting on me running this for thirty years. You’re betting on me delivering a working migration in eight weeks, keeping the platform running, and shipping the modules on the roadmap. EverythingCola is the proof I can do that — it’s not a slide deck, it’s live software with paying customers.

Second, I’m not building this to sell. I have no investors to satisfy, no exit clock running. The unit economics are strong enough that Citytize is unit-profitable from customer one. I don’t need to scale to a thousand cities to survive — I need to be excellent for thirty. That alignment matters more than my age. A founder a decade older with VC pressure to chase enterprise revenue is, structurally, less aligned with a city media operator’s interests than I am.

What you can expect from me

Direct communication. Real software, not slideware. Honest answers when something goes wrong. A platform built specifically for the work you’re doing — not configured for it after the fact.

If you’re considering Citytize, the best place to start is the free SEO audit. Send me your site URL. I’ll send back a one-page audit with specific things I’d improve. No pitch, no obligation, no automated follow-up sequence. Just useful.