Anyone who has ever tried to market a web-based product or service to small businesses knows this: business owners are too busy to seek out online services that could help them be more successful, and they don’t have the time to have a detailed conversation with every potential provider who might be able to help them. This is even more true for innovative new product/service concepts.

At the same time, providers of online services for small businesses are finding it expensive to pursue dedicated marketing campaigns for their products. In many cases, each company’s marketing process is virtually identical to many complementary/non-competitive businesses.

What if these non-competitive companies could pool their resources and present their products in a way that made it easy and inexpensive for small businesses to learn about and try them? Top10LocalTools is a "collaborative marketing" program designed to help local businesses discover and enroll in online services. At launch it will offer a stream of useful content, a basic product showcase, and a program to train and compensate local advisors and service providers (“resellers”) for making sales to their customers – all designed to drive awareness, leads, and sales to its member companies. It makes money from bounties and commissions, and eventually from the network effects of aggregating small business owners and their interests.