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Brent Bivona was on a bike ride through the Finger Lakes region in the summer of 2023 when he came upon a farm stand stocked with freshly baked sourdough bread and scones made with fresh raspberries.
He carried as much as he could and headed home, calling everybody he knew to tell them about the stand. “There needs to be an app for this,” he said to one friend.
It was at that moment that his idea for Stands By Me was born.
Stands By Me is a local discovery app that helps people support local farm stands, farmers markets, roadside stands, community pantries, and other small local businesses. Through community input and vendor feedback, the app tracks local roadside stands across the country. Vendors can add their own stands or claim their stands that users have already submitted to the app.
“I love supporting local. I’ve been a small business owner in New York for 30 years,” says Bivona, who owns Sunrise Aquatics, a Rochester-based pond installation service and supplies center. “I understand what it’s like, and I love supporting them.”
The original focus of Stands By Me was New York and, in particular, the Finger Lakes region. It has quickly expanded, with 33 states now represented on the app. There are 363 local stands currently on the map and counting, with over 1,000 downloads of the app.
The official launch of Stands By Me took place on Aug. 11, just as major produce distributors like Taylor Farms recalled products that may have been contaminated by cyclospora. Local farm stands, Bivona says, are more reliable.
“The cool thing is knowing your local farmers and how their growing practices are. You can ask them questions,” he says. “It’s a great way to be able to talk to your farmers and know, hey, what are your practices in growing? Are you organic?”
The app launched a beta version in March. Bivona sent out the link to a few friends. Overnight, the app grew.
“I invited like 12 friends and family into a small beta testing group and told them, ‘Hey, I built this. I want you to see what it’s like. Check it out. We need to figure this out,’” Bivona recalls. “Three people shared it, and next thing I know, there’s 100 people in this little group.”
Bivona and his wife, Michele, are the only two employees. Michele mostly does vendor outreach while Brent focuses on the app’s technical side. The Bovinas rely on word-of-mouth marketing among vendors and customers, as well as some social media marketing via Facebook and Instagram. Participating vendors put stickers with the Stands By Me QR code on their stands, which people can scan to download the app.
As the number of users grows, the app’s offerings grow with them. Stands By Me is community-built, with Bivona getting some of the ideas for the app’s features from vendors.
“I started engaging and meeting some of these vendors at their stands, and getting their feedback,” he says. “One particular vendor, Sage, has her stand at her house, but then she also has pop-ups. So, she wanted a feature that had a live pin that kind of flickered and showed that she was at another place for certain hours.”
Distinctive emojis on the app represent different offerings. Community pantries are labeled with a heart.
“I don’t want to ever see anybody go hungry,” says Bivona. “More people need to be aware of these food pantries, the little stands that people are setting up and stocking. People need to know where they are, how they can help stock them.”
As a parent, he also wanted to highlight young entrepreneurs by adding kid-run stands to the map. They are run under parental oversight and are represented in the app by a sprout emoji.
Bivona plans to add even more features soon, such as a community trail hop that will encourage connections among neighboring vendors. He also built a passport badge system to encourage users to visit as many stands and markets as possible. The goal of the app is to get more people involved in the “local movement.”
“This platform that we built is designed to get people to interact and use it and build community. So, that’s what really separates what we’re doing (from competitors),” Bivona says.
Audtra Fitzgerald is Rochester Beacon contributing writer and a member of the Oasis Project’s third cohort.
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