Four years after signing up to help encourage community-based innovation in Fredericton, Kelly O’Brien is now launching his own innovative product that could help community groups everywhere.

O’Brien is chief executive officer of BusinessBoard, a Fredericton startup that has developed a low-cost online bulletin board that allows not-for-profit organizations and their members to post notices and increase the sense of community.

 “We’ve got a business model now that we’re really excited about, and the market is huge with community organizations around the world,” O’Brien said in an interview over breakfast last weekend.

There are 3 million community non-profits in North America, he said.

O’Brien spent a career as a business development executive with technology and telecom companies in Canada and as far away as China.

Four years ago, with a young family, he wanted something with less travel, so he took a job developing an innovation community in Fredericton. After several permutations, that job eventually spun out a for-profit company that helps community groups enhance their online presence.

The pain that BusinessBoard addresses is that non-profit organizations find websites expensive and one-dimensional, and the not-for-profits often lack the technical expertise or the time to update them regularly. What’s more, they don’t encourage community discussion and links between community members.

BusinessBoard charges organizations $20 a month to create a bulletin board that is visually appealing and makes it easy for the organization to post text, photos or videos. What’s more, members of the organization can also post material, and the organization itself has the option of screening it before it goes live.

BusinessBoard includes a dashboard that the organization can use to analyze how many people have come to the site, posted on it and used it to connect with other people. The importance of this feature is it allows the organization to produce hard data on its outreach when approaching government and others for funding.

O’Brien said he has spent years researching the space and nothing on the market today gives community groups the flexibility and cost-advantage of BuisnessBoard.

He said the product could grow quickly because of the vertical integration of community groups. In other words, a group such as the Lions Club has a local organization that is part of national and international networks. If one local club uses and likes BusinessBoard, word can spread quickly through the broader organization.

The BusinessBoard shareholders include a few of the not-for-profits that O’Brien was working with previously and people who helped him develop the site. These include Shawn Carver and Toon Nagtegaal, who previously collaborated on TheNextPhase training seminars, and Kyle Racki, CEO of Headspace Design of Halifax.

The company has never raised money, and O’Brien indicated it may not have to as long as sales are satisfactory.

“We get 1,000 clients, and we’ve got a nice little business. But if we get those 1,000 clients, we can get 20,000 very quickly because the community groups are so vertically oriented and non-competitive.”