I'm excited to announce that today we're starting with a new, much requested, feature on Pinside: a pinball business directory.

The goal of this feature is to allow Pinsiders who are running a pinball business of any size (i.e. distributors, repair people, parts suppliers, aftermarket mod makers, restorators etc.) to register their company on Pinside.

This business directory not only benefits the business owners, it's obviously also a great way for the community to find the companies they're looking for. It will also help provide more transparency to the community because company names will show under business Pinsiders' usernames:

Test user Gizza has his company Pinside Testing Inc listed under his name.

Once we get a sizeable amount of sign ups, we will launch the actual biz index, a new main section on the site that will conveniently list all pin biz entries, not unlike how we are already indexing and listing places to play pinball on our pinball map.

In the future, we hope to be offering cool features aimed at those businesses, helping them promote and/or even sell their products and/or services on Pinside. Ideas include options to create ad campaigns in some form, get word out about your products. But we can also imagine offering shops directly on Pinside, and having features like the ability to create invite-only forum threads or announcement threads, ways to get a "Pinside validated" stamp. And more.

TL;DR
Are you a pinball business? Registration is free. Sign up your business now!

Note: All of the above is in early beta status. When we decide to leave beta status, all people with a company conducting business on Pinside will be required to register, in order for the community to get maximum transparency who's working for what company. Please let me know if you have questions or ideas to improve this concept.

Thanks, great feedback so far!

Yes, I can see the benefit of this and it will most likely be added in some way.

That would be a great way to handle this.

There are definitely plans to offer services aimed at businesses. And yes, it is likely that we will try to generate some income from offering those features. In what way? Not sure yet. But it's definitely not gonna be some sneaky plot. We want features that benefit three sides: the Pinside community, your "biz" and Pinside. Example: we could offer the small mod makers the option to run a shop on Pinside. Just an example of course, but we're thinking along those lines.

You could simply call your business "Bryan Kelly", I see no problem with that. The whole point of this is to get the forum to be more transparant. If someone is saying that product A sucks, it kind of helps putting that it in perspective when we know that person is actually selling product B, if that makes sense.

Only city, state, country are mandatory. I figured that a business address would probably be the home address for some home businesses, so street/number is not mandatory.

In this specific case, I would say: you are a freelancer. So "Aurich Designs" is great. Maybe, for transparency, you could make mention of doing freelance design work for Heighway (or just "other pinball companies") somewhere in your company intro. By the way, I will be adding an option to include a longer story on your biz page than just that 160 character tagline

Will do, thanks!

This option will be coming. Working on it

Great idea. I think a star rating is a great idea, one vote per user.

And maybe also the option to write an endorsement? To avoid abuse, endorsements should probably be removeable by the Biz owner because I don't want people making rants against a biz. At least, not on their Biz page

I thought about this for a bit, but I want to be careful. The whole concept of the "Biz" pages is that they're meant to be a "business card" for those who choose to participate. The Pin Biz directory is sort of a "yellow pages" for pinball.

In the future, I want owners to be able to use their Biz pages to show off their company and products and have their own little marketing space on Pinside. This should allow pinheads to find the company/individual they're looking for. So it's more of a marketing tool than anything else. I certainly don't want it to be a dumping ground for anyone to post their grievances with a company, legit or not.

That said, I am also aware of Pinside's responsibility in helping pinheads avoid "bad" businesses. But I think the forum is a better place for that; It's where you can elaborate about a bad experience with a company. The company in question can react, others can chime in. Hopefully resulting in good discussion. It's much more constructive that way and there will also be more (room for) context.

Needless to say, any business that we collectively feel should not have a presence on Pinside will not be allowed to be listed (or will be unlisted). In that sense, our ultimate goal is for the Pin Biz directory be a good first reference for the trustworthiness of a company: "are they listed in the Pin Biz? But we're not there yet

There is now! I have just launched the new "pin biz" section on the site!