Pursarth Tuladhar Is Mapping the Internet's Blind Spot, One Corkboard at a Time

The search began with a missing filter. Pursarth Tuladhar wanted a list of community bulletin boards in San Francisco - the cork rectangles in laundromats, cafes, grocery stores, parks, and the occasional house wall where dog walkers, piano teachers, handymen, and neighborhood theaters compete for a few square inches. Google did not have it. Yelp could tell him whether a business had Wi-Fi or a bathroom, but not whether it had a place to pin a flyer. He asked online. He asked AI. The useful answer remained stubbornly offline.

So Tuladhar made the list himself. He chose a neighborhood or two, bought a Muni day pass, and worked along the commercial streets. He stepped into businesses that looked community-minded and asked a small, literal question: Do you have a bulletin board? On several days he logged 30,000 steps. When walking became limiting, he fixed his bicycle. At first the work had a commercial purpose. Simbasite, the company he co-founded, builds websites for local service businesses, many of the same painters, cleaners, dog walkers, tutors, and repair people advertising with paper and tape.

But the map outgrew the pitch. Tuladhar found more than a hundred boards, organized them by neighborhood, published the addresses, and kept going. His personal site now counts 139. He has said he wants to map every one in the city. That ambition is narrow enough to sound eccentric and broad enough to expose a philosophy: when the database stops, get curious.

The city under the dashboard

Tuladhar has spent much of his career on the measurable side of commerce. After studying marketing and philosophy at Fairleigh Dickinson University, he worked as an analyst at Lion Brand Yarn and then in online marketing at LexisNexis. Roles at Zillow and TaskRabbit put him inside internet businesses that turned sprawling offline markets into searchable, trackable systems. Later came Cleanify, a small home-cleaning startup, and Dreambound, where he led growth.

A funny story from the Cleanify chapter captures the texture of early-stage work. Four or five people were operating from a SoMa loft when the lights went out. The chief executive had forgotten to pay the bill. The company was gone a month later. The detail is funny because it is painfully ordinary. Startup abstractions meet the invoice, the mop, and the circuit breaker sooner or later.

Tuladhar kept moving closer to the work behind the metrics. He has described joining ride-alongs for on-site estimates, cleaning apartments beside house cleaners, and spending hours in coffee shops sharing marketing advice with local owners. Those encounters sharpened an asymmetry. A service professional may know exactly how to clean a difficult apartment or repair a window, yet the software sold to that person often assumes fluency in design, copywriting, search optimization, and conversion analysis.

“People who know me know I'm obsessed with landing pages.”Pursarth Tuladhar

He says he has hand-built hundreds of landing pages and analyzed thousands. The lesson he drew was not that everyone should learn to do the same. It was that the tool should carry more of the expertise. Simbasite asks a local service business for information it already has, including its business details and profiles, then handles the page structure, words, reviews, galleries, and keyword work. The product is a rejection of the empty canvas as a default. Freedom for an expert can feel like unpaid homework to everyone else.

Two cities, one repeated question

The bulletin-board project also echoes an earlier company on another continent. In 2018, Tuladhar co-founded Aji's Products in Nepal with Lorina and Irina Sthapit. The venture began around woolen socks knitted by their grandmother, then expanded to goods made by a group of older artisans. Aji means grandmother in Newari. Products carried biographies: knitting, jewelry, blankets, clay miniatures, and techniques accumulated across decades.

Aji's did more than list inventory. Its podcast and writing recorded makers' memories and invited younger relatives into the conversation. Within its first seven months, the company was working with nine grandmothers and one grandfather. The work reached customers outside Nepal, but the more interesting exchange ran both ways. A product could produce income and attention; a story could return status to skill that had become easy to overlook.

Simbasite is not Aji's with a different interface. One is software for local services, the other was a social enterprise built around craft and intergenerational memory. Yet both sit beside the same practical question: how does valuable work cross the gap between the person doing it and the person who needs to see it?

That question connects Kathmandu craft tables to San Francisco cork. It also explains why Tuladhar's resume feels less like a ladder than a series of distribution problems. Yarn, legal information, housing, home tasks, cleaning, vocational education, artisan goods, and local services all involve expertise looking for an audience. The channels change. The work of translation remains.

A useful kind of skepticism

Tuladhar now describes his professional evolution with a wink: once labeled a growth hacker, later a no-code builder, currently transitioning to a vibe coder. He uses AI inside the Simbasite product. He also refuses to speak about it as magic. Confronted with the idea of feeding his messy board photographs into a model for automatic analysis, he compared AI to a “lazy stoned intern” that makes mistakes and acts as if it did not.

The joke is pointed, but not anti-technology. It argues for supervision and fit. Simbasite uses automation to compress tasks that normally require multiple kinds of marketing knowledge. The board map uses shoes, a bicycle, conversations, and manual verification because the data is irregular and the context matters. Choosing the low-tech method is not nostalgia. It is product judgment.

The boards themselves offer a tiny study in permission. A business gives up wall space. A neighbor contributes a notice. Another neighbor stops long enough to read it. There is no feed ranking the flyers, though newer paper can still bury older paper. There is no clean attribution trail either. Tuladhar knows the limitation. A QR code might count visits, but a campaign across a hundred boards would need a separate code for each location to measure neighborhood-level response.

For a career marketer, that fuzziness is part of the point. He has noted that online advertising is easy to track and increasingly costly, while a bulletin board is free and close to the community it serves. The map offers utility before it asks for attention. “If you try to sell hard, people get turned off,” he has said. His alternative is to make useful information, share it, and let the market decide what to do next.

“I've made a commitment to map each and every one.”Pursarth Tuladhar

The bicycle is part of the product

Founder advice loves the phrase “do things that don't scale.” Repetition has made it sound almost clean. Tuladhar's version restores the sweat. It means walking into hundreds of businesses, getting told no, recording addresses, revisiting uncertain locations, and taking the bus across town. It means respecting the shopkeeper who says no politics, no religion, and please do not use too much tape. It means fixing the bicycle because the remaining territory is too wide for your shoes.

His personal adventures have that same taste for distance. He records a ten-day hike to Everest Base Camp and Kala Patthar, and a ten-day, 2,900-mile drive from New York City to San Francisco in a 2008 Honda Fit carrying everything he owned. The details matter because they turn motion into a habit rather than a metaphor. New cities become legible by crossing them.

The bulletin-board count will change. Some boards will disappear; new ones will go up. A map of analog infrastructure requires maintenance precisely because it is alive. Tuladhar's aspiration is not to freeze the city. It is to keep paying attention. Simbasite may gain customers from the project, or it may simply become known as the company that made a useful guide. He has been candid that he does not know how much direct business it will produce.

That uncertainty makes the project worth studying. Plenty of marketing content is engineered backward from attribution. This began with a genuine information gap and became a public object. The commercial logic is present, but it does not consume the gift.

On a crowded board, the best flyer does not own the wall. It earns a moment. The same is true online, despite all the software designed to suggest otherwise. Tuladhar's work asks builders to notice the person holding the tape: what they know, what they cannot afford, what the current tool quietly demands of them, and what a more considerate product could carry on their behalf.