Peny started with a parade we missed.
A parade, a fireworks show, a wildfire, and a shelter-in-place order — four times the news didn't reach us, and not one of them the fault of the people doing the work.
Two websites. Two start times.
Our city's website said the parade started at 9:00. What we didn't know: the city had put up a second website, on a different domain, just for the festival — and that one said 10:00.
We showed up at 10:00, kids in tow, to a street being swept. Wrong site. Wrong hour. Right city, though — they'd published both.
Ten came and went.
Another night we sat on a blanket waiting for the fireworks show at 10:00. Ten came and went. Nothing in the sky, nothing from the city — no post, no update, nowhere.
We just eventually drove home. Nobody knew a thing.
Those were annoyances. The wildfire wasn't.
When a fire broke out near our home and evacuations began, the city posted it in exactly one place: Facebook. I don't use Facebook.
If I'd been asleep, or in the basement, I would have learned about the evacuation from the smoke.
A shelter-in-place order we never got.
I was out of town when my wife called, worried. Her dad had just told her there was an active shooter in our neighborhood and the city had issued a shelter-in-place order. He knew because he'd been stopped at a police roadblock.
Nothing had come to us — no text, no call, no email. My wife ran across the street to warn our elderly neighbors, whose front door was standing open. They hadn't heard either.
Weeks later I called the city to ask why. “Then you'll just have to regularly check the website.”
The problem was never that the city didn't care.
None of this was the city staff's fault. They had posted. Every time, someone sat down and typed it out.
They were maintaining multiple channels and each one carried the same condition: the resident had to come find it.
The system was designed to fail, and it failed the way it always does: quietly, until it matters.
Every resident, a penny at a time.
We named the company Peny after the penny press — the moment in the 1830s when newspapers dropped to one cent and news stopped being a luxury.
That's still the idea: information about your own city shouldn't depend on which apps you have, or which day the algorithm decides to show you city posts.
So we built the tool we wished our city had.
One place for the city to post. Every resident reached — website, app, push alerts, social, email.
Your staff already does the hard part.
They know what's happening. Peny just makes sure everyone else does too.
