Today we’d like to introduce you to Giovanni DiDomenico.
Hi Giovanni, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
Shop Morris County started as an Instagram page on April 1, 2023. That was it. No website, no team, no plan beyond a simple idea that Morris County deserved a place that actually showed off what was here. We started posting the restaurants, the shops, the events, the little spots people drive past every day and never think to stop at. People responded fast. It turned out a lot of locals wanted the same thing we did, which was an easier way to find what was happening in their own backyard.
Around June 1st of 2024, we launched ShopMorrisCounty.com. That was the turning point. Instagram was great for discovery, but a website meant we could actually cover things properly. Full articles, event roundups, business features, seasonal guides, real reporting on what was going on across the county. Once the site went up, everything took off.
Today ShopMorrisCounty.com is the largest local guide for Morris County. The site reaches 140,000 people a month, all locals looking for new places to eat, things to do, and events worth showing up for. We cover all 39 towns in Morris County, from Parsippany to Morristown to Denville to the small ones people forget are on the map.
What we do is pretty simple. We publish local news, event coverage, restaurant and dining features, business spotlights, and lifestyle content. We run a curated events calendar so you always know what is happening this weekend. We put out a digital guide to the county and a weekly email newsletter that goes to thousands of locals.
Our social side is growing fast right now. We have over 8,000 followers on Instagram and picked up more than 3,000 of them in just the last three months. On TikTok we gained over 4,500 followers in that same three month stretch. Everything is trending up, and it tells us people want this kind of local coverage more than ever.
The part that matters most to us is that local people need to know what is going on locally. Too much of what happens in Morris County goes unnoticed simply because nobody is telling anyone about it. The events, the openings, the fundraisers, the weekend plans sitting ten minutes from your house. That is the gap we exist to close.
We are still just getting started.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Here’s your Obstacles/Challenges answer. Similar length, same voice.
It has not been a smooth road, and honestly we would not want to tell anyone it was.
The first real challenge was that nobody knew who we were. When you start as an Instagram page, you have no credibility with businesses. We would reach out to a restaurant or a shop and get nothing back, because from their side we were just another account asking for something. Building trust in a local community takes time and there is no shortcut for it. We had to prove we were actually going to show up, actually going to write about them well, and actually going to still be here in a year.
The second challenge was volume. Covering all 39 towns in Morris County is a lot of ground. Events change, businesses open and close, things get canceled last minute. Keeping the site accurate and current is a constant job, and early on we were doing all of it by hand. We had to get a lot better at systems and processes before the growth became sustainable instead of overwhelming.
Money was the third one. Local media is a hard business model. Everyone loves what you do, but getting people to pay for advertising when they have never bought digital advertising before is a completely different conversation. We had to learn how to explain the value in plain language, not marketing language, and we had to be patient while businesses got comfortable with the idea.
The fourth thing, and maybe the hardest, is that growth is not linear. Some months the numbers jump and some months they flatten out. Early on that messed with our heads. You do everything right for four weeks and the results do not move, and you start questioning the whole thing. What we eventually figured out is that the work compounds. The article you wrote eight months ago is still bringing people in today. You just cannot see it while you are in it.
The struggles are what shaped how we operate now. We are more organized, more consistent, and a lot more focused on serving readers first. Every hard stretch taught us something we would not have learned if it had all been easy.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Shop Morris County is a local media and discovery platform for Morris County, New Jersey. The simplest way to describe us is that we are the place locals go to find out what is happening around them.
We publish daily on ShopMorrisCounty.com, which is now the largest local guide for Morris County with 140,000 people visiting the site every month. We cover local news, events, restaurants and dining, business features, and lifestyle content across all 39 towns in the county. We also run a curated events calendar, a seasonal digital guide to Morris County, a weekly email newsletter that goes out to thousands of locals, and social accounts on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok.
What we specialize in is discovery. Plenty of places will tell you the news. We tell you what to do this weekend, where to eat, which festival is worth the drive, which shop just opened two towns over that you would never have found on your own. We write in a way that actually makes you want to go somewhere, not just read about it.
What sets us apart is that we are genuinely local. We are not a franchise, not a syndicated content mill, and not a national site with a Morris County tab. We live here. We go to these places. When we write about a restaurant, someone from our team has usually eaten there. That shows up in the work, and readers can tell.
The thing we are most proud of brand wise is the trust. People message us asking where to take their kids on a rainy Saturday or where to go for an anniversary dinner, and they take our answer seriously. That kind of trust is not something you can buy with ad spend. You earn it by being consistent and being right.
For businesses, we offer feature articles, sidebar advertising that runs across the entire site, full page placements in our digital guide, event coverage, newsletter features, and social media features. Everything is built to put local businesses in front of a local audience that is already actively looking for them.
What we want readers to know is simple. If you live in Morris County, there is a lot going on around you. We exist to make sure you actually hear about it.
Let’s talk about our city – what do you love? What do you not love?
What we like best about New Jersey is how much is packed into such a small space. You can be at the beach in the morning, hiking in the mountains by the afternoon, and in New York City by dinner. There is no other state in the country where that is realistic on a Saturday.
The food is the other thing. New Jersey has an absurd amount of good food for its size. The diners, the pizza, the bagels, the Italian delis, the Portuguese and Indian and Korean and Peruvian spots tucked into strip malls that would be destination restaurants anywhere else. Running a local media platform here means we are never short on things worth writing about.
But the real answer is the people and the towns. Every town in New Jersey has its own personality, its own downtown, its own annual festival that people plan their whole summer around. Morris County alone has 39 of them and they are all different. That local pride runs deep here. People genuinely care about where they live, and that is what makes what we do possible in the first place.
We also love how many family-owned businesses are still standing. So many places here have been run by the same family for two or three generations. That is getting rarer everywhere else and it is still very much alive in New Jersey.
What we like least is that so much of it goes undiscovered by the people who live here. There are incredible small businesses and events happening constantly, and the majority of locals never hear about them. Not because they do not care, but because there is no easy place to look. People will drive past the same shop for five years and never walk in. That is honestly what pushed us to build Shop Morris County in the first place.
The other thing we would change is how much New Jersey gets underestimated from the outside. People who have never spent real time here have a picture in their head that is nothing like the actual place. Anyone who visits properly figures that out fast, but the reputation lingers longer than it should.
Nothing we would trade though. It is a great state to build something local in.
Contact Info:
- Website: Https://shopmorriscounty.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/shopmorriscounty/
