Two Parisians, one obsession: local businesses that win their neighborhood
LocalFinder started with a simple observation: the businesses that make a neighborhood worth living in — the roofer everyone recommends, the orthodontist families trust for a generation — were losing the online game to whoever spent the most on ads. Not because their work was worse. Because marketing had become a full-time job nobody gave them time for.
We’re Thomas and Patrick — two Parisians who made Pasadena home and opened LocalFinder in 2014. We came to marketing from unusual places: Thomas from the music industry — a business master’s from Berklee and a career in France as a producer and sound engineer; Patrick from the printing industry, where he became a serial entrepreneur. Different worlds, same lesson: craft matters, and the local businesses doing the best work rarely have time to tell anyone about it. So we built LocalFinder the way we’d want it if we owned the shop: boutique, local-first, and honest about what works.
Boutique by design
We’re not a platform with ten thousand anonymous accounts. We work with a small number of local businesses, and we only take one business per category per market — if you’re our roofer in the San Gabriel Valley, we will never work for your competitor. Your win is the only win we have in your category.
Then AI changed what two people can do
For a decade we did local marketing the classic way: hands-on, one business at a time. Then AI changed the equation of what a boutique can deliver. We built our own platform — an AI marketing team that researches your market, writes your content, watches your community for people who need you, and reports what happened. Ten years of local marketing craft, encoded into agents that work around the clock. The AI does the heavy lifting. Humans make every call that matters. Nothing publishes without approval; nothing speaks for your business without a person saying yes.
Who does what
Thomas Ferrière — Co-founder. A former music producer and sound engineer (and Berklee business graduate), Thomas now applies a producer’s obsession with detail to the platform: the AI agents, the integrations, the plumbing that works at 3 a.m.
Patrick — Co-founder. A serial entrepreneur who came up through the printing industry, Patrick is the person you’ll actually talk to: strategy, onboarding, and making sure the machine serves your goals.
Come say hello
We’re at 12 S Raymond Ave, Pasadena, CA 91105, in Old Pasadena. Or write us: thomas@knock.email.