Guia Brazusa

The problem

Brazilians in the US find each other, and Brazilian businesses, through word of mouth and scattered Facebook groups. There is no single, trustworthy place to look, and building a real directory for a community spread across 30-plus states meant more raw legwork than one person could hand-write listing by listing, especially outside the handful of cities I actually know well.

Why I built it

As a Brazilian living in the US, I wanted one good place to find and support Brazilian-owned businesses, and to help the community connect, instead of scrolling through five different Facebook groups hoping someone remembers a restaurant's name.

The directory is built from two honest sources, and it says so on every listing. Some businesses have a full profile: a real description, hours, and contact details, written from what the owner or a community source provided. Others are labeled plainly as auto-discovered, meaning the listing was pulled in automatically and only has a name, address, and phone number until someone fills it in. I'd rather show a thin, honestly-labeled listing than fake a description I do not actually have.

There is no owner login that lets a business self-publish yet. The real path in right now is a Suggest a Business form: anyone, owner or not, submits a name plus at least a website or a social link, and it gets reviewed before it goes live. That is slower than automated self-serve, but it means a human looks at every new listing before the community sees it, instead of trusting an unmoderated form to keep the directory clean on its own.

A Comunidade section sits behind a free account, with a specific track for Brazilian women entrepreneurs pulled from a partner nonprofit. It is early: a handful of people need to actually use it before I know if the community layer is worth building further, or if the directory alone is the whole product.

Geography shapes what's actually in the directory today. A lot of the richer, fully-written listings cluster around Massachusetts, Somerville and Boston especially, which reflects where the initial outreach happened, not a deliberate limit. The state and city filters work nationwide, but the depth of what you find behind them is currently uneven, and I'd rather say that plainly than let someone assume every state is covered equally well.

What it does

• A searchable directory of Brazilian-owned businesses across the US, currently around 94 listings spanning 30 states and 14 categories: restaurants, shops, services, media, nonprofits, and tourism, filterable by state, city, and category.
• Two kinds of listings, labeled honestly: curated profiles with a real description and contact details, and thinner auto-discovered entries with just a name, address, and phone number.
• A Suggest a Business form open to anyone, not just owners, that gets reviewed before a new listing goes live.
• A sign-in-gated community section, including a track built for Brazilian women entrepreneurs.

Where it's going

The auto-discovered listings need a real path to become full profiles, ideally a way for the actual owner to claim theirs and fill it in themselves, instead of everything routing through my manual review queue. Owner login and self-serve editing is the single biggest gap between where this is today and what a real directory needs to be.

Could this work for you?

The real value here is the pattern, not the topic, and it travels. A few ways the same idea could work for something of yours: