There is a conversation that deserves more space. Whenever the MINOMO City Agent comes up, it almost always gets filed under existing job categories: "it's a kind of franchise", "it's a door-to-door salesperson", "it's someone who handles social media for local shops". All of these descriptions miss something important. The City Agent is an original role, written from scratch. It is a new profession — and we are writing it right now.
The point goes beyond terminology. A new profession has three characteristics that make it compelling: it occupies a space free from direct competition, it writes its own rules as it takes shape, and it attracts people who are looking for something different from what the conventional job market offers. All three of these traits, today, describe the City Agent well.
Let's look at it honestly.
A territorial consultant, not a salesperson
The City Agent does consultancy, not sales. The work is relationship-driven, grounded in local knowledge. You go to a neighbourhood you know, walk into a place, have a coffee, talk with the owner for twenty minutes, show them their Bio Page already set up on your phone. You explain how it works, listen to their doubts, suggest a possible use. Once the other person has genuinely understood, the City Agent simply hands over the credentials: the merchant reads the terms of service on their own, starts when they are ready, and can ask to be removed at any time. It is a straightforward proposal the merchant accepts or declines. Everything remains in their hands.
The model also differs from franchising. A franchisee buys a format and replicates a retail outlet. The City Agent has a different scope: they steward a territory. Their activity is an original construction, shaped around their own area — its merchants, its associations, its squares.
And it differs from the social media manager too, even though content is involved. The SMM optimises their clients' presence on third-party platforms, inside algorithms that shift every quarter. The City Agent works instead on a direct channel, where messages arrive by design, and where the audience is already there, waiting.
The territorial City Agent
From this profile emerges the first of the two sub-roles we are seeing crystallise around the figure: the territorial City Agent. This is the relationship person — the one who connects the baker and the cultural association, the museum and the mayor, the neighbourhood and the visitor. They have a local network built over years of coffees, meetings, and shared work, and they can do the simplest and hardest thing in the world: remember people's names.
Their income is recurring. A percentage on every euro of service that the merchants in their territory generate. The more care they invest, the more it grows. The financial model structurally aligns the Agent's interest with that of their area — there is a built-in incentive to stay present well beyond the initial activation.
The Merchant Content Manager: the profession born inside the profession
Then there is a second profile, emerging alongside the first for straightforward reasons. Every merchant has a different relationship with MINOMO. Some learn quickly to use it to its full potential: they write push notifications, organise events, photograph the dish of the day. Others prefer to delegate that part — let's be honest: they opened a shop, and that is their trade. It is entirely legitimate.
For them the Merchant Content Manager is born: a figure who specialises in the editorial management of a merchant's MINOMO presence, by agreement. They write the push notifications, build a weekly editorial plan, set up events, suggest promotions. For the merchant it is like having a small communications office, but on a channel where the message actually arrives, with stable rules.
For someone starting in the programme today, it is a sub-role that can be built in parallel with the territorial relationship work. For younger people — those accustomed to writing, photographing, building content for digital — it is probably the most natural entry point.
The inversion: social media becomes a funnel
There is also a cultural shift taking shape around all of this, and it is worth making explicit.
For years, the local merchant used social media as a competitive arena: publish a post, hope the algorithm shows it to someone, pay to boost it, measure it against the noise of a hundred other pieces of content. The promise was: "be visible and you will sell." The reality was: you pay to be seen by a fraction of your own existing customers.
With MINOMO the relationship is inverted. The merchant with their own public Bio Page and a direct follower audience already has a channel where the message always arrives: competing on social media becomes a choice, no longer a necessity. Social media then becomes a funnel, a traffic showcase: the merchant uses it to capture new followers, but immediately directs them toward their MINOMO — where the relationship continues directly, under their control.
For the City Agent (and even more so for the Merchant Content Manager) this profoundly changes the strategic advice they give to merchants. It's no longer "let's boost engagement on Instagram". It's "let's bring your followers onto a channel that's yours".
An opportunity without competition
And this is where we come back to the beginning. A new profession has — by definition — less competition than an established one. The schools, the courses, the master's degrees, the trade associations, the standard industry rates are still being written. Those who enter now build their own territory, write their own rules, develop their own method. In five years they will be the veterans of the trade — because someone has to be first.
The MINOMO City Agent programme is exactly that: the first step of an ever-expanding network, in search of people who want to build a profession before someone else defines what that profession is.
And the "before" is right now.
Want to understand how you could build this profession in your city?
The City Agent programme lets you talk it through with the Country Manager — no commitment. A thirty-to-forty-minute conversation to understand your area, the numbers, the starting conditions. You decide, afterwards.