UntappedNorth is confronting the possibility that there may not be an eighth year after more than $30,000 spent, thousands of unpaid hours, six server providers, a nearly devastating hack and seven years of building, breaking and rebuilding.
UntappedNorth still loads.
That may be the hardest part.
The server answers. The database returns what it is asked for. Old articles still appear. Photos remain in their galleries and the homepage looks, from the outside, much like it always has.
About 550 people still find their way to UntappedNorth in an average month.
There was a time when that number looked very different.
We watched traffic climb through 13,000 monthly visits. We talked seriously about 30,000 being next. Eventually, Cloudflare showed numbers approaching 100,000 visits in a month.
Every upward line felt like proof that the money, lost sleep, technical failures and stubborn refusal to quit were beginning to make sense.
Today, the building is quieter.
Articles come less often. Ideas remain ideas longer. Systems that once felt like the beginning of something enormous increasingly feel like rooms in a house we are not sure we can afford to keep.
After seven years, UntappedNorth is not facing one spectacular collapse.
It is facing something much harder to repair: the possibility that the two people who have carried it for most of their adult lives no longer have enough left to carry it the same way.
Before any of this had a price
UntappedNorth began in 2019 with Andrew Stuetz and a simple belief: local athletes and grassroots sports deserved to be covered with the same care as the people playing under brighter lights.
There was no staff, investor group or technical department. There was no polished business plan explaining how a Northern Ontario sports publication would eventually build live statistics, scoreboards, artificial intelligence tools and community partnerships.
There was just a journalist from Sault Ste. Marie who loved sports and storytelling, and a website that offered somewhere to experiment.
Corey Rainone joined in late 2020.
The early site worked, mostly, but it looked like what it was: an ambitious independent project built without the resources of the organizations it wanted to stand beside.
Corey started taking it apart.
What followed was less a redesign than a rebuilding process that never really stopped.
Layouts changed. Plugins disappeared. Custom functions replaced generic ones. Mobile versions broke. Logos went through countless revisions. Five-minute fixes became two-hour battles with browsers.
Then people started telling us the website looked elegant. Professional. Beautiful.
Those words mattered because we could see every broken version underneath the one everyone else saw.
And that pride became one more reason to keep going.
The hours that should have belonged to sleep
For years, much of UntappedNorth was built after everything else was finished.
Work ended. The laptop opened.
Midnight became two in the morning. Two became four. There were nights when Corey finished programming around 5 a.m. and started his regular workday at 7.
Andrew would go to bed with messages on his phone and wake up to more.
A screenshot of a new function. A plugin problem. A server issue. An idea that somehow became urgent in the middle of the night.
Every so often, Andrew would answer a message and Corey would respond immediately.
“You’re still awake?”
Yes.
Still awake.
It became funny because it happened often enough to stop being surprising.
There was nothing particularly healthy about it. We know that now.
Exhaustion became evidence of commitment, and every impossible night that ended with something finally working taught us the wrong lesson: if we sacrificed enough, maybe the next impossible thing would work too.
Sometimes it did.
Our first live player statistics project was one of those moments.
What sounded simple — display goals, assists and points on a player page — became weeks of APIs, data structures, missing values, caching, formatting and functions that worked perfectly in one place before breaking somewhere else.
Then, one night, everything landed where it was supposed to.
The numbers appeared.
Corey cried.
There was no development team around him and no launch party waiting. There was just an exhausted person sitting in front of a screen looking at something that had finally stopped fighting back.
The next morning, a reader opened UntappedNorth and saw live player statistics.
They had no reason to know what the previous night had cost.
That was the point.
Building something bigger than a sports blog
Success rarely remained success for very long.
Once the statistics worked, the next question was obvious: what else could we make move in real time?
In 2021, UntappedNorth launched a live NHL scoreboard.
Scores changed. Games appeared. Data moved through the website.
Suddenly, UntappedNorth felt less like a sports blog and more like a platform.
If statistics could work, maybe a scoreboard could work. If the scoreboard worked, maybe other leagues could follow. Maybe analytics, applications and more advanced tools could come next.
We became very good at asking, “Why not?”
We were less effective at asking what the answer would cost.
Eventually, systems underneath our systems changed. APIs moved. Data providers changed how information was delivered and code representing years of work became useless in a matter of days.
The files were still there.
They simply no longer did anything useful.
We could have stopped.
Instead, we rebuilt.
Then there were the servers.
Roughly six providers came and went before UntappedNorth eventually settled at OVH. Each move promised better stability, more control or enough room for whatever we wanted to build next.
We configured infrastructure so someone thousands of kilometres away could open a Northern Ontario sports story slightly faster.
Milliseconds mattered.
Most readers never noticed.
Again, that was the point.
Then came the hack.
For a period, the servers carrying years of articles, photographs, databases, code and projects were effectively locked away from us.
The question was no longer whether something could be fixed.
The question was whether UntappedNorth still belonged to us.
Eventually, we regained control, restored the systems and rebuilt the security.
The website came back looking almost exactly as it had before.
Some of our worst nights ended with readers waking up to a completely normal website.
When it felt like everything might work
Not every difficult memory is difficult because it was bad.
Some hurt because of how hopeful they were.
There was a month when traffic passed 13,000.
Maybe 30,000 next month.
Why not?
Then Cloudflare began showing numbers close to 100,000 visits.
For a while, it felt like validation for everything the analytics could never measure.
The sleepless nights had a number. The redesign had a number. The servers had a number.
People were coming.
We began building more.
When artificial intelligence started changing media, UntappedNorth did what it had always done with technology: we tried to build something before we had any business building it.
We experimented with a system that could assist with articles, titles, social posts, statistics and editorial workflows while still understanding the difference between a box-score recap and an actual story.
The goal was never to replace our voice.
It was to help two people carrying a publication produce more without giving away what made UntappedNorth theirs.
Behind the website, we were also trying to build a company.
There were bylaws, ownership structures, policies, codes of conduct, privacy rules, cybersecurity expectations, business plans, sponsorship structures, investor materials and systems for employees we hoped we might someday be able to pay.
The plan was to incorporate in 2025.
It never happened.
The money had other places to go.
More than a website
For all the technology that came to define UntappedNorth behind the scenes, some of the memories that matter most happened nowhere near a server.
Our relationship with Sault Youth Soccer Club became more than coverage.
There were photo days, banquets, games, interviews and hours at the fields. We helped because somebody needed to be there and because grassroots sport only works when people keep showing up.
Eventually, UntappedNorth sponsored a team.
For years, our crest had been pixels on a screen. A design file. Something resized, recoloured, exported and argued about.
Then a child pulled a jersey over their head and the UntappedNorth crest settled on their chest.
Over their heart.
No traffic report could explain what that felt like.
That is the part of UntappedNorth we are most afraid of losing.
For seven years, readers could open our stories without reaching a paywall.
Parents could share an article about their child. Coaches could send a feature to friends and family. The statistics, photographs, stories and community coverage were simply there.
We rarely charged community organizations for the hours we gave them.
When there was something we could do, our instinct was usually to do it and figure everything else out later.
Later eventually arrived.
Between the two of us, more than $30,000 of personal money has gone into UntappedNorth.
Not investor money.
Our money.
It paid for servers, software, domains, equipment, Cloudflare, Bunny.net, Plesk, Zoho, development tools and countless smaller expenses required to keep everything operating.
The money is still the easy part to calculate.
There is no invoice for a night that ended at five in the morning.
There is no receipt for a weekend spent fixing something that had worked the day before.
There is no spreadsheet that calculates what “You’re still awake?” costs when the answer has been yes too many times.
We showed up.
It was beautiful in many ways.
It was also terrible business.
The failure that didn’t throw an error
The hack had a solution.
Dead statistics could be rebuilt. Servers could be moved. APIs could be replaced.
For years, every crisis eventually became the same question:
What do we need to fix?
Then something broke that did not throw an error.
Corey started losing interest.
There was no dramatic moment. Development slowly became maintenance. New ideas were immediately followed by calculations about how many hours they would take.
Then Leagueva, a new sports-management platform, began taking shape.
Suddenly, Corey felt something familiar.
Excitement.
Blank pages. New systems. Problems that had not already stolen a weekend once before.
He wanted to build again.
That should have felt good.
Instead, it hurt because that was how UntappedNorth used to feel.
Burnout does not come with documentation.
There is no server to restart when something you once could not stop thinking about becomes something you are avoiding.
That may have been the worst outage in our history.
One last shift
There are things we would change.
We should have monetized earlier.
We should have asked for help while the audience was climbing instead of waiting until the room became quiet.
We should have said no to more ideas.
We should have protected our time and our friendship better.
We should have understood sooner that building another feature was not the same thing as building a sustainable business.
We should have slept.
UntappedNorth almost became several different things.
It almost became the regional media network we imagined. It almost became a technology platform. It almost became an AI product. It almost became the incorporated organization sitting inside that unfinished minute book.
It almost turned an audience approaching 100,000 visits into something durable.
Almost is a difficult word after seven years.
But we are not shutting it down today.
From Sept. 10 through Dec. 31, 2026, UntappedNorth is taking one final 112-day shift.
That money is not intended to reimburse the more than $30,000 we already spent. That money is gone. It bought seven years and we chose to spend it.
The $20,000 is about what happens next.
It would provide roughly one year of runway to stabilize the platform, cover core infrastructure and begin paying a small group of young writers, photographers and sports-media creators.
People who need what almost everyone entering this industry is told they require and too few people are willing to provide:
A first real chance.
If UntappedNorth survives, it cannot survive by asking the same two people to make the same sacrifices.
Maybe another writer gets the byline.
Maybe a young photographer gets paid to stand at the edge of the field and learn how to capture the moment before it disappears.
Maybe somebody else opens one of the projects we built and begins imagining what it could become.
Maybe the next generation gets the best parts of UntappedNorth without inheriting everything it cost to build them.
Maybe they get to sleep.
If Dec. 31 arrives and nothing has changed, we will begin closing UntappedNorth.
Articles will be exported. Photos will be saved. Databases will be archived. Services will be cancelled.
Seven years will eventually come down to a confirmation box.
Yes or no.
But we are not clicking it today.
For seven years, somewhere inside our messages, one question has continued to appear.
“You’re still awake?”
Still awake after the redesign.
Still awake after the statistics and scoreboard.
Still awake after the servers and the hack.
Still awake when traffic passed 13,000 and when 30,000 seemed possible.
Still awake when the numbers moved toward 100,000.
Still awake at photo days, banquets and soccer fields.
Still awake while kids wore the crest over their hearts.
For seven years, the answer was yes.
We are hoping the next 112 days give UntappedNorth another reason to keep saying it.
https://gofund.me/ba8d45dea