Small Cities Weekly | 07.28.2023
Hazards on the Highway, Water Everywhere, & a Manhattan (Kansas, that is) Startup
As part of the work we are doing on the Small City Segment, we send out a brief weekly post of thoughts and links that reflect the week’s work. I’d love to hear from you if you have any thoughts, questions, disagreements, or things to add! And please forward this on to people you think might enjoy reading it.
Thoughts
I was on a call this week with a founder who is building for the Small City Segment. They are still early - they have done a few pilots, have a working product, and are still trying to figure out their ideal customer and distribution. What struck me the most about their story so far isn’t what they are building, but how they are building.
They haven’t raised any money formally, but have put together about $150k of funding from competitions. They are obsessed with proving that this product is really what their customer needs and don’t want to take any big steps forward until they are confident in that. So in order to make that money stretch as long as possible, for the first year or so the technical co-founder worked full-time on the venture while the more sales-focused founder worked a full-time job and contributed on nights and weekends. Now that they have a working product and are more distribution and channels focused, they’ve switched. The technical co-founder has gone back to a full-time job, making product updates on nights and weekends, and the sales-focused co-founder is now full-time, talking and selling to customers.
I’m starting to think that building for the Small City Segment isn’t going to just be about companies defined by serving this market, but also by a their own set of characteristics that allow them to do it well outside of traditional startup hubs. These characteristics might include being wildly capital efficient, using pre-selling as the default path toward starting, defaulting to running the business long-term instead of exiting, and others I’m sure we will learn more about. I’m excited to see if this plays out and how it might allow us to build support and funding that best fits these founders and their markets, and not just carbon copy what has worked in the large metros.
We are looking forward to attending the Main Street Summit in Columbia, MO this fall to see how this may fit in with what is already happening from the best in small business.
Links
Huge amounts of hazardous materials pass through Midwest every day. How safe are residents?, Clark Wade (IndyStar)
The majority of hazmat accidents in the five-state region — nearly 90% — occurred in urban and suburban counties with industrial and manufacturing hubs where large quantities of hazardous materials come and go daily. That includes places such as Indianapolis, Grand Rapids, Louisville, Cincinnati and Hodgkins, Illinois, an industrial suburb of Chicago that has recorded the region’s most hazmat accidents in the past decade. But accident data shows rural communities like East Palestine and Sparta, Kentucky, face an outsized risk when it comes to serious damages. The challenge outside metropolitan areas comes from the thousands of miles of highways and rail lines that connect them.
The Trillion Gallon Question, Christopher Cox (NYT) | Even ‘Safe’ Places Are Experiencing Climate Chaos in America, Jonathan Mingle (NYT)
Other parts of the document were terrifying. Two large dams owned by the Bureau of Reclamation — Friant and New Melones — looked likely to overtop: Each would have periods when they would be taking on water faster than they could spill it, and they would reach those moments when the reservoirs were nearly full. Friant Dam, which is situated in the hills above Fresno, population 544,500, would take on an incredible six times its total volume in the course of the month. New Melones would have a peak inflow that was more than twice what it could release, and its spillway couldn’t be used until the water was near the crest of the dam. In the probable inundation zone for New Melones were most of the 218,800 people of Modesto. If these projections were correct, it would create an unprecedented amount of destruction. [The Trillion Dollar Question]
But the vulnerability of this “brave little state,” as its native son President Calvin Coolidge once called it, was laid bare all the same. As the floodwaters recede, the notion that any place could be somehow insulated from extreme weather and the ravages of a warming climate should be swept away, too, for good. [Even ‘Safe’ Places Are Experiencing Climate Chaos in America]
How ‘raving fans’ in small town Kansas built this govtech startup’s sales funnel, Matthew Gwin (Startland News)
The team identified a gap in the ecosystem: larger software providers weren’t offering unique solutions to small and mid-size cities and counties, said Robert Disberger. “What we learned is that these smaller municipalities have their own unique processes, too,” explained Disberger, co-owner and vice president of sales at Manhattan-based GovBuilt. “For them to buy an ‘off-the-shelf’ solution hampers their processes to where they can’t actually fulfill them in the way they want.”
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