How 'Small Town' Entrepreneurs Can Use Location to Their Advantage

Many aspiring entrepreneurs think it’s necessary to move to San Francisco or New York City to launch a new business -- particularly if that business is a tech startup. After all, both areas are overflowing with top-tier talent, venture capital and a healthy helping of innovation pie.

But the grass, despite whatthey say, isn’t really greener on the other side. Some tech startups are actually trying to “de-locate” their operations from trendy areas because they are so expensive and competitive. Zapier, for example, is currentlyoffering employees $10,000to leave San Francisco. The company believes this is a financially savvy decision that will also help it attract remote talent.

In the modern era of entrepreneurship, location shouldn't stop anyone from starting a company. In fact, it could actually become a great asset.

Find your rural advantage.

This isn't to say there aren’tanyuphill battles in smaller communities -- particularly when it comes to hiring, fundraising and public relations. But so what if there are challenges?Any geographic location will pose hurdles, and entrepreneurship is all about solving these problems. Here are three ways to overcome the biggest stumbling blocks of "small town" entrepreneurship:

Create a unique opportunity.

When we launchedCoSchedule, it was more out of necessity than anything else. Neither my co-founder nor I could find jobs we liked in North Dakota, our home state.

While many people --particularly young professionals-- opt to move to more urban areas to find jobs, that’s not an appealing option for everyone. So out of frustration and a desire to stay put, we created jobs for ourselves. And in doing so, we gave others a unique opportunity to do what they love and love what they do.

Listen to the conversations going on in your town. Take a look at the other companies in your region, and consider the types of jobs theydon'tcurrently offer. Then, be the company the fills the gap.

CoSchedule, for example, isthe only business in North Dakotathat builds enterprise SaaS software and uses a modern development stack to do so. This automatically makes us an attractive employment opportunity for local job seekers.

Become a recruitment machine.

Hiring is hard no matter where you're located, and recruiting in a state with a smaller population will only add to the challenge. While companies in big cities find themselves drowning in floods of applicants, you may find yourself wondering whether anyone even knows you have open positions.

But instead of hiring an expensive recruiter -- who could cost15 to 50 percent of a new hire’s salary-- I suggest you take control of recruiting internally. My co-founder and I became experts at finding new talent, hittingLinkedIn Recruiterto interact with potential applicants across the nation on a daily basis. We honed our pitch, highlighting the benefits of working for us, as well as the advantages of living in a family-oriented,low-cost community such as North Dakota. 它奏效了。 Today, we have people on our staff who hail from places such as Oregon, Washington and Colorado.

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Leverage local resources.

On the surface, funding will appear to be limited in your immediate vicinity. In our case, we had one venture capitalist in the entire state, and the angel investor network was meager at best. To make matters worse, none of our potential sources of funding were very familiar with tech investments.

But as we learned, smaller communities arethirsty for homegrown entrepreneurship-- sometimes even more so than bigger cities. In our case, North Dakota was actively trying to grow its technology investments, and that ended up being a boon for us. We were able to find helpful, founder-friendly opportunities for capital that weren't available anywhere else.

Check with yourstate government to see whether itoffers specific programsthat can help with growth. 58003 Host aStartup Weekendin town, or present at alocal TEDx event. By taking this approach, our community voted to get us intoTechCo’s Startup of the Yearcompetition, in which we went on to become one of the top five finishers in 2016. 58003

Don’t let location get in the way of your entrepreneurial aspirations. Instead, use it to your advantage. Wear your small town on your sleeve, flaunt the benefits of living there, and make yourself a mainstay in the local community.

If you follow the above tips, you can convince top-notch talent from across the nation to de-locate -- and you can show local professionals that they don't need to relocate.

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