Howells.

I heard about Smallknot on Monocle’s The Entrepreneurs, but didn’t follow up by taking a look at their website until now. I’ll let them explain what they do:

Smallknot lets you invest in the small businesses in your community in exchange for goods, services, special perks and benefits. We work exclusively with local businesses that are looking to expand and grow but need a little extra capital to get there. Maybe your favorite coffee shop wants to build a new back patio, or your favorite pizza place needs a new oven. For a lot of local businesses, even very successful ones, projects like these get put on hold or never happen because of a lack of access to capital. Banks don’t lend to the smallest businesses in your neighborhood, and credit cards are costly and expensive. With Smallknot, you can help fund a project in your neighborhood and get back real value paid back in kind and at a premium.

What I love about this idea over, say, contributing to Kickstarter campaigns is that my investment is an actual alternative investment: in return I would get effectively 100%+ of my money back in the form of goods and services provided by them, and the intangible return of feeling good about supporting a favourite, already-established, local business.

The platform is serving Williamsburg and Greenville right now, and from what I can see has only served a handful of local businesses which is a Good Thing. I hope they stay small for as long as is practical, since it’s the connection each business has with its community that makes it so special.