Is there any sort of HN like site for small businesses? Something not as focused on tech or tech startups but more on things that small businesses consider important topics?
> but more on things that small businesses consider important topics?
could you elaborate on some of those topics?
there's plenty of subreddits like r/ecommerce and so on for specific niches (see people doing say dropshipping) off the top of my head, I can think of day by day busy work that might not interest the venture capital focused HN audience but highly important for small businesses like discussing the occassional news in regards to accounting software like quickbooks or payrolls, setting up printers, running ad campaigns and so on but I feel like these kind of discussions are counter productive by creating more capable competition among small businesses against each other. It's the information asymmetry that gives a small businesses an edge to remain relevant before big players, an edge that we sometimes see erased when popularized on free open platforms where small business owners advertise some strategy and then hordes of copy cats following that diminish the value of the strategy in the first place and why I don't see a HN equivalent existing today.
I think I agree with Sandwichukulele here on the subreddits. Twitter is another one where niche communities are business focused, so are some Discord servers, however I wouldn't know how you'd reach the relevant servers though.
What type of small businesses? I think you'd need to specify a specific category, otherwise there's not enough in common with the needs. Car dealership operators aren't going to look at the same site as people who run restaurants, most of the challenges are domain specific. HN = tech domain, which is specific enough to be relevant to most tech business people.
I also came here to suggest Indie Hackers. I haven't been active there for a while, but it's probably the best online community I know for solo founders looking to bootstrap a company.
It might not be exactly what OP was looking though given the community is fairly focused around tech startups.
could you elaborate on some of those topics?
there's plenty of subreddits like r/ecommerce and so on for specific niches (see people doing say dropshipping) off the top of my head, I can think of day by day busy work that might not interest the venture capital focused HN audience but highly important for small businesses like discussing the occassional news in regards to accounting software like quickbooks or payrolls, setting up printers, running ad campaigns and so on but I feel like these kind of discussions are counter productive by creating more capable competition among small businesses against each other. It's the information asymmetry that gives a small businesses an edge to remain relevant before big players, an edge that we sometimes see erased when popularized on free open platforms where small business owners advertise some strategy and then hordes of copy cats following that diminish the value of the strategy in the first place and why I don't see a HN equivalent existing today.