Announcing Homegrown, the first Neighborhood Studios company!

An investment platform that connects local investors with best-in-class businesses that are ready to expand.

Today we couldn’t be more excited to announce the launch of the very first startup to emerge from Neighborhood Studios — Homegrown!

Backstory

Neighborhood Studios began in the summer of 2022. We spent the last half of the year developing our process to identify unique insights to hyperlocal problems, develop novel product entry points, and de-risk our product approach.

Then — starting just 60 days ago — we began to launch experiments to test some of our initial ideas. We didn’t expect for one of our ideas to catch-on this quickly, but this idea took on a life of its own.

In our research process, we found that access to expansion capital was an acute problem for brick & mortar businesses. During our customer discovery, we discovered that the best local business owners did a DIY version of what we planned to build. In other words, the best brick & mortar owners were already doing their own artisanal version of Homegrown. They were living in the future!

When we shared the insight and business model with the team at Overline, they agreed to lead the pre-Seed round for Homegrown. This was earlier than we ever planned to raise venture capital for one of our startups, but we’ve known the Overline team for many years and believe they will be a great partner to help us grow Homegrown into a big, important business.

What’s so special about this idea?

Neighborhood businesses are one of the things that make our lives great.

These extraordinary entrepreneurs take a great deal of risk and work extremely hard to create and operate all of the businesses that we love — the hole-in-the-wall burger joint where you do Friday burger night with your family, your neighborhood coffee shop that you pop into every morning on the way to work, the nearby yoga studio with your favorite instructor.

When these types of businesses have a few locations and want to expand, their options for growth financing are very bad. Debt comes in small amounts, is very expensive, and requires personal guarantees. And equity lasts forever and is hard to raise.

So what these entrepreneurs do to open new locations is cobble together savings, debt, and equity and — maybe one day — open their third or fourth locations. But most never do because it’s too much effort and the risk is just too high for these operators.

In other words, there is no single source of capital for the very best brick & mortar entrepreneurs to obtain growth capital for new locations.

Until now.

While this is a real problem for local businesses, there’s another player in this equation that’s equally as important — local investors who typically make angel investments into these types of alternative investments.

Retail investors are increasingly looking for investment opportunities outside of the stock market, but it’s difficult to diversify your investments while still getting steady monthly returns.

A common belief amongst angel investors is that local brick & mortar investments are bad investments. And this is true. However, the top 10% of local brick & mortar investments — the ones with a track record — provide strong, consistent returns and are much more stable than many traditional investment types.

Homegrown is an investment platform that connects local investors with best-in-class businesses that are ready to expand.

Our ultimate vision is to turn the top 10% of SMBs into a brand new asset class.

What’s next?

The next step in our studio process is to recruit an exceptional founder/CEO for Homegrown.

This is a huge opportunity for someone to launch and grow their own startup with the help of a world class team.

We are looking for a founder with experience in financial technologies, small businesses, sales and/or alternative investments.

To follow more startup launches at Neighborhood Studios, sign-up for our updates on our homepage.

About Neighborhood Studios

Neighborhood Studios is a venture studio that partners with tenacious founders to build hyperlocal startups from the ground up.

If you are building a business in any hyperlocal space or if any of this really grabs you, we want to hear from you. Drop us a note at goodstuffnearby@neighborhoodstudios.com.

To follow more happenings at Neighborhood Studios, sign-up for our updates at the bottom of our homepage.

Only neighborhoods can save us!