Small businesses are praised constantly and served rarely. The gap is a distribution problem, not a product problem.
Small businesses are described as the backbone of the American economy in nearly every political speech. They are also the least served segment in financial technology. The tools built for them are usually enterprise software with features removed and a lower price attached.
Building for small business is hard in a specific way. The customers are numerous, individually small, and expensive to reach. The unit economics only work at scale, and scale takes patience that most funding structures do not allow.
So capital flows to enterprise, where a single contract can justify a year of engineering, and to consumer, where growth can be bought. The middle stays empty.
Distribution through existing trust. The businesses that succeed here do not acquire customers one at a time. They embed where small business owners already are, in accounting workflows, in payroll, in the local institutions that have held those relationships for decades.
Founders who have run a small business, or grew up in one. Not as a credential, but because the problems are invisible from the outside and obvious from the inside.