Why Small Business Matters to Us

When we started building Akinos, we knew we wanted to focus on small and growing businesses. That decision was personal.

Several of us have built businesses ourselves. The founders of Akinos built a technology consulting company from the ground up. I owned a café inspired by an experience I had while traveling in Brazil. I came home wanting to create something that captured some of what I had experienced there.

Like many small business owners, I quickly discovered that owning a business meant doing just about everything. I developed the menu, designed the interior, sourced products, built the website and technology infrastructure, selected the POS system, managed payroll and figured out how to market the business.

The café became a huge local success. Eventually, that success attracted larger businesses interested in replicating and scaling the concept. Competition itself wasn't unusual or particularly troubling. That's part of running a business.

What was harder was the imbalance. A small independent business might create something distinctive, but a larger competitor can simplify that idea, reproduce it at scale, and support it with marketing teams, advertising budgets and resources the original business could never match.

Our customers understood the difference. They knew what made the original special, and when that distinction mattered, they defended us publicly and passionately without us asking them to.

That experience has stayed with me. Small businesses bring something distinctive to their communities precisely because they are so closely connected to the people who create them. But those same businesses are often competing for attention against organizations with vastly greater resources.

Listening Before Building

That experience is part of why small business matters so much to us at Akinos.

Marketing has always been one of the places where the imbalance between small and large businesses is easiest to see. A large company can have teams devoted to search, advertising, social media, analytics and whatever new channel comes next. In a small business, all of those responsibilities may belong to one person, or to an owner who is also managing employees, customers, finances and operations.

Our own experience with entrepreneurship gave us an affinity for those businesses, but we didn't want to assume that meant we understood what they needed today.

So we started talking to them.

Human-centered research has been an important part of Akinos from the beginning. We have deep experience in product design and human-centered research on our team, and we brought that perspective into our initial interviews with small and growing businesses.

One of the people we met was responsible for marketing a B2B company that provides seminars and training to help other businesses communicate more effectively.

She was the marketing team.

She cared deeply about the company's growth and felt personally invested in its success. She was also accountable for how she spent a limited marketing budget. As the ways people discover businesses continue to change, she had to decide where to put that money and then justify those decisions with results.

That felt very familiar to me.

When I ran my café, digital marketing was simpler, but it was never particularly easy to measure. Search, social media, online reviews and eventually influencers all demanded attention. You made the best decisions you could with the information available. Sometimes the most useful measurement was simply asking a customer, "How did you find us?"

Today's small business owner still faces that uncertainty, but the discovery landscape has become considerably more complicated. AI is now another part of it.

We don't believe the answer is to give an already busy business owner another complicated marketing job.

Learning With Early Adopters

That's why working directly with some of our early adopters has been so important to us.

We're currently working with organizations that couldn't seem more different, including a nonprofit providing free mediation and conflict-resolution services and an independent plastic surgery practice.

Yet we've noticed something fascinating in working with both of them.

Some of the most valuable conversations aren't about the technology at all. They're about what these organizations want people to understand about them.

What is the intention behind the organization? Who are they really trying to help? What makes their approach different? What expertise or values should someone understand before deciding whether this is the right organization for them?

These are things the people running these organizations know deeply, but they haven't necessarily had a reason to sit down and articulate them clearly.

That matters in a world where AI is increasingly helping people discover, understand and evaluate businesses and organizations. Before we can help AI understand an organization better, we sometimes have to help the organization articulate what it wants to be understood for.

Why We're Excited

This is the part of building Akinos that excites us most.

We love the technology and the problems we're trying to solve, but Akinos is being shaped by the people we're meeting along the way. Our early research changed our thinking. Working with our early adopters continues to do the same.

We've been entrepreneurs ourselves, so we have enormous respect for people willing to build something they believe should exist. We understand the pride that comes from creating something distinctive, and the challenge of competing for attention when someone else has more people, more money and more time to spend on marketing.

Now we have the opportunity to work alongside some of those people, learn what makes their businesses special, and build technology that helps them navigate a rapidly changing world without asking them to become experts in yet another thing.

That's why we chose small business. And it's why we're so excited about what we're building together.