Top 15 Best Small Business & Entrepreneur Forums for 2020
Table of Contents
- Why Should You Join Entrepreneur Forums?
- How to Choose the Right Forum for Your Business Needs
- Top 15 Best Online Entrepreneur Forums
- Niche Categories and Industry-Specific Entrepreneur Forums
- Incubators and Accelerators Help Start, Fund, and Grow Your Business
- Seller Platforms to Market Your Products & Services
- Entrepreneur Forums That Serve Your Local Community
- Find the Right Online Resources for Your Business
What is an Entrepreneur Forum?
Entrepreneur forums are online communities of new & seasoned entrepreneurs. These forums serve as a platform to exchange ideas about how to set up a new business, grow, and exit. It’s a great way to generate new business ideas, share marketing practices, find a mentor, seek out potential clients, and find friends with whom to share your unique journey.
Starting a new business is exciting, inspiring, and challenging. It takes a special kind of person to see business opportunities and to hustle them into reality. For first-time entrepreneurs, the confluence of fear, excitement, stress, and self-doubt is enough to cause one to question their choices, and maybe even their sanity. But thanks to online entrepreneur forums, this isn’t something you have to go through alone. Connecting with others who have already gone through the journey is not only a source of comfort and comradery, it can also help you avoid common mistakes and identify how to best use your time.
While building LinkedPhone to empower entrepreneurs and small business owners with a modern phone service that works for them, we learned a great deal about the challenges that business owners face. To better serve the small business community, we’ve put together a list of the top 15 best online entrepreneur forums, along with a few extras that we find interesting, to help get you connected with other new and veteran business owners and experts, and find the information and resources you need.
Why Should You Join Entrepreneur Forums?
Many of the people you meet in online forums will be young or budding entrepreneurs just getting started in the business world. Some will be long-time experts who have been running their businesses for years, or serial entrepreneurs who have started and sold multiple companies. By engaging with different entrepreneur forums, you can share stories, ask for advice, read case studies, and get the resources you need.
How to Choose the Right Forum for Your Business Needs
With so many entrepreneur forums online, you will encounter a variety of different attitudes, experience levels, perspectives, opinions, data, and even misinformation. Start with some of the most popular forums to see what people are talking about, then narrow your focus to specific channels and discussions most relevant to you. Fill your knowledge gaps, and find out about how other people in similar businesses have succeeded, failed, and handled unexpected situations.
Top 15 Best Online Entrepreneur Forums
1. Small-Business-Forum.net
Small-Business-Forum.net is a classic, no-frills forum where users post questions and answers, with posts moderated by a team of administrators. There are a wide variety of sub-topic forums, from starting, financing and growing your business, to marketing, running a website, accounting, taxes, technology and more.
2. BizWarriors
BizWarriors takes a more aggressive stance towards doing business. Even the tagline on their logo is “Create. Collaborate. Conquer.” But don’t let that turn you off, since Matthew and Adam Toren, two serial entrepreneurs, publish a wide variety of articles and run a business forum where users engage about diverse business topics. If that resonates with you, definitely check them out.
3. Small Business Brief
A no-nonsense yet comprehensive site, Small Business Brief is a treasure trove of information and collaboration for entrepreneurs. Articles on business ownership are separated by industry type, and their forum features discussions on a large number of topics. They also host a free database of forms and templates for common business situations.
4. CNET Small Business and Startups Forum
Most of us know CNET as a consumer technology and computing review site, but they also host several dozen forums, including a small business forum, where people from the business community can post their questions, get answers, and start discussions.
5. Quickbooks Online Community
Accounting, payroll and taxes are the least glamorous parts of doing business, but every entrepreneur needs to have a complete, up-to-date picture of their financial situation at all times. The Quickbooks Online Community is one of the best resources for discussing financial topics relevant to small business owners.
6. Warrior Forum
If you’re familiar with Reddit-style message boards, then the Warrior Forum should be a no-brainer. Forums are divided by topic, and posts are up-voted or down-voted by the community, so the most popular posts always appear near the top of the list. You can still sort and search within forums to find discussions that you’re interested in.
7. Bank of America Small Business Online Community
Big banks like Bank of America are crucial to helping small business owners finance and capitalize their entrepreneurial ventures, and BofA has gone the extra step to create an online forum where experts and entrepreneurs can help each other get the answers they need. They also host a regular small business podcast!
8. Business Advice Forum
Another great classic-style forum, you can jump right into important subjects like growing and managing a business, social media & internet marketing, advertising, even a marketplace for hiring or buying & selling of websites and whole businesses. They also have a section dedicated to helping entrepreneurs get access to commercial capital outside of traditional banks.
9. Startup Nation
StartupNation is dedicated to entrepreneurship and starting new businesses, and they offer a huge number of resources to help you do just that. From articles around starting, growing, and managing a business, to their entrepreneurship podcast, to their community forum where you can participate with like-minded members of the business community, StartupNation has it all.
10. Alignable
Alignable is not strictly a small business forum, but a peer-to-peer network of business owners and entrepreneurs for exchanging referrals, finding expert advice, and building relationships with business partners and local leaders. You can sign up for free and get access to connections within your industry, join discussions, and connect with your local community.
11. LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn is the premier social network for businesses, employers, employees, and job-seekers. Here you can connect and share resources with business people from around the world doing just about everything under the sun, as well as screen and hire employees, and even market your services to other businesses.
12. Reddit (Entrepreneur, Small Business, and Startup threads)
Within the vast array of “subreddits” (or topical forums) on Reddit.com there are several which stand out as invaluable to business owners and entrepreneurs. We recommend that you follow r/entrepreneur, r/small-business, and r/startup to begin with, but do a few targeted searches and see if there are other local or industry-specific subreddits that interest you.
13. The Fastlane Forum
If you’ve read the best-selling business books “The Millionaire Fastlane” or “Unscripted” by M.J. DeMarco, you’re already familiar with his trademark style and no-nonsense approach to starting and running a successful business. The Fastlane Forum provides additional resources for aficionados of DeMarco’s “C.E.N.T.S. Framework”, along with many other business topics.
14. Small Business Forum
Not to be confused with Smallbusinessforum.net, Small Business Forum is a magazine-style blog operated by Medium.com which publishes articles by entrepreneurs small and large. They also feature articles from contributors in the business community, though interaction by the public is limited to the comments section.
15. Startups.com
Last but not least, Startups.com is one of the most important hubs for information and resources relevant to entrepreneurs on the whole internet. It’s actually an entire network of platforms, including Clarity.fm for mentorship, Fundable to explore how to fund a business, along with other educational resources and professional services.
Niche Categories and Industry-Specific Entrepreneur Forums
As much as we’d like to give you a complete encyclopedia of industry-specific forums and sites that cover niche business categories, it’s important to do your own research and find communities which speak to you. Here are a few examples of great targeted platforms that cover specific aspects of the business world:
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- Teen Business Forum - for young entrepreneurs
- Small Business Computing and Ecommerce Forum – all about business technology
- Creative COW - for artists and creative professionals
- ChefTalk – a great restaurant industry-targeted forum
- Women's Business Network – for female entrepreneurs and business professionals
- Retire at 21 - another young entrepreneur forum
- Black Businesses Matter – for African American entrepreneurs
- Zebras Unite – socially-responsible entrepreneurship
- StartOut – fostering LGBTQ entrepreneurs
- Black & Brown Founders – supporting African American & LatinX entrepreneurs
Incubators and Accelerators Help Start, Fund, and Grow Your Business
Incubators and accelerators are priceless for helping new businesses get started, guiding their development, and assisting entrepreneurs to create a business plan and get the funding they need.
These are typically started by a company or local community organization, and function off grants and funds allocated to help new entrepreneurs and small business get started. Here are a few you might want to check out:
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- Y Combinator – provides seed money to selected new startups every year; Stripe, Airbnb and Doordash are just a few which started there.
- EO Network – a membership-only peer-to-peer network for connecting entrepreneurs with each other and with experts for business development support.
- Side Hustle Nation – helping entrepreneurs develop and expand their “side hustle” into a full-time job.
- StartupWind – calls itself an “innovation platform,” they work with universities, small & medium businesses, and large enterprises to come up with new ideas and build businesses around them.
Seller Platforms to Market Your Products & Services
These days, e-commerce is more important than ever, and selling online opens up new possibilities for marketing your business to customers all over the world. Also growing in popularity and importance are platforms for freelancers to market their services to clients. Here are a few of the current top e-commerce platforms, many of which provide community forums and additional resources for small business owners:
E-commerce Platforms
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- Amazon - the not-so-gentle giant we all know and use, even if we don’t quite love it
- eBay - often overlooked in 2020, but still a powerhouse for small and medium sellers
- Etsy - a unique direct-to-consumer site for artisan craftspeople and independent sellers
- Shopify - powerful ecommerce tools to help you start, manage and grow an online store
- Square - known for democratizing point-of-sale (POS) solutions, also features lots of great resources for small business owners, including commercial capital
- Pinterest - not known for ecommerce, but similar to Instagram, sellers are discovering ways to promote your products and direct customers to your own website
Freelancer Platforms
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- Upwork - one of the original online freelancing platforms, you can promote your services or discover freelance talent, even hire for your company or agency
- Fiverr - more focused on hiring for one-off projects, but you can still create long-term relationships with freelancers
- Freelancer.com - another great platform for hiring freelancers and promoting services
- Thumbtack - locally-focused gig hiring, you can find everything from a creative professional in your area to a plumber or electrician
- Taskrabbit - send someone to buy groceries for you, wash your car, drop off documents, even paint a fence, Huckleberry Finn style
- Homeyou - find a local contractor for repairs, service, renovations or upgrades on your home or property, with a review system similar to Angie’s List
Entrepreneur Forums That Serve Your Local Community
Don’t forget to search your local area for websites, blogs, forums, even Meetup groups or community events which cater to entrepreneurs and business owners. While we can’t give you a definitive list (it would be way too long!), try searching “entrepreneur forum + your neighborhood, city, or region” and see what’s out there. You might be surprised by what you find!
Find the Right Online Resources for Your Business
One article isn’t enough to list all the great entrepreneur forums and business resources out there, but we hope this summary has given you a foundation to start finding information, asking questions, and getting answers to help you start and run your business.
Deciding to become an entrepreneur is a big decision and, even if it’s not your first rodeo, we applaud everyone who takes that leap of faith. Even the likes of Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google had to start from somewhere. By learning and growing with each other, small business owners can create thriving communities.
A special high five to Miles Burke for his outstanding research and contributions to this article. We love working with and supporting like-minded entrepreneurs. Thank you Miles! ❤️❤️❤️
About LinkedPhone
The world is changing. The way we work is changing. LinkedPhone is designed to free businesses from the limitations of traditional business phone systems. We empower modern professionals to work from anywhere. We serve small businesses, start-ups, entrepreneurs & mobile teams with professional-grade tools once only available to large corporations. We believe in simple, honest, and transparent pricing. We are passionate about the small business community. We are LinkedPhone.
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