It's Austin Small Business Week! (Free Guide Inside)

Howdy, Austin.

Welcome to Austin Founders Feed, your weekly peek behind the curtain at the fastest growing entrepreneurship community in the country.

This week is Small Business Week: The City of Austin put together a full week of workshops, panels, and one-on-one sessions covering everything from funding and bookkeeping to marketing, AI, pricing, permitting, and business planning.

Here’s everything that’s happening this week:

Let’s get to it.

— Ken & Warren

This edition is sponsored by United Solutions.

Interested in sponsoring Austin Founders Feed? Take 30 seconds to fill out this form and tell us about your business.

Keep on the lookout for our weekend picks in this upcoming Founder Friday issue delivered to your inbox at 7 AM CST.

Click here for our Small Business Week Guide

Austin Small Business Week (May 4–8) is one of the most useful weeks on the calendar for local founders, operators, and small business owners, and unlike most events worth attending, every single session is free.

The City of Austin puts together a full week of workshops, panels, and one-on-one sessions covering everything from funding and bookkeeping to marketing, AI, pricing, permitting, and business planning. Several sessions even count toward the City of Austin Business Skills Certificate.

The problem is there are 15+ events across five days, and nobody has time for all of them.

So we went through the full schedule and pulled the sessions we think are most worth your time — organized by what you're actually trying to accomplish. Whether you need capital, customers, a business plan, or just want to stop overpaying on your taxes, there's a session for you.

Click here for our Small Business Week Guide

Most Austin business owners have no idea how much they're actually paying to accept card payments. Between confusing statements, "qualified" tiers that mysteriously never apply, and equipment leases that outlive your first lease renewal — payment processing quietly eats margins that could fund your next hire, your next location, or just your sanity.

Quick gut checks:

If any of those made you pause, it's probably time for a second look. That's where our sponsor Luis Gutierrez at United Solutions comes in:

And he'll give you a second look at your current setup even if you're not sure you need one.

Reach out to Luis for a free review of your setup:
📞 (956) 337-0075
✉️ [email protected]

Even if you walk away keeping what you have, you'll walk away understanding it — and that alone is worth the conversation.

Austin has kicked off its FY2027 budget process with a projected $26.4M deficit, according to early estimates from the city reported by Community Impact.

This is before any major changes. Just current trends.

Revenue is only expected to grow ~3%, while costs keep rising. Most of that growth is already committed to public safety contracts, pensions, healthcare, and prior raises.

At the same time, one of Austin’s biggest revenue drivers is slowing:

New construction is projected at $2.8B, about 10% below forecast.

City officials were explicit about what’s behind it:

In other words, the city is now planning around a softer Austin economy.

To close the gap, a mix of options is on the table:

None of these are final, but they show the scale of tradeoffs.

The takeaway is simple:

Austin’s growth is slowing, costs aren’t, and the city is starting to adjust.

Source

Pupsentials turns people's pet photos into custom embroidered apparel: tote bags, sweatshirts, denim jackets. The origin story is exactly the kind of thing that makes Austin, Austin. Jake (co-founder) wanted a personalized gift for Kyndall (co-founder) to celebrate her love for dogs, couldn't find anything detailed enough, and approached 42 local embroiderers. Every single one said no.

So they bought their own machine.

Then it scaled in a way that's almost painful to read. After a celebrity endorsement of their prototype, Pupsentials got 300 orders in one day, but they could only physically produce 8 shirts a day. In 2021, they left over $500,000 on the table because they couldn't fulfill demand fast enough.

After raising capital (from 8fig), they got the math right and the numbers got real:

Why should Austin builders care?

Two things. First, the Chambers heard "no" 42 times in their own backyard before deciding to bet on themselves, a useful reminder that a lot of "impossible" categories are just under-built. Second, the painful part of their story is the part most founders don't plan for: accidentally creating demand you can't ship. Their growth only got real once they were honest about what was bottlenecking it.

Read the full Pupsentials story →

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