Best Small Cities for Startups

Population: 28,714
Labor force: 16,856
Startups per 1,000 people: 2.43
Small business per 1,000 people: 49

What to know about starting up in Kearney:
"A community like Kearney I think is a perfect place to start a small business and build it up to the point where you can replicate it out. Kearney's market is diverse and balanced at the same time. We have all kinds of different businesses, we have four or five real core pillars to the economy. It takes a lot of the valleys and the lows out of the equation. It creates a really healthy, progressive confident type mindset for the other businesses in the region. Lending institutions are more apt to work with startups than the traditional asset-based lending that occurs with most banks in other markets"
-Dan Shundoff, founder and CEO of IT services firm Intellicom