You’ve had the thought. Maybe it hit you at midnight while you were making something you couldn’t stop making, or at your day job while you were thinking about something else entirely. The thought that says: what if I actually did this?
Most people leave it there. They file the idea away under “someday” and keep moving. But every May, during Small Business Month, we get to celebrate the ones who didn’t — the entrepreneurs who took the thought seriously, made the leap, and figured it out as they went.
The leap is real. So is everything that comes after it. Here’s what two of them learned.
The Gap Nobody Talks About
There are more than 33 million small businesses in the United States. The vast majority of them started the same way: with a person, a passion, and a decision to stop waiting.
But there’s a gap between passion and profitability that doesn’t show up in the success stories. You can love what you do and still struggle to build a business around it — because building a business requires a different set of skills than the thing that inspired you to start. Pricing, operations, marketing, legal — none of that comes packaged with the passion.
And then there’s funding. For most early-stage founders, the capital landscape feels completely impenetrable — like a system that exists for people who already know how it works. The truth is that most of the heavy lifting in securing funding happens before you apply: knowing what lenders and grant programs are looking for, getting your financials in order, understanding what “funding-ready” actually means.
That’s exactly what Hello Alice’s Funding Readiness Road Map was built to walk you through. It’s a practical, step-by-step guide to getting your business ready for capital — before you need it urgently.
What Adam Shapiro Learned by Going All In
If you think entrepreneurship is for a certain type of person, Adam Shapiro’s story is worth sitting with.
You may know Adam from the screen — he’s a working actor with roles in The Bear and Never Have I Ever, and a career built on showing up fully and committing to the work. What fewer people know is that he’s also the founder of Shappy Pretzel Co., a small business born from a genuine obsession with pretzels and the audacity to see where that could go.
At Main Street Rising LA — Hello Alice’s first stop on its national small business tour — Adam took the stage not as a celebrity but as a fellow entrepreneur. And his advice cut right to the heart of what makes a passion-driven business different from every other kind:
“Infuse as much of your business with your own authentic personality. That way, you’ll never run out of ideas because you know yourself better than anybody else does. And your beautiful, wonderful personality is only going to make your business better and connect with people on a much deeper level.”
That’s not a growth hack. It’s a long-term strategy — one that works because it’s genuinely yours. The founders who burn out are often the ones trying to build someone else’s vision of a business. The ones who keep going are the ones who built something that couldn’t have come from anyone else.
The passion was never the question. What he had to learn was everything else.
Crease Beast: Five Years of Showing Up
Adam’s story has a counterpart in every industry, at every scale. Consider Crease Beast — a small business that turned a very specific problem (shoe creasing) into a product people genuinely needed.
Crease Beast makes premium memory foam crease protectors that prevent creases in new shoes and remove them from old ones. It’s the kind of business that could only come from a founder who cared deeply enough about a problem to solve it properly.
Crease Beast has been part of the Hello Alice community for more than five years. They’ve received a Hello Alice grant. And at Main Street Rising LA, they were named an award winner — a moment that’s less about the prize and more about what five years of consistent building looks like when it finally gets the recognition it deserves.
The leap for Crease Beast wasn’t one dramatic moment. It was five years of smaller decisions, made one at a time, with the right community behind them.
The Real Reason People Don’t Start
The honest obstacle isn’t fear of failure. It’s the weight of everything you don’t know yet.
The funding landscape feels impenetrable. The legal and operational questions pile up. The people who’ve done it before aren’t always easy to find. And starting from scratch — especially without connections or capital — can feel like you’re the only one who doesn’t have the playbook.
You’re not. The playbook doesn’t exist. What does exist is a community of people building in real time, and resources designed to meet you where you are.
National Small Business Week (May 3–9) is the official recognition of what small business owners do every day. But recognition alone doesn’t close the gap. What closes it is access.
What Hello Alice Is Actually For
Main Street Rising wasn’t a conference. It was a room built intentionally for people who are figuring it out — founders at every stage, with access to speakers, programming, and each other in a way that’s usually reserved for people with expensive connections.
That’s the Hello Alice model: bring the resources to the owners, not the other way around.
Hello Alice is a free platform built for small business owners at every stage of the journey. That means:
- Funding opportunities — grants, capital resources, and programs matched to your business. Not sure if you’re ready to apply? Start with the Funding Readiness Road Map and find out exactly where you stand.
- Tools and resources — practical support for running and growing your business day to day
- A real community — owners who’ve been where you are and are willing to say so
- Programming like Main Street Rising — events that put you in the room with people who can change the trajectory of your business
You don’t need to be established to join. You just need to be building something.
The Leap Is the Beginning, Not the End
Adam Shapiro turned a passion for pretzels into a real company. Crease Beast turned a problem into a product people couldn’t stop buying. Every small business you’ve ever loved started with someone who decided to go first.
The gap between passion and business is real — but it’s not permanent. What fills it is access to the right resources, the right community, and the honest truth about what entrepreneurship actually takes.
If you’re still thinking about the leap, May is as good a time as any to stop thinking and start building.
Join Hello Alice free. Built for small business owners who are ready to turn what they love into something real.