About Next Stop STL

Next Stop STL is a small, independent publication for people who want to start or run a business in and around St. Louis. We launched in fall 2026 with a simple aim: put the practical questions a founder faces here into plain English, one guide at a time, and keep those guides tidy enough that you can find your answer without reading ten tabs of forum threads.

What you will find here

The guides sit in five sections, and each one answers a different kind of question.

• Starting Up covers the first paperwork: choosing a structure, registering with the state, local licenses and the rules that apply once you bring on your first employee.
• Funding is about money in and money out, from comparing loan programs to keeping enough cash on hand to get through a slow quarter.
• Commercial Space walks through renting a storefront, office or workshop, including how the common lease types split costs between you and the landlord.
• Local Economy looks at the city and the wider region from a founder's point of view: neighborhood business districts, the industries that shape demand, and what that means for a new venture.
• Growth picks up once the doors are open, with marketing, local search and the habits that help a small team keep customers coming back.

Who it is for

Mostly first-time owners: the person turning a side project into a registered company, the tradesperson ready to rent a unit of their own, the café owner weighing a second location. Plenty of the material applies anywhere in the country, but we write with Missouri rules and St. Louis streets in mind, so the examples tend to be local.

The people behind the guides

Four editors write and update the site under pen names. We use first names only because the work should be judged on whether it is clear and useful, not on who signed it.

• Corliss handles the starting-up material: forming a business, licenses and early hiring rules.
• Tobiah writes about funding, cash flow and making sense of the numbers.
• Ravenna looks after commercial space and anything to do with leases.
• Oriel covers the local economy, the neighborhood districts and how small firms get noticed.

What we are not

None of us is a lawyer, accountant, broker or financial adviser, and nothing on this site is professional advice. A guide can explain how something usually works and which questions to ask; it cannot weigh the details of your situation. Before you sign a lease, take on a loan or file anything with the state, talk to someone qualified who can look at your actual documents. Fees, forms and program rules also change, so treat the official agency page as the final word on anything time-sensitive.

Read more about us

If you want the backstory, How It All Started explains why this site exists and how we choose what to write next. To see how a guide gets researched and corrected, read Writing With Care. And if something here is wrong or missing, the contact page tells you how to reach us.