u/Huumans

A couple of months ago we posted here about how broken small business lending is for Canadian entrepreneurs and small business owners.

A lot of you replied, and plenty of you told us bluntly what was wrong with the current banking system for small businesses and ideas to improve.

What's interesting is you're not the only ones saying what we are saying.

The Competition Bureau is currently running a market study on SME financing, and the concerns it flagged are oh so familiar:

• The big banks dominate lending in Canada
• Smaller and newer lenders struggle to break in
• Comparing loan options or switching lenders is hard
• SMEs pay more to borrow than big companies, and that gap is wider in Canada than in other OECD countries

We're happy to report that we are aiming to solve this problem.

We've built a recommendation engine for small business owners that helps small businesses get access to financial products from different lenders from across the country (including us at Huumans). It matches you to the following loan options:

• Term loans
• Working capital
• Lines of credit
• Revenue based financing

What we're trying to fix:

Choice. Most owners know one option: their bank. When the bank says no, they assume the answer is no everywhere. It usually isn't.

Access. Seeing lenders you'd never have found, matched to where your business actually is today.

Education. Showing the difference between a Working Capital, LOC, Term Loan and RBF, what the real cost is, and when each one makes sense.

Think Ratehub or Credit Karma, but for small business financing.

Admittedly, it's far from perfect but we are happy to share and we've really appreciated the feedback from the reddit community.

If you're weighing financing, or just want to know a product that is a good fit, you can login to our software platform and try it out.

Go to https://app.huumans.com/ and click on Find Funding in our platform!

It's a free sign up to Huumans and we just want to be helpful because we care!

Thank you so much reddit! We truly hope we can help small businesses get the help they need with small business financing.

It's so important to scale your business with the right financing, systems, and people - but there's no denying it's challenging.

What was the hardest thing to do to scale your business, but also the most rewarding in terms of financial benefits?

The Competition Bureau launched a market study this year specifically because SME lending in Canada isn't competitive at all.

Link: https://competition-bureau.canada.ca/en/how-we-foster-competition/promotion-and-advocacy/market-study-competition-financing-canadas-small-and-medium-businesses

If you've ever tried to actually get financing as a small business, you know that it's really hard to do so. Banks take forever and they often ghost you, you have to have your credit score pulled, you upload manual bank statements, and half the time they still want a personal guarantee before they'll even talk with you. And many times, you can't get financing.

This is the team at Huumans, and full disclosure, we're building a a lending recommendation engine to solve for these challenges.

We're building a recommendation engine that takes your business's actual profile and gives you a ranked shortlist of financing options that fit your need/financial situation. We will provide choice for small businesses, and not just point financing options to us, but provide the best and most affordable options.

We want to stress test this and make it great!!! And we need 50 business owners to run their real (or hypothetical) financing scenario through it and tell us where it's wrong.

This will take 15 min, no obligation to use anything it suggests. We especially want people who want to know their financing options or to learn about loans and how to grow with them!!

Comment or DM if you're interested - thank you in advance!!!!