Downtown Fayetteville came alive last week to the sounds of music and the buzz of business networking. Startup Junkie hosted their annual Startup Crawl last Friday. The event was well attended, leaving many participants and visitors satisfied. This is year seven for the Startup Crawl, and spokesperson Harrison Kitson says the program has really come together in 2025.
“This initially started as a kind of smaller event they wanted to put together just to spread entrepreneurship, get attention to the scene, invite a bunch of the cool people in the ecosystem down here. And it’s kind of just grown and grown and grown beyond that.
“We’ve made it a bit tighter knit at this point. So it used to be a wild goose chase, kind of around a little bit beyond the square. We’ve tightened it up. We brought all the energy in one area. We’ve expanded the bands. The music is louder, it’s better, it’s people you might recognize. And then we encourage people to set up and kind of show off their businesses as much as possible. So it’s just kind of expanded to new heights all around really.”
Some businesses at the event are involved in Startup Junkie initiatives, like the Kiva NWA Loan Program, which helps local small business owners obtain zero-interest loans by connecting them with community lenders, or the Fuel Accelerator, a program that helps close the gap between growth-stage tech startups and key enterprise partners. However, businesses entirely unrelated to Startup Junkie were also in attendance.
“So part of it is trying to find people who are really, really heavily involved in the community. So the people that we’ve seen at our events, the people we’ve seen at other events. We also have a kind of smaller application process where we look through people and say, hey, these would be a great fit for the event. It’s kind of any way that you can get involved with us and get our attention, and we’re happy to get a lot of different people involved, from, you know, if you’re a big tech startup to if you are in a mom-and-pop store selling, you know, gluten-free cookies. It really doesn’t matter.”
The crawl expanded throughout the square and into the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History. Inside, folks perused tables that business owners covered in products, information or live demos of their services, all while live music belted from BC’s Blues Shack and Juke Joint.
One of the businesses inside the Pryor Center was The Wellnest Shop.
“We are a non-toxic refillery and wellness boutique. So we have refillable home care, personal care products you can bring in your own containers. We are in Rogers, and we also have natural wellness products. We do a lot of community events and workshops in our space as well.”
That’s Stephanie Sirianni, founder of The Wellnest Shop. She says they began as a solely e-commerce business, but recently opened a brick-and-mortar location thanks to financial assistance from Kiva NWA.
“It was really important to me to want to cash flow this business and not really put in a lot of startup capital. And someone introduced me to Kiva. I was at a networking event, someone said, hey, here’s a crowd-funded 0% interest loan. And Startup Junkie is connected to Kiva, and they work together really closely, and so we were able to crowd fund it. You do personal funding first, and then they open it up to public funding. And they’ve been really supportive along the way. So it’s really cool.
“It really gave us the ability to get into that brick-and-mortar space a lot sooner than we would have just being in an e-commerce space. There’s so much competition. And I feel like people are really moving back to wanting to be in person for shopping and tactile shopping, especially after COVID. And so the startup loan really launched us into that space so we could host community events, workshops and get products on the shelves.”
Sirianni’s second-in-command, Caitlin Livingston, says there’s a lot of merit in being at events like the Startup Crawl for a company like theirs.
“Still to this day, people don’t know that we exist. And so just getting in front of people is so valuable. Just be like, hey, we’re over here. This is our little corner of the woods. It’s hard to get what you’re doing out there whenever you don’t have the funds for a big billboard or commercial. So it’s all been word of mouth. And this is how we meet people.”
Another group in the Pryor Center drew passerbys with a unique instrument, a PlayStation 5 controller.
“So the game that we’re showing off today is The Haunting of Joni Evers.”
Greg Rogers is co-founder and creative director of Causeway Studios, an NWA-based video game studio.
“We released it back in January 2025. It’s an award-winning game. It’s won awards for narrative, it’s won awards for the voice acting, and we’re currently in pre-production and raising funds from investors for our second game, which is a continuation of the larger IP, if you’ll call it, of Causeway.”
Even though The Haunting of Joni Evers, now available on the online platform Steam, is an almost wholly digital product, co-founder and studio director Kjartan Kennedy says it’s still imperative that they show up and put the game in front of people. In addition to the Startup Crawl, Causeway Studios is also a major part of OZ Play, which hosts an in-person demo for local game studios each spring.
“The whole point here, of us being here, is to build local community and local support. I think there’s a bunch of people that don’t know that there are games being made here, games being made where they are from and where they live, instead of just games being made in Seattle, San Francisco, Austin. Those games are great. I love a lot of those games, but I also love the idea that there are games being made right here in Arkansas. And I think people want to support that idea. I think they want to see games and stories that are inspired by the folklore of the Ozarks and things like that.”
Back out on the square, food trucks and sample stations drew crowds with their aromas. Sandy Thana is the founder of Chooky, a Vietnamese sauce company. She spent Friday evening searing tongues with her BAE Sa-té Umami sauce.
“Which is ‘before anything else, put your saté on it.’ It started off by teaching people more about Vietnamese food, and I was doing Vietnamese pop-up dinners around the area, and people just kind of fell in love with my sauces. And so I was like, let’s bottle this up, because it’s a lot better than putting on a whole event. Yeah. So Chooky is a play on a Vietnamese word ‘to ki,’ which means signature. So I’ll be coming out with my signature sauces.”
Thana had worked with Startup Junkie before the Crawl, but says she’s mainly involved with Canopy NWA, a local nonprofit that supports refugee and immigrant families with housing, jobs and community connections.
“I am a Canopy NWA entrepreneur graduate, and so they connected me with Startup Junkie. So Canopy is pretty freaking awesome. They help immigrants and children of immigrants start up their businesses. I took some classes. I learned more about my finances. I got a lot of networking opportunities. And just to be able to be in a community like BIPOC people.”
As the evening continued, so did the positive energy pouring from not just business owners, but also community members visiting the event. The nearly 10 local craft breweries in attendance might have had something to do with that, but who knows.
Emily Gunnels and Holly Shacklett were completing a lap around the square and reflecting on their experience that night. Gunnels says she learned more about a business she’s fond of, while Shacklett explored professional connections.
“I love AcreTrader. They’ve been here for several years, and I just think it’s really cool what they’re doing in the agricultural space. But I haven’t got a great pull to any of them specifically. That doesn’t mean they’re not good. It’s just nothing has pulled me, except I’m seeing these nonprofits over here, like Canopy, which I absolutely love. So I guess that’s part of the fun, right, of being exposed to tons of different vendors and then seeing the people in your community that you already know you love. That’s a little bonus.”
“Well, I’m a virtual assistant, so that’s part of why my friend invited me—so I could see if there was anybody I needed to network with. Yes, I found one that I thought would be a possible good connection.”
The Startup Crawl proved to be an enjoyable and productive evening for many. Kitson says that’s exactly what they aimed for.
“To speak to just being a community member, I mean, small business really is the backbone of Arkansas. Ninety-nine percent of businesses are small business in Arkansas. And although it’s going to be the large corporations, obviously, in Arkansas that get a whole lot of the attention, without these businesses, we don’t have CBD treats for your dog, and we don’t have custom shirts for your events. We don’t have a bunch of those kinds of things that are so necessary for everything we do.
“And in terms of the startup showing up at Startup Crawl, I mean, the boots-on-the-ground mentality is really heavily underrated for small business owners. Lots of people try social media, they build their websites, they run ads, they do all of that stuff that’s important. But when you can network with the community and build trust with the people you talk to, build relationships with them, that means that when you try and reach out to them, when you have conversations with them later, you’re already a familiar face, and they’re more likely to be able to help each other. It’s just all about relationship building.”
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