In Michigan there are software companies in small rural towns but no where I know about is there a concentration.
I used to live in a small rural town West of Lansing when I worked as an agronomist in a past career. I left to do a SaaS startup and stayed local because this small town became a test site for cable Internet. Note this was a time when neither Lansing nor Grand Rapids had a broadband Internet option, everything was dial up or ISDN if you were lucky.
My new office was across from city hall. I advocated to the city father's that they spend a fraction of the money promoting it's empty industrial park (every small town in Michigan has one) to lure software companies to town promoting it's then rare broadband Internet. They treated me as if I was advocating building a spaceport for aliens. In fact if they saw me coming they'd cross the street.
I found out years later that quite by accident a startup had moved to the town specifically for the availability of broadband. Now they only have around 25 employees twenty years later but in a town of less than 3,000 I think that is still pretty good. But with a small amount of effort they could have had a dozen such companies ;<(.
Traverse City is becoming very techy. Over the course of the pandemic I have witnessed a lot of folks coming in from Chicago, etc, to work remotely, or to do tech work for one of the decent web/it/finance/insurance/medical companies here.
P.S. we are hiring web dev and analytics/data engineer if you know anyone in the area!
Traverse City is amazing, but you already know that ;<). However I have problems dealing with winter in East Lansing so I can only imagine how bad it would be up there. You better like snowmobiling or skiing. But for seven months out of the year it's absolute perfection.
I used to live in a small rural town West of Lansing when I worked as an agronomist in a past career. I left to do a SaaS startup and stayed local because this small town became a test site for cable Internet. Note this was a time when neither Lansing nor Grand Rapids had a broadband Internet option, everything was dial up or ISDN if you were lucky.
My new office was across from city hall. I advocated to the city father's that they spend a fraction of the money promoting it's empty industrial park (every small town in Michigan has one) to lure software companies to town promoting it's then rare broadband Internet. They treated me as if I was advocating building a spaceport for aliens. In fact if they saw me coming they'd cross the street.
I found out years later that quite by accident a startup had moved to the town specifically for the availability of broadband. Now they only have around 25 employees twenty years later but in a town of less than 3,000 I think that is still pretty good. But with a small amount of effort they could have had a dozen such companies ;<(.