Small Town, Hot Idea

This article was written by Jessica Chen of Entrepreneur.com

From small beginnings come great things. While they're not often seen as places to start trends, small towns can be incubators for new ideas by providing entrepreneurs with community support and a place to start-up with little -- if any -- competition. So while new concepts may have little staying power in a trend-obsessed place like Manhattan, small towns can be the perfect breeding ground for the right idea.

O2 Fresh

For sisters Stephanie and Laurie Mara, that idea was an oxygen bar. The bars first appeared in Japan then began popping up in hipster cities like Los Angeles and Las Vegas in the late '90s. After a night of gambling at Caesar's Palace, the New Jersey-born sisters came across an oxygen bar and felt compelled to give it a try. Experiencing the positive health benefits of breathing up to 92% pure oxygen convinced the sisters, who had been searching for a business idea, to take a gamble on the concept.

"We wanted to open our own business for years," Stephanie says. "There were negatives to everything that we came up with and this didn't seem to have a negative."...