The following is a guest post by Kevin Cullis.  For more information on Kevin, including his blog on all things business and Mac, please visit his site at www.macstartup.com.

I attended Startup Weekend June 3-5, 2011 in Denver.  Startup Weekend is a 54-hour long event that starts Friday evening and ends Sunday evening having hacked out a business plan and pitched your idea to judges to determine the weekend winners.  It involves all types of people: coders, marketers, people with an idea, or startup wannabes, a whole mixture of individuals.  One of the interesting observations during the event was how many PCs and Macs were in attendance, so the question becomes: Can a startup use a Mac?  The Startup Weekend Mac to PC attendance ratio at this one was about 2:1.  So, do ya think just maybe?

As in any startup, there are two aspects of a business: the craft of a business (writing, law, medicine, mechanic, dog grooming) and then there is the business of the craft (making a profit in those crafts using Mac tools).  There is a general misconception among PC users that Macs are “mainly for graphic artists,” and only a small number of businesses can use them.

Having worked with thousands of businesses selling computers in my career, I can emphatically say that the average startup, mompreneur, or small business can use a Mac in a nanosecond.  There is only the small chance that using a Mac may restrict a business, but it mostly occurs with industry specific solutions, for example architectural, accounting, or medical applications that may not have some of the bells and whistles as a Windows version.  In most cases, there are workarounds for niche software, but in most cases, it is not a showstopper, more of an inconvenience to the Mac user.

Stay tuned for next week’s conclusion of “Starting a Business – the Mac Version”.  And until then, if you need legal help starting a business, please contact me, your Denver small business attorney, Elizabeth Lewis.