Is interest in startups in Iceland decreasing?
First rule of writing non-fiction online is that ending your headlines with a question mark is completely lame (and the question is usually easily answered with a “no”). However, this time around, this question is honestly something I’ve been thinking about over the last couple of weeks. I’m going to share a couple of thoughts (and data).
My (pessimistic) gut
This thinking started a while back, after we saw that most of QuizUp’s former employees started working at established companies. A large part didn’t even go to startups, but bigger corporate gigs, and only one company was founded from the remains.
At the same time, the economy in Iceland is going well. Low unemployment, low inflation, everything chugging along. Thinking that people that were otherwise inclined to entrepreneurship, find themselves in a nice job instead, could affect this as well.
Competition participation is trailing down
Last week, the Golden Egg business model competition (Gulleggið) announced ten finalists. Gulleggið has been a part of the Icelandic startup and entrepreneurship space for a long time (2017 is its tenth year). I would almost go so far as to say that organised startup community activity was nearly non-existent at that time. Why should it have started before? Everyone worked in finance and life was good.
Anyway, ten finalists were chosen out of 123 business ideas. A decent number, if you look at it in a vacuum. But if we plot the number of business ideas that entered the competition for the last five years, a trend emerges.
The trend for Startup Reykjavik and Startup Energy Reykjavik isn’t quite as clear. Startup Reykjavik bounced back last year after a big drop, and looks to be on an upwards slope, while Energy applications are slowly declining.
What do you think could be causing this development in participation? Send me a message.
Events are up and attendance not as much
Anecdotally, I’ve heard comments that event attendance is diminishing. Some attribute it to event fatigue – there’s so much to choose from, the average attendance goes down – but it could also be lower interest levels.
So, we scraped some data (thanks to our main engineer Kári Tristan) and got attendance data for events ranging back to 2011. These are events hosted by Icelandic Startups, Startup Iceland, Innovit, Innovation Center Iceland (NMÍ), Gulleggið, Startup Reykjavík, Startup Energy Reykjavik, Northstack, Sjávarklasinn and Innovation House. We got data for a total of 170 events covering 2011 until this moment in 2017.
Remember, I’m not a statistician and I haven’t done the prerequisite deviation and confidence interval calculations on this for it to be scientific. It’s mostly for the fun, and limited insights. If you’re interested in doing some of that number crunching, I can send you the data we have.
There’s a decent upwards trend in the number of events, which is something most of us that follow the ecosystem have probably noticed. There’s more people planning events, and startups in general have gotten more attention (anecdotally) than in the earlier years.
This graph shows the average event attendees per event by quarter. So an event in Q3 2014 had, on average, 95 attendees. There’s a trendline here, but not as strong as in the total events (and, remember, not scientifically tested).
My hypothesis is the following: Supply of startup related events has grown faster than demand / size of market, which leads to smaller groups of attendants (on average).
Sadly, we don’t have more nitty-gritty data, to see, for example, unique event attendants per quarter, or event attendance retention.
What does it all mean?
Not much, really. You made it to the end of the post, and there’s not a “No” answer to the question posed in the headline. There isn’t a “yes” answer either; it’s a total “I don’t know”.
What kind of data could we use to try to answer this? If you have ideas, let me know 🙂.
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