Is Australia as a whole doing enough to support a new wave of entrepreneurs and new ideas? How many potential billions of dollars are leaving the country every week as aspiring entrepreneurs move offshore to seek investment and grow the next big idea?
I’ve had multiple start-ups in Australia, built them from the ground up with no funding, bootstrapped my way to success and been fortunate enough to have sold two of these businesses.
During this time I’ve spoken with hundreds if not thousands of business owners and entrepreneurs from all over the world at networking events, conferences and industry functions. There was one common theme that rang true from every Australian who has their business located in another country.
If you truly care about your business — you must get out of Australia.
Being a true Aussie I didn’t like the sound of this, so I put my entrepreneurial mind to work and came up with the top ten reasons to base your new internet start-up in Australia.
I’ve listed them in chronological order for easy reading.
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You read this right.
There is no good reason to base your internet start-up based in Australia. In fact, for every 1 reason you come up with to start-up in Australia, there incrementally more benefits to start-up in another country.
Unless you’re opening a coffee shop with an exclusive agreement to service a 50 story business complex with a monopoly on the area — I cannot fathom one good reason not to pack up shop and move offshore. Think about it.
Other countries are pro-actively doing much more to embrace, properly equip, fund, attractive high calibre talent, open doors and connect you with the right people to ensure success.
Singapore and Hong Kong will give you free money to base your business locally, and many governments will match dollar for dollar on raised funds (that go to the start-up and not the investor).
Australia simply is too small, does not celebrate or embrace success, has endless red-tape, over burdens you with compliance, significantly lacks funding channels, over taxes, and makes it time consuming to do business on a global stage with such long flights and time zone issues.
It’s a combination of government, private industry and investors not in the right head space to support start-ups; and this includes some ‘incubators’ and ‘innovation labs’ — which operate under the guise of helping start-ups but do nothing more than suck down IP of some of the most creative and brilliant entrepreneurial minds into corporates under the banner of helping promising start-ups.
It’s all fluff and does very little to foster the minds of aspiring entrepreneurs who have BIG ideas and want to change the world.
If you are serious about making money on a global stage with customers from around the world — you need to do what’s right for the business, follow the 1000’s of Aussie entrepreneurs that have ‘been there done that’ — and unfortunately – that means getting yourself out of Australia.
Mark Ross-Smith is a serial internet entrepreneur with 2 successful exits, author and speaker on loyalty programs and big data, and past Anthill 30 under 30 winner.
