Thinking of starting a business? Here’s where you should and shouldn’t start up

Ah yes – you have the idea, you have the financing, you see a bright future for your new startup. It’s time to start planning in earnest where you’ll set up your new startup.

Prevailing logic would say that you need to be located in a massive capital city CBD. Perhaps that could be suitable, yes, but you may find a few surprises when it comes to the best cities in Australia to launch a startup.

Some of these may be a shock, but the confluence of factors can make unlikely cities a ripe base for startup success. As Reckon CEO Sam Allert states:

“Launching a startup in Australia, or anywhere, is no simple feat, but absolutely achievable. Small businesses are the backbone of the economy and success is everywhere. It’s interesting, however, that you might find some the least obvious cities in Australia may actually offer the best environments for startup prosperity. What I’m seeing is a diversification of opportunity and it’s time to ask yourself as an aspiring entrepreneur – Should you be looking to broaden your geographical horizons?”

To get to the bottom of this we conducted our own research…

Reckon’s research into the best and worst cities in Australia to start a business

To find out where you should and shouldn’t base your startup, we interrogated 50 Australian cities and used the following metrics to parse out the best and worst performers:

Talent Pool

• Median Income
• Availability Of Young Workers
• Proportion Of Population in Labour Force
• Unemployment Rates
• Education Level
• Long Term Health

Business Landscape

• Business Density
• Short Term survival Rate
• Long Term Survival Rate

Internet Speed

• Upload Speed
• Download Speed
• Latency

Cost of Living

• Weekly Rent
• Monthly Mortgage
• Commute Costs
• Childcare Costs

Once we weighed these factors against each of the 50 cities in our study, we were able to attach a total score for each to determine the best and worst cities to base your startup. Let’s take a look at what we found.

Best overall cities

After tallying the results as per our criteria, we found that the top 10 best cities to base your startup were:

As you can see, it may not be as obvious as it seems. In fact, apparent front runners like Sydney didn’t even rank in the top 20. Victoria is also very well represented, taking out the top four spots, pointing to excellent opportunity in that state alone.

Worst overall cities

Using the same criteria, we tallied the results and found that the worst 10 cities to base a startup were:

Capital cities ranked

If you’re looking for a particular state or territory to base your startup in, we found that the rankings were as follows:

Best cities by state

If you’re already wedded to a particular state for personal or business reasons, you might want to look further afield from your usual homebase to seed a startup. Let’s look at the best cities from each state.

Victoria

Queensland

New South Wales

Tasmania

South Australia

Western Australia

Northern Territory

Results overview

What we’re seeing here is a lot of regional cities competing well against many of our capitals. When you look at factors like business survival, costs of living, and internet speeds, you broaden the horizon of what’s possible.

So, if you are thinking about a startup location, perhaps look beyond your capital cities and take heed of these findings. After all, cities like Geelong, Toowoomba and Mackay all attained excellent rankings in the top 10.

As Sam Aller mentions,

“Prevailing logic says that you should aim to get a foothold in capital cities when starting a business. Certainly, cities like Melbourne are ripe for success, yet for many cash poor startups, I would suggest that with a globalised business environment, good internet, and remote working infrastructure, this may no longer be the case.”