Perth has recently and suddenly sprouted a plethora of accelerators and seed-stage funding options. So in the first //Startup News Special we’re taking a look at the funding situation in Perth.
Perth tech investments have been rare, given the size of the community. The single biggest complaint of founders in Perth is the difficulty of getting investment (well, apparently that’s true in most places but it’s *especially* difficult here).
However, recently we’ve seen around half a dozen accelerators open for business (depending on your definition of accelerator this is anywhere from 1 to 7 open in the last year). So it’s time to take a look at the options for a Perth startup that needs funding to get started.
The first thing that needs to be said, however, is that getting funding in Perth is still hard, and any startup that is going to get funding will still need to demonstrate traction in the marketplace. In other words, you must have customers before you can get funding (or persuade customers to fund you via crowdfunding). The meme of “have a brilliant idea, pitch the idea to an investor, get money!” just plain isn’t true here, or indeed most places. Your first step to getting an idea off the ground is not to find funding, but to prove that the idea has a market. However, once you’ve proved that there’s a market, getting investment can really help build the business.
So this first //Startup News Special will consist of a set of articles over the next few weeks covering as many aspects of funding as we can.
We’ll be updating this list with more articles as we release them.