4 Reasons why Edinburgh is a great place to launch a startup
Many articles have recently named Edinburgh as one of the best places in the UK for broke millennials as well as things like inward investments, co-working and innovation. The city was also named the fastest growing tech hub in the UK towards the end of last year. Clearly the city is having a bit of a moment, and all of these nominations make Edinburgh a great place to found a startup. In today’s blog post, we’ll go through our top 4 reasons why we agree with this.
1. Small but mighty city
Though Edinburgh is not the cheapest place to live in the UK, the cost of living in the Scottish capital is still significantly lower than in London. Public transportation is affordable with a good network of buses. Furthermore, central Edinburgh is extremely walkable, meaning that many people can skip commuting costs altogether as they can walk to work. With a good number of cultural institutions, among them some of the UK’s biggest festivals, and vast greenspaces, the small city is a great place to live and work in.
2. Great tech and entrepreneurial communities
Some 7% of Edinburgh’s workforce is employed as software engineers, and there’s a good number accelerator initiatives in the city, making it a great place to launch a startup or a digital product. Incubators like CodeBase offer highly affordable hotdesking, permanent desks and offices, as well as a plethora of events to meet and learn from other startup people. Outside of CodeBase, there are also many popular meetups,tech festivals and hackathons that take place in Edinburgh on a regular basis.
3. Lots of highly employable tech people
With Napier, Heriot-Watt and Edinburgh University all offering a good number of data and computer science related courses, a good number of skilled graduates enter the workforce in Edinburgh every year. Furthermore, CodeClan, situated on Castle Terrace regularly pumps out junior developers ready to join the workforce.
4. Good funding options
As we’ve written a blog post on some of the different funding options available for SMEs in Scotland before, we won’t take too deep a dive into specific funding options in this blog post. Suffice to say that grants like the By Design Grant offer great options for early-stage businesses. The city also plays host to several competitions that seek to fund exciting projects, such as Converge Challenge and Scottish Edge.
Daydreaming of founding a startup? Got an idea for a great product?
Bad Dinosaur can help you. We specialise in working with early-stage startups, or even individuals with an entrepreneurial flair and an idea for an app. We can build an MVP of your app idea in three weeks or less, and also offer things like product design bootcamps and managed hosting. Shoot us an email and let’s chat!
