Start-up landscape has been improving in recent years and these are the easiest cities to start a business in America. According to Kauffman Foundation, which publishes annual reports about entrepreneurship in the US, start-up activity index, which measures new venture creation, has continued to increase in 2016 following a positive trend that started a year before.
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Still, many startups do not survive first years on the market. There are different statistics about survival rates of new businesses among which some even claim that only one in ten of fresh companies make it to the fifth anniversary. On the other side, Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that approximately half of the startups survive four year period – among business launched in 2011, 79.4% lasted at least a year, 69.3% celebrated the second anniversary, 61.9% existed three years and 56.3% lived for at least four years. But surviving on the market and making money is not the same thing – among businesses that do not disappear, 40% is profitable, 30% break even while 30% lose money. Whether a start-up would be a success or a failure depends on different factors. According to CB Insights, which analyzed 101 businesses that faded away, leading cause of deaths among startups is the lack of market need for a product/service that they offer, followed by problems with funding and poor human resources capital. Surrounding also plays important role in startups development (in CB Insight’s analysis bad location was a reason for failure in 9% of cases). In this article about the easiest cities to start a business in America we tried to determine which cities provide a nurturing climate for startups. For those who are considering launching a business in Europe our previous list of Easiest Cities in Europe to Move to might be useful as it includes a few startup hot spots.
In order to create this list we used as a starting point WalletHub’s comprehensive ranking of Best large cities to start a business in 2017, which was based on analysis of 150 places across America. WalletHub used 18 different criteria in creating the list including the number of startups per capita, survival rates, human capital availability, labor costs, office space affordability…. We also relied on Kauffman’s list of metro areas that focused on the rate of new entrepreneurs, the number of those launching a business because they recognized a good opportunity and start-up density. Combining these two lists we created the average ranking for 40 large cities, and then assigned additional points to those that appeared on Forbes, CBS, and global Startup Genome rankings. In this way we covered different sources that rank cities’ startup friendliness considering a range of different factors. So, let’s see which are the easiest cities to start a business in America?
