Wow … a huge number of teams responded to the call to join our next accelerator program! As we sift through the hundreds of applications from around the world it’s great, not just to read, but also to see and hear the people who are passionate about building businesses with us through the videos they have made. Their talent, creativity and energy offers a window onto what start-ups worldwide are thinking about, writes Hugh Mason
We like stats. So here are some of the key numbers from our recent application round:
- 23,472 folk viewed information about our accelerator program. We made it quite challenging so anyone clicking through would understand what commitment it takes.
- 1,145 checked out the application form.
- 262 teams filled it out.
They came from all over the world. We were delighted to get an application from Kazakhstan but visitors also came to check us out from countries as diverse as Paraguay, the Faroe Islands, Namibia and Malawi. We are intrigued to hear more about the start-up scene in all these places.
Teams described themselves as coming from 36 different countries. The top 20 were as follows, with the percentage of applicants from that country following the country name:
| Singapore | 23.5% |
| India | 16.7% |
| Phillipines | 8.1% |
| Thailand | 6.8% |
| USA | 6.3% |
| Indonesia | 5.9% |
| Pakistan | 3.6% |
| South Korea | 3.2% |
| Malaysia | 2.7% |
| Nepal | 2.3% |
| Taiwan | 2.3% |
| Australia | 1.8% |
| Vietnam | 1.8% |
| Chile | 1.4% |
| Hong Kong | 1.4% |
| United Kingdom | 1.4% |
| Cambodia | 0.9% |
| Mexico | 0.9% |
| Serbia | 0.9% |
| Ukraine | 0.9% |
The ages of folk applying range from early 20s to early 50s with a guesstimated mean around 30. We had many more women applying this time around, which is great to see, though at about 7% of team members across the board that’s still a lot less than the 18% that YouTube reports watching our channel online:
As for the kinds of range of ideas put forward, a wide range of themes emerged. Here’s a rough top 10 domains in descending order of popularity: Marketing, Content, E-commerce, Education, Analytics, CRM, Games, Health, Finance, Business Intelligence. Interesting to see some quite meaty topics in there and perhaps an indication that the pendulum may be swinging away from start-ups looking at first world problems towards ideas that commentators like ReadWrite’s Dan Lyons might call ‘real businesses’.
But don’t take our word for it. Some of the start-up teams hoping to join us are happy to share their ideas in public, so we’ll be showcasing their videos here over the next week or two. We’re sure they would be delighted to have your feedback, so do comment.