Who Cares About Finnish Startups?

When I posted the Nevermind the Valley: Here’s Finland post last week, many Finns asked me about who read the story. A lot of people here are curious if others in the world know we exist!

Some statistics

• 8600 page views. This is huge! It is one of the top ReadWriteStart posts ever
• 463 Retweets from the orginial @rww tweet. That's comparable to other RWW stories (other RTs from individuals not counted)
• 406 Likes on Facebook
• 40% of the traffic came from Finland (very nice to see all the community being active)
• 27% from the US (the top cities are the big metropolitan areas, with San Francisco at the top)
• 5% from the UK
• 1.4% from Sweden, who apparently doesn’t like us too much
• The rest of the traffic is fragmented
• The story was also the most voted so far on the new ArcticStartup

What did we learn?

One thing that really surprises me is the lack of Nordic participation. It seems that we need to do much more efforts for us to be connected to Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. Of course, one may attribute the low figures to the lower population, but you would expect that to be balanced by higher interest, which did not show.

Finnish startups are very excited to promote the ecosystem, and very eager to receive attention worldwide. This enthusiasm is creating some buzz, as some people are starting to see Finland as a hot spot for entrepreneurship.

Some were disappointed that I didn’t list more, but I decided to limit it to 30 because I think a longer list would have been too unfocused for US readers. The post inspired some follow up posts:

Never Mind Finland: More Start-Ups, Looking Good, which lists 8 startups from the Aalto Start-Up Center.

55 Finnish Startups Everyone Should Know About, written by Technopolis Online.