How Broadsight could double the UK Government's #StartupBritain offering to £3000

Well, all we would have to offer is a 10% discount off a decent standard piece of work on a new business strategy, business model and business plan. Following the logic of the StartupBritain deals, that's another £1500 in your pocket....but of course, you would have to spend the other 90% to get it.

This is because, sadly, the whole StartupBritain effort is essentially a supermarket book of "money off if you buy X" coupons, rather than actual cash in a starveling startup's pocket - Postdesk:

“£300 worth of coupons” they might say, when in reality it’s comprised of 100s of 20 pence off deals, and nobody realistically will ever make a saving of £300; not just because half of the offers aren’t relevant to you, but because you’d have to spend £1000s to take that advantage. As Anthony Cope put it, “Most of these ‘offers’ are too expensive for SMEs to take up.” It’s the same deal here. Maybe the Advertising Standards Agency would be interested in this £1500 claim – because in my eyes it’s impossible to even get a £100 of true, practical and real life savings from this scheme.

I agree - this was being sold today as something akin to a £1500 startup grant*, it is most certainly not that. It's more like saying I can start my own cornershop with a £1500-off Tesco's coupon book, all I need to do is spend £15,000-plus or so to get it. What's more it's apparently using public money to promote it - the very least I'd have expected is that the advertisers on the site pay to completely fund it's costs.. And to make it worse, it's not even a uniquely better deal than you can get as standard from many of the suppliers

The UK startup industry needs all the help they can get, but recycling lots of money-off deals you can get in the open market anyway is not it. Here is what we would imagine doing instead, using asymmetric benefits - i.e. things that cost the Government very little but make a real difference to the startup, whose biggest costs are wages, space and kit:

- Company Tax holiday for the first N year (like Ireland does)
- Simplify and expand what can be written down as R&D Capex
- Provide cut price accomodation and basic office services
- Increase the range of things that smaller companies can write off as expenses, compared to say the US the UK writeoffs are ludicrously tight.
- Simplify employment law for companies of less than say 10 people
- Tax relief on funding of small technology startups to encourage higher VC lending levels
- £1500 of Real Cash, or a voucher that is redeemable on something with a meaningful discount. A small contribution from the bankers who are supporting this effort but aren't actually lending to small businesses would go a long way, say 1% of their bonus pot this year?

All these would realistically cost the government very little (early day startups being as poor as churchmice anyway), but make a big difference in lightening the load so a startup can get itself off the ground. I note that in parallel with this, HMG is cutting really free and impartial business advice services like Business Link and Libraries

I don't actually think this sort of thing helps the credibility of the government's (probably honestly good) intentions, it makes them look clueless (hence the parodies) as it is essentially of very little material value (a day or two's burn rate?), and in effect is not impartial and is very constraining. I hope that the plan going forward takes the suggestions from ourselves and others and builds a practical service from this.

We hope you found this useful - our invoice for the other 90% will be in the post

Update - article in the WSJ says the naysayers are missing the point:

To concentrate on the admittedly not brilliant website and on the somewhat desultory offers is to miss the bigger picture. Entrepreneurship is the key to economic prosperity. There is a very real cultural problem across Europe with the whole concept of entrepreneurialism. Changing cultures takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. Some efforts will succeed, others will fail.

What is important in StartUp Britain is the political will behind it. To get the Prime Minister and two other cabinet ministers to the launch shows the political drive behind this. Cynics will argue that it is politicians cashing in on the publicity. Or perhaps it is the manifestation of a realization that entrepreneurship is the way that Europe is going to have to turn to get itself out of its economic malaise and the desire of the U.K. government to help in the ways that government can, without getting in the way.

With respect to Mr Rooney, I think he is missing the even bigger point - ie that without fundamental structural changes to the infrastructure supporting small companies and entrepreneurialism in the UK (see our suggested points above) then all the PR pizazz and Government rhetoric in the world won't help. As Umair Haque has so pithily put it - "Banks get mega-bailouts. Entrepreneurs get...a packet of coupons. See the problem?"

*Which brings us back to the plague of Clueless Journalists regurgitating PR releases.....