Why your European company is not worth $1 billion (yet)

What you're missing could be a combination of confidence and content.

Let’s be honest — for a startup to become a unicorn, they’ll need a whole lot more than just the European market.

Let’s look at the stats:

As of today, CrunchBase reports that the USA has 124 unicorns (privately-held companies worth over $1 billion). Europe, on the other hand, has 23 (yes, we counted).

Even if your startup isn’t aiming to become a unicorn, this statistic gives us insight to the potential outlook for European startups.

As the data suggests, US-based startups have a bit of an advantage. Despite the US having less than half of Europe’s population of 743 million, Europeans are dealing with a diverse market; an array of languages, cultures, and currencies (though the Euro certainly helps!). For example, selling a product to Italians would be an entirely different process than selling to Swedes. Meanwhile, the United States have the benefit of one language to cover the entire continent, as well as all other English-speaking countries, such as the easily-accessible neighboring country of Canada (woop!).

The difference in opportunity makes us “Sad!” (to borrow Trump’s oh-so-poignant expression)

Here in Riga, we see a plethora of incredible ideas. The problem? They seem to all have one thing in common — they can’t, for the life of them, get the word out about their amazing ideas and products.

A lack of talent is not the issue. This issue is twofold. From one perspective, it seems to be an overflow of an old, soviet mindset, of an inferiority complex, the mentality of “not being good enough”. From the other, it could just be lacking the skills to create and distribute great content in a language that gives them access to a bigger market than the meager 1.9 million of Latvia.

So what do these startups need?

Above all, European startups need help getting the word out.

From website copy (nothing crushes like sloppy copy), to lead magnets, to writing consistently good copy and getting it in front of their audience.

Look:

A study by HubSpot found that the majority of companies ranked their content marketing capabilities as insufficient and inconsistent.

Marketing specialists have repeatedly emphasized the importance of content marketing in generating ROI (return on investment), with 53% of marketers stating that creating more content is their main priority in 2017. The attention placed on content marketing currently far exceeds the amount of focus put on traditional marketing channels, such as paid advertising, social media marketing and paid search marketing. In fact, businesses have identified paid advertising as the most overrated marketing tactic.

What we see it that globally there’s a shift towards the need to generate great, branded content to access big markets, and that marketers, even ones who are already there, are having trouble delivering.

European startups need someone to draw the potential out of them — we’ll do it

Our mission is to bring great talent into the limelight, to become acknowledged for the work that’s been put in, the innovation, the minds behind the products.

We delve head-first into the startup at hand, first to understand their potential, and then to mold their information into irresistible content, and only then to get it out in front of millions of eyes. What potential European unicorns need is first to get rid of that self-deprecating mindset. Then, one startup at a time, we know we’ll be able to instill this sense of worth further.

All in all, we produce world-class content to put European startups on equal footing with US-based startups. Because Europe shouldn’t be your handicap.