The Next Global Tech Hotspot? Amsterdam Stakes Its Claim
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Frustrated by the difficulty of finding dates while living in London, Dutchman David Vermeulen started InnerCircle, a matchmaking website focused on highly educated singles. Yet rather than set up in Europe’s biggest city, he moved to Amsterdam, home to about 800,000 people and a much smaller pool of potential customers. The city, he says, offered an inexpensive place to try out the idea as well as a launchpad for international expansion if the site took off.
“Amsterdam is the ideal market for testing,” Vermeulen said at InnerCircle’s office, a shared startup workspace on the placid waters of the Herengracht canal. “The concept was initially set-up in such a way that we could easily roll-out internationally.” His site is now available in five cities and has 93,000 approved suitors, with another 95,000 on a waiting list.