Who got involved in the trend and data-seeking Startup Muster?

An online data gathering initiative to reveal the development of the Australian start-up ecosystem has closed with coordinators saying they’re confident they have enough information to create a reliable insight into the community’s momentum.

Coordinating team serial entrepreneur Murray Hurps and statistician Richard Kroon told StartupSmart they were seeking 500 entries to ensure an error margin of 4% when the initiative launched in March.

While the data is yet to be validated and cleaned up, 430 respondents finished the survey.

Almost half (49%) came from within New South Wales, followed by Queensland with 17%, Victoria with 13%, South Australia with 8%, Western Australia with 6%, the Australian Capital Territory with 5% and Tasmania with 1%. Under 1% came from the Northern Territory.

“New South Wales was probably a bit overrepresented but we worked very hard to access communities in other states,” Hurps told StartupSmart. “But people in areas outside of New South Wales and Victoria are working really hard in places where it’s harder to get support so were keen to raise their hands and ask for a second of attention.”

Almost one in five of the respondents (18%) were female founders.

The major challenge for Startup Muster team was communicating the value of the survey; something he expects will become easier next year after the findings are released as a report and completely anonymised data in a few months.

“I understand that if someone came from nowhere to ask for my data to produce something valuable, I’d have questions too.”

Hurps says the report will enable the start-up scene to quantify their core issues and seek support to overcome them.

“If we have hard numbers on how many people are raising from friends and family but would prefer to go with professional investors for the same capital, we’ll know we need action around that issue for example,” he says.

The team will be cleaning up the data set and beginning to crunch the numbers over the coming weeks with a report due out in April 2014.