The Drive-Time Test for Startup Community Reach

In my veins, I bleed geographer. Not sure that will ever go away. So, when I meet a new ecosystem enthusiast, usually on a video call, I pull up Wikipedia to quickly get some data, like the population of the city & region, population growth over time, and maybe the largest employers and the colleges and universities. Then I open Google Maps to visualize what is around that city. I want to answer this question: How far will someone drive for your meetup?

A few weeks ago, I was talking with a community builder in a mid-sized city, and he asked me a question I didn't have a great answer for: "Where should our ecosystem actually end?" My friend, Chris Wink of Technica.ly, also wrote about this phenomenon. 

My quick answer was “It depends, and it is complicated.” I think the answer in Raleigh, NC, is different from the answer in Fargo, ND, and different from the answer in Detroit. MI. Let’s look at my hometown. Durham is 26 miles from Raleigh. Are they two different ecosystems? I would posit no. Detroit is a major city, and Ann Arbor is an amazing tech town with loads of talent. Is Ann Arbor part of the Detroit ecosystem, or is it happy trying to be its own community?

Economic geographers have a word for this. They call it the hinterland — the surrounding region that depends on a central urban area for jobs, services, and economic activity. Originally, it described the land behind a port city, the territory that fed goods into the harbor and pulled resources back out. I like borrowing the term because it forces you to think about your ecosystem as a region, not a zip code.

Here's how I define it for startup communities: your hinterland is roughly a 35-mile or 40-minute drive from your central location. 

Why 40 minutes? Because that's about how far a mildly motivated founder will drive to show up at your weekly social event. Not a founder who's desperate for an investor meeting and would drive two hours. A normal one, with a job and a family and a Wednesday night that already has plans. Forty minutes is the edge of "sure, I can make that." Beyond it, you're asking for a special occasion, not a habit.

This matters most in rural and suburban settings, where you're not just building programming; you're building awareness that entrepreneurial activity exists at all. If you're the only game in town, that 40-minute ring tells you exactly who you're trying to reach and, just as importantly, who you're not. Stop pretending you're serving a metro area you can't actually pull people from.

Urban settings get more interesting, because you can end up with multiple centers inside the same hinterland. Downtown has its scene. So does the university district twelve miles away (Buffalo, NY). So does the emerging neighborhood everyone's suddenly excited about. When that happens, collaboration stops being a nice value on a slide and becomes the actual job. Two centers competing for the same 40-minute radius will split a small ecosystem into two smaller, weaker ones. Not good in my opinion. 

The trickiest version of this is when your hinterland naturally contains two or three separate cities, each with its own identity, its own city council, its own sense of who's in charge. I've watched this play out more than once. Nobody wants to be the "junior" ecosystem, and nobody wants to drive 35 minutes to attend somebody else's event. That's not a logistics problem. That's a leadership problem, and it takes real finesse to solve. Usually it starts with one person from each city deciding the region matters more than the ribbon-cutting credit.

So before you build another program, draw the circle. Forty minutes out from your center, in every direction. Look at what's actually in it. Your community college. That funky, hipster town just 20 miles out where the cool kids hang out. That circle will tell you more about your entrepreneurial capacity, your collaboration partners, and your true leadership challenges.