Austin’s Local Market Research Tool (Free Resource)

Howdy, Austin.

Welcome to Austin Founders Feed, your weekly cheatsheet for the fastest growing business scene in the country.

This week, we’re looking at SizeUp Austin, the city-backed business intelligence platform that helps local founders benchmark competitors, find customers, scout suppliers, and map opportunities by neighborhood.

Here’s everything that’s happening this week:

Let’s get to it.

— Ken & Warren

This edition is sponsored by Austin Founders Feed.

Interested in sponsoring Austin Founders Feed? Claim your $50 credit here.

Most founders make local business decisions with a mix of instinct, Google searches, and whatever they hear from other operators.

That is fine when you’re moving fast.

But before you pick a location, launch ads, scout suppliers, expand into a new neighborhood, or try to understand where your customers are, there’s a free Austin tool worth checking.

It’s called SizeUp Austin, and it’s a free business intelligence platform connected to the City of Austin’s small-business ecosystem.

The platform has four main tools:

1. Small Business Insights

This is the benchmarking tool.

Enter your business type and location, and it helps you compare performance, find potential customers and suppliers, and target your marketing by geography.

Use it for: a quarterly gut check, ad targeting, supplier research, or figuring out which neighborhoods deserve your attention.

2. Small Business Advisor

This is the staged playbook.

It organizes business topics across the full company journey: planning, starting, managing, and growing.

Use it for: a structured second opinion when you are stuck on this quarter’s bottleneck — licensing, financing, hiring, operations, or growth.

3. Shop and Eat Local

This is the discovery layer.

Customers can use it to find Austin businesses. Founders can use it to scout local vendors, partners, competitors, and cross-promotion opportunities without relying only on Google.

Use it for: building a local vendor list, finding partnership targets, or understanding who else is serving your category.

4. Local Industry Pulse

This is the market-map tool.

It helps analyze local industry performance and visualize where businesses in a category are located.

Use it for: pre-launch research, second-location planning, category mapping, or spotting parts of town your industry may be underserving.

The Austin Founders Feed Business Directory just crossed 100 local listings.

That means 100 Austin founders, operators, and local teams have planted a flag in one place so the rest of the community can find them, hire them, partner with them, or show up and buy what they’re selling.

Thank you to every founder and business owner who has added their company so far. You’re helping turn this into a real discovery layer for Austin’s business community.

If your business is not listed yet, now is a good time to add it.

It’s free, takes a few minutes, and puts your business in front of 4,500+ Austin founders, operators, and local business owners.

Austin keeps changing… and fast.

But, The Tavern, the 110-year-old bar at North Lamar and West 12th, is one of those places that has stood the test of time. It’s survived ownership changes, neighborhood shifts, COVID, and a city that keeps trading old Austin texture for newer, shinier versions of itself.

The current owners, Shannon Sedwick and Michael Shelton, know something about keeping Austin weird for real. They’re also the founders of Esther’s Follies, and after first buying The Tavern in the 1980s, they reacquired it in 2018 with a clear goal: preserve the place without turning it into a museum.

That is harder than it sounds.

Legacy businesses do not survive by accident. They survive because someone keeps making the unsexy decisions: maintain the building, protect the regulars, update what needs updating, and avoid sanding off the character that made people care in the first place.

The founder takeaway is simple:

In a fast-growing city, history can become a moat.

But only if you operate it.

Dealroom’s new Global Tech Ecosystem Index 2026 ranks Austin #6 in the world on its Global Champions lens, which measures ecosystem scale across venture capital, enterprise value, unicorns, funding growth, and university-linked founders.

That puts Austin behind only the Bay Area, New York City, Boston, London, and Los Angeles — and ahead of Tel Aviv, Paris, Beijing, and Seoul on Dealroom’s global scale ranking.

But the more interesting part is that Austin also ranks #6 globally on Dealroom’s Density Leaders lens, which measures startup output relative to population.

Dealroom benchmarked 325 tech ecosystems across 77 countries, and Austin now scores stronger than 98% of global hubs.

The supporting numbers explain why:

For Austin founders, the takeaway is simple:

The rest of the world’s data has caught up to what the city has felt for a while.

When you raise here, hire here, sell from here, or pitch out-of-town capital from here, you’re no longer explaining why Austin matters.

You’re operating from one of the world’s top tech ecosystems.

Thanks to Jason from Austin Next for bringing this ecosystem update to our attention.

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