> I'm surprised somebody hasn't started a software company in a place like this. Maybe not the very out of the way island featured in the article but similar ones. Rent must be dirt cheap. I wonder how big a company (or collective of freelancers?) it would take to save a town like that.
It's tough. This isn't "the suburbs", this is way way off the beaten path. Six-and-a-half hours one way, by car, to St Johns, which at 70k people is still a pretty small and rural city by most standards. You're a couple of days away from anything resembling Big City living.
The local talent pool is more or less non-existant, so you'd either have to accept remote workers (in which case you're not saving the town population-wise, but you're at least stabilizing the tax base), or you'd have to pay above SF rates to convince people to move out to the middle-of-nowhere instead of SF, where they'd have a much lower risk of finding another job if the company stops paying the bills. And access to actual amenities.
The cheap housing will help a bit in recruiting, especially among people with young families or older Devs who aren't traditionally the target of startups, but the lack of anything remotely resembling a nightlife or entertainment options (maybe there's a local watering hole in town that doubles as the only restaurant) is going to turn a lot of people off. And that's not even getting into the one-room "school" situation, the fact that the nearest hospital is so far away they need to air-evac you if you become ill, etc. It's a tough, remote life unlike anything most urban dwellers would be used to.
And god knows what kind of internet connectivity even exists out there.