If you're racing to "win" a market for a particular software category, the question of "when should we go global" is central to your strategy.
One approach, for example, is to just focus on building the best product you possibly can for users in your domestic market, per Paul Graham’s advice, “build for yourself”. This works especially well if you're in (and releasing to) the US, because it's a large, homogenous, premium, local market meaning you understand your users very deeply, and your product can achieve critical mass before you get into the messy work of adapting it for international.
However, because that route's so popular, it can also lead to intense competition. If the market is valuable enough there will be ten, fifteen, businesses trying to get a toehold and eat your lunch. That means that the harder approach – building a product for global users, with global adaptability and distribution built in – can actually be easier with competitors factored in. That was the approach of Android in phone operating systems – which won them an overall market share of 72%. It's also the approach of several of our favourite clients today in various consumer categories.
I’m obsessed with this second route to market, and I talk to product and globalization leaders who are too, every day. But in my experience, B2C tech businesses are squeamish about international adaptability and tend to prefer route one. They sense difficulty, hassle, a soaring cost base, weaker salience in their messaging, when they take their product abroad. But it doesn't have to be that way. And the rewards for cracking "global" are enormous – businesses like Android, WhatsApp, and TikTok, have all done this with exceptional rewards.
So, how can you pull it off the localization route to market share? How can you identify what needs to be adapted while maintaining a lean team based in one country? How can you scale product quality without scaling your cost base?
From talking to hundreds of product and globalization leaders, here are three thoughts.
1. Don’t lowball your localization estimations
The first thing to acknowledge is that you do need to adapt your product by market substantially.
This ecosystem is rife with anecdotes of under-adaptation leading to failure. Alessandra Binazzi, Principal Consultat at Global Sights Consulting, told a story about a company she had once worked at: "At ASICS, we acquired a fitness app called Runkeeper to drive the company's digital transformation. ASICS is a Japanese company, and yet Runkeeper really struggled for a long time in Japan. When we started looking at the data, we realized our Japanese users were very different to our US users. They were more serious runners – in the US we penetrated the casual market.”
It’s not just translation or lite product adaptability in other words, it’s everything from persona, competitor positioning, local context, through to legal, through to nuts-and-bolts context pieces like network speeds, local device tendencies, currency preferences. We recently did a piece of research about password reset links in SMS in a country where people are likely to share phones. There’s the more literal localization requirements; right-to-left script design adaptations, more voluminous or dense scripts affecting the look and feel of buttons, menus, navigation control. There’s probably media in your product which doesn’t look like the people consuming it. And some of these things users mind, and others they don’t (Slack told us about how they put some words back into English in their Japanese version because it’s what Japanese users expected.)
So our advice? Assume you will have to adapt a great deal.
2. Think and communicate clearly about your localization investment levels with the professionals delivering your programmes
To do it well, therefore, you can’t adapt evenly across all markets. We sometimes think about a hierarchy of product availability from functional access through to user delight. What markets merit the work of getting it functional? What markets merit the work of delivering user delight? That depends on you.
But you don’t need to use our pyramid – Zach Duncan manages localization at Stripe, he’s spoken at one of our webinars before. He recently posted an amazing linkedin post in which I think illustrates really well different quality levels.
Localization quality, he writes, is like food…
What I love about this is that Zach demonstrates a fine implicit of the business context of localization and suggests a framework for thinking about it which you could communicate to a stakeholder upwards or downwards with. It can be easy for localization professionals to get stuck in a frame of trying to deliver fine dining all the time, which might just not be appropriate for the market you're in. We’d advise making it explicit; looking at some localization actions as enablers and others as investments.
3. Start to use data, including crowd data, as a virtuous circle
For the most sophisticated teams we work with, the cycle of adaptability at the heart of things is very simple, just done on a scale which is complex.
We review their product from the perspective of a specified user group. We find opportunities with it – that could be functional issues or growth blockers, negative feedback, issues and bugs. Or it could be unstructured feedback, comparisons with competitors, an evaluation of the product from a certain user perspective.
Our value for them is that we can do this anywhere, and we can do it relatively quickly – usually within 48 hours. Although the process of adapting and launching your product across 190+ countries can be incredibly complex, the engine you
- Define your target level of adaptation to enable your product
- Get your product to product/market fit and technical functionality
- Keep iterating and delivering fro users to achieve product-led growth
Let's talk about your localization strategy
If you're looking to scale effectively while keeping costs in check, and want to explore how localized testing and smart market expansion tactics can work for you, we should talk!