A few quick tips for international founders who want to break into the US/global market:
1/ B2B is better than B2C: User needs are more specifically defined, customers are typically less fickle, products have less cultural dependency, can generate stable recurring revenue
2/ If you still gotta develop a B2C product: Build a container app for the local US content. I was recently surprised to find one of the popular mental health apps in the US was actually based in Southeast Asia; since 100% of their content and users are English/US based, I bet most users don’t know the team isn’t based in the US
3/ It’s 100x more difficult to bring an existing, working product to the US market than building a new product: Sometimes the product isn’t designed (and therefore wouldn’t work) for the US market, and as a small team you can’t fork your product and build another version. But more often, it’s just the law of nature. As a small team, you should focus on one thing, which in this case is traction/paying customers in your market. Your entire team is (and ought to be) sucked into what’s already working; starting a second project based on the founder’s aspiration (“Project America”) will eventually kill your company
4/ So build for the US/global market from day 1: You might have initial customers in Chile, but they just happen to be in Chile, you’re not married to them where you’re building a bunch of Chile-specific feature sets as core features (you can always build plugins or extensions for local requirements)
5/ Founder(s) must be a US product native: Building for the US/global market isn’t something a founder can outsource to someone else on the team, and the only way to do this is when the founder is capable of building a US/global product. Being a US person himself helps, but more importantly the founder should be a “US product native” i.e. knows very well what it takes to build a successful product in the US market
6/ Don’t ever send one person to America as a satellite: That one person can’t do anything without a full product authority, while burning through cash living in a high cost city. After about 12 months there’s a high chance the founder and the satellite person will end up personally hating each other