I often meet international founders who have built a product with traction and revenue in their local market, and now want to take the product global.
The problem is, as soon as they try to go global, many of the founders realize their product doesn’t work for the global market.
This is not surprising. Software products are built for users (either consumers or companies), and users’ desires and needs are different in different markets. (This can be a different story for packaged goods.)
Now you’re in a predicament:
- You can’t give up on going global: Unless you’re in China, going global isn’t really a choice; you’ll hit the growth ceiling pretty soon if you’re operating only in your local market
- You can’t give up on existing users and revenue: Any revenue is good revenue, especially for small startups, so giving up users, traction, and revenue isn’t a smart move
- You can’t afford to have two different products: Forking your product to build a “global version” means managing two different products in a small company, which is often a suicidal move
Then what do you do? Ideally, you would have developed a global product from day one, but you can’t go back now.
In my opinion, the only way to pull this off is by building a “global one build”:
- Keep operating in the local market with the existing product. Meanwhile, start building a new “global one build” product in the background. This might require fresh funding and 6-12 months of development time
- Not every feature in your current local product might make it to the global one build (some might survive as local-only extensions or plugins)
- Once the global one build is launched, port your local users over to the global one build. For your local users, this will feel like a major product update.
Now, you’re not a local product anymore; you’re a global product that momentarily happens to have a lot of users in a specific local market. These are very different things.
It’s imperative you communicate the plan and roadmap transparently and involve the entire team. Make sure no one feels like they’re second-class citizens or doing throwaway work (“We’ll focus on the global market as a company. Now, you two will do the maintenance work for this local client.”).
I’ve also seen some founders take on this global project as their personal 20% project. That approach almost always fails. Generally speaking, when the CEO’s interest isn’t aligned with the rest of the team’s, it just introduces a lot of confusion.
By the way, if your product hasn’t reached success in your local market yet, all of this is a moot point; go find the PMF first.