Did you go global from day one, or win your local market first?
Most founders in Japan do the second one. Start in Japan and only once it works, head overseas. I did the same for 22 years. All of my business was in Japanese, for Japanese customers.
Part of it is the language wall, most Japanese people don't read English online, and if you Google something in Japan, you are very unlikely to come across anything from the English-speaking world. Japan is open to the Internet, but the information-world is pretty closed off.
In my earliest days, I thought you needed to be in Silicon Valley to build for the English-speaking market. After I moved to Melbourne with my family, I discovered that I could reach the world through the internet, even from Japan.
Which way did you go, and why? And if you started local, what told you it was time to go global?
Replies
Global from day one, mostly because translation stopped being the expensive part. The app, its store pages and the site are all in about 50 languages. What surprised me is where the first search traffic came from, not English at all, but the translated pages: India, Ukraine, Poland, Brazil. English is where the money is, but it's also where everyone competes, so the smaller languages found us first. What I can't do globally is support and marketing, there I still think in one or two languages. Did moving to Melbourne change how you write for English readers, or mainly your confidence that you could?
@gbasovv 50 languages is impressive! My Mac apps are in 32 languages, but my SaaS products are only in English and Japanese for now. If you're actually getting customers outside English, I'd love to learn from how you did it.
As for Melbourne, it was the confidence, mostly. Funny thing is, I first felt it while scrolling Facebook and YouTube. I had the UI set to Japanese, but the ads were local Australian ones, and I started paying attention to what kind of information was flowing around in the English-speaking world.
Then I realized the opposite was true too. Back in Japan, only Japanese information ever reached me, so my view had gotten pretty narrow. Even if you switch the UI to English, platforms like Google and the advertisers seem to push local stuff first, so unless you're conscious of it, you don't really get to the global side.
The bigger thing was COVID. I couldn't get back to Japan, and to keep my visa I got a student visa and did a year at a social media college, online. I met people from other non-English-speaking countries there too. I was probably the worst English speaker in the class, but the teachers and students slowly figured out I had a tech background, and halfway through, classmates were coming to me for help with their reports. That's when I thought, ok, I can actually make it in the English-speaking world.
On top of that, while looking into US LLCs, I found out you can set one up pretty easily without ever going there.
So all of that together, I decided to do business in English.
@hisashispace the ads showing you a different information world is something I'd never have thought of, and going from the worst English speaker in class to the one people ask for help is a great turn. Nothing clever on our side, honestly. Most of the people outside English find us through search: someone looks for a birthday song in Polish or Portuguese, and in their own language there are far fewer pages competing for that. The real work was making the translations sound natural rather than literal. Your Mac apps in 32 languages probably already show which markets respond, maybe that's the shortlist for the SaaS too?
We went global from day one: our product isn’t tied to a place, so there was no home market to win first. And honestly it’s much easier to start global now, merchants of record handle payments and tax, and automated translations take care of a lot of the language wall you mentioned. We’re still early, so I can’t call it a proven path yet, but for who we’re building for, global felt like the only honest option.
@alieksia Thanks for the info! I looked into MoR too, and Stripe bought Lemon Squeezy and started doing MoR themselves. That's the one I'm using.
@hisashispace Nice, Stripe doing MoR directly makes sense. We went with Paddle. One thing worth checking when you compare them: some show lower initial fees, but then add card processing and/or withdrawal fees on top, so the real cost isn't always obvious. Most of them are happy to take SaaS, but they each have a list of business types they won’t accept or only accept at higher fees (advisory, coaching, and so on, never mind casinos =) )