This founder session will explore International Expansion, creating your playbook for entering new markets, building a team for international growth, and the key challenges and learnings from other founders who have been there and done it.
Scale Coaches:
Session Takeaways:
BREAKING INTO THE US with Joe White, Moonfruit & EF
Should I even be looking to expand to the US as a founder/company?
This should be a customer driven question and determine whether you should be doing things over in the US or not. Nowadays, running a business is a global competition more than ever. A huge challenge for UK scale-ups is that the UK market is 10x smaller than the US and China, and you need to be big enough to defend yourself as a critical mass. Your scale market is either the whole of Europe, the US, or China and each market has its benefits. For example, being in Europe can make more strategic sense when it comes to regulations, consumer behaviour and protection which has worked for Transferwise and Spotify. The US can be an advantage with the size of market, number of potential customers and number of people adopting technology.
Structuring your team for International Expansion
This is another customer led decision, main operations should be placed where there is a strong customer base and it’s recommended to also maintain some form of contact with Silicon Valley - this could either be by having an office there or the CEO visiting regularly. Silicon Valley is not too big and being able to tap into the ecosystem and spend some time there is important as it gives access to scale capital and talent. There are other functions that can be kept low-cost, for example keeping the engineering/tech team in the UK or Eastern Europe rather than hiring locally in the US.
Mistakes and learnings
SCALING INTO EUROPE with Aron Gelbard, Bloom & Wild
What was your GTM strategy? What tests and market research did you run?
Bloom & Wild took an iterative, test driven approach first shipping from the UK to France to see how logistics worked in those markets. After ensuring recipients were happy with the products, they started to hire a small team of native French and German speakers in London to cover marketing and customer service capabilities. They also set up their technology to localise the platform for things such as language and currency but had local delivery partners to make logistics easier. For Bloom & Wild, it was a case of trying to do as little as possible and only critical activities to launch internationally to get an insight as to whether international would work or not.
Localisation and team structure
Bloom & Wild did everything in house and had a few aspects to take into consideration:
The first step is to identify and work out what aspects of your business you need to localise. For Bloom & Wild, they hired native French and German speakers in London as there was a strong enough talent base and it reduced the costs and risks of going international. To tackle the country specific quirks, country managers were hired and tasked with researching differences between the UK and their market and identifying partners which needed to be local. Marketing was also split into a central function with tasks such as translation and ad words, while brand building had to be local to reach PR agencies and influencers.
What’re some of your key learnings from expanding into Europe? Would you do anything differently?
Resources:
Octopus Playbook