Be global or die : Loic Le Meur dans cet article, expliquait sa vision du développement d’une start-up. Chez Moovement nous partagions déjà depuis le début cette vision (un de nos actionnaires du départ a créé une start-up devenue mondiale à p…

The next big thing will be local-global — local focused networks that can be franchised for every community. Sort of like Craigslist, a global site divided into thousands of local branches.

Going local can be attractive, appealing for users/customers. A local-focused service might attract much more users, who would feel close and get confidence with the product.
If you go global, you dilute your efforts and concentration. Not that it is bad, but it can make sense to go local first.

If my local service is easily expandable, I would rather convince 25% of the new york (metro) population, i.e. 4M users to use my product, than only 1% of the entire US, i.e. 3.5M users.

If the point is to say that local = small market, what about facebook, for example: it was targeting US colleges at first, a market of something like 12M users max (correct me if I am wrong). The Paris metro: 10M people. NYC Metro: 18M. London: 10M. LA metro: 20M ….

And finally, Craiglist, eBay, Yahoo, Dell: all started local, to solve a local community problem.

I’m playing the devil’s advocate here, but this is just to show that thinking local to go global is not always a showstopper.

There’s a parallel universe out there served by authentically local web sites. I work in the dot.com field and could care less about 99% of sites covered by TC in my day-to-day life (excepting Google, YouTube, LinkedIn and few other dominant giants). But I find many truly local sites valuable enough to visit frequently… a local ISP that posts school weather-related closings, the alt. weekly paper’s site, our municipal site, some local blogs, a neighborhood site, a citizen journalism site, etc.

Most of the TC universe is the online equivalent of WalMart, McDonalds and Circuit City. Why not focus on the thousands/millions of funky small shops and independent mom and pop businesses?

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying things cannot be changed and only Silicon Valley works. What I think is that you have better chances starting in that region.

However, I strongly doubt that the Facebook (Panoramio) crowdlocalization approach is as easily translatable to other projects as mentioned by Loic.

1. FB staff wants to follow the Wikipedia approach even if the basis is quite different. Open source and Wikipedia are doing good for everybody and the community is in the center of it so motivation is quite clear. FB is a business and earns money selling adds and probably other data and will, maybe one day, be sold for a couple of millions to whomever. So at least it is questionable if people will see in FB the same good as they might see in Firefox or Wikipedia to get them spending time and effort on doing volunteer translation work for them.

2. In order to rally on your users to translate and vote (revise) your content you need a lot of users with even more time and motivation. Its true that services like Skype or Panoramio do a great job on this but they have also many millions of users and a good, clear and free offering (skype: calls for free, Panoramio: see how the globe look like from photos)! So do you have these numbers as a start up and do you have the same reach to your community?

3. If you want to sell something on your website or you would like other companies to offer something on your web, you should make sure the quality of your website is fair enough. The wiki-style error correction approach might work in the long run but are you, your investors, your advertisers and your users are willing to wait this time to see the website free of errors? And how long will it take?

4. Everybody who has worked on i18n projects knows their complexity even if you are only dealing with main languages (like EN, ES, DE, FR, ZH, etc.). Now to get control over locals is a much harder approach still. Have you considered that Brazilian Portuguese and Portugal Portuguese are completely different. What about Spanish and the big challange of local vocabulary of all 15+ Spanish speaking countries… Are you going to create locals for each and every country? or how will you coordinate that your Spanish interface won’t become a big mass of different origens?

5. and don’t forget if you have a professional service you should offer local language support to your users. Will FB offer this part as well in their translation tool… In any case you should seriously bear the support team in mind when internationalizing your website. Local support gets local feedback and helps you to optimize your website. So you not only need top people on board but a whole infrastructure to deal with the newcomers from around the world.

These are just a couple of reflections on this topic we nowadays find in so many blogs. I think it is a bit early to write kind of Cluetrain Manifesto for localization. What is for sure is that there is not a single right approach for everybody!

Ha… that’s too rich. Please, I understand that SF is the mecca of VC, but there are venture capitalists financing ventures around the world, not to mention other ways to finance, and great talent in other locations, too. If you *really* think globally, you know that your business doesn’t have to be located in any one area to succeed. Hell, all your employees don’t even need to be in the same time zone anymore.

Otherwise, it’s a good post.

17. Do key partnerships with large local players

A great way to go international is what LinkedIn has just done in France by partnering with the largest human resource organization, APEC. APEC’s established position on the market will guarantee LinkedIn initial volume and branding.

18. Never trust that if the partner is large your service will be a success

Partnering the the largest ISP or portal in a Country does not mean they will heavily promote you. You are likely to end up as the service #867 promoted on a page nobody watches. They would never do that to you? I experienced this many times… You would better partner with a small site in your space which will really feature your service than a large one where it will be lost like in a Christmas tree.

“Moving yourself and your family to a very international city like London, NY or San Francisco helps”

Like Paris isn’t international at all

Rule 1. If your idea doesn’t work in your home city then moving to the Valley isn’t going to make a jot of difference.

Global was good when to find a fellow freak you had to go online and search the small world of online users, now everyone has the internet (well you get the point) so you can find that freak locally. More emphasis on location services would be better.

I actually work at a start up that has done pretty adhered to all the advice in the post and its worked out very well.

I feel that all websites should have the built in functionality to be able to go global (i.e. translation abilities).

Maybe a YC styled fund aimed at Europeans entrepreneur’s who need a little more backing than 5k.

Also maybe another way would be for us europeans to get US mentors would be a winner.

Of course there are lots of unique Russian web-projects, but still copycats are usually more popular then “foreign originals”.