Global Or Die: Is There A Future For Local Startups?
Michael Arrington
63 comments »
My friend Loic Le Meur wants to convince startups to avoid the lure of focusing only on local markets. He asked to write the guest post below, which I think is worthy of debate.
Loic recently moved to San Fransisco with his family to build and launch his new startup, Seesmic (I’m a small investor in Seesmic). For more from Loic, see his Ten Rules For Startup Success, which created quite a stir last December. His personal blog is here.
His post and a related video follows:
When the commercial Internet emerged in the early nineties, the first startups were very local, addressing their local markets. Take search for example: we had search engines all across Europe using different technologies, different names and indexing local content in their local language.
None of them have survived; they were all acquired or killed first by companies like Yahoo, and then later by Google. It reminds me how fast an established leadership such as the one Yahoo had, can disappear in a record time. French or Germans were mostly looking at French or German sites and not so much outside. We had hundreds of auction sites like EBAY. How many are left now?
This is all over, startups have to think globally now, unless they want to just sell for cheap. Look at the Internet in Europe: how many world class Internet leaders there? We had Skype, it is now Ebay owned. We had the leading european travel site LastMinute.com, it is now owned by Sabre. I could go on and on - most european companies that could become world leaders are now American owned. This is sad but just a fact. Of course there are exceptions like the dating site Meetic that many tried to acquire and remains European, but there aren’t many like these.
Here is my advice to startups just starting to think about their product and target market:
1. Think global as you create the business
It is very difficult because our natural tendency is to think local, to eat lunch and dinner with people around where we live and think in our own language. I lived in Paris most of my life and I was naturally addressing the French market first. Moving yourself and your family to a very international city like London, NY or San Francisco helps
2. Move to Silicon Valley
Talking about a move, that is clearly the best environment in the world for a startup. It is where you can gather the best team and the best partners. It increases your chances to get big faster. The European video site Dailymotion was launched before YouTube, was not a copy cat, but YouTube became larger more quickly and was sold for over a billion to Google while Dailymotion still keeps raising funds.
3. Create an original product: new and different
Digg or Twitter have created new social relationships and even though they have hundreds of copycats, they will remain the originals. The best way to succeed is definitely an original and great product.
4. Do not create a copycat, unless your goal is only to get acquired
Do not do copycats, even if you are in a remote market and even if it is tempting, unless you are just here to create a company and sell it quickly to the leader, which is a business model that some entrepreneurs have become masters about. Why not partner with the mothership and launch them where you are instead of copying ? Innovate, do not copy, life is too short for that.
5. Try to raise funds from world-class VCs
They will help you become world-class, but if you are not based in Silicon Valley you have a lower chance that they invest in your company. If you go for local VCs, always take the most international ones.
6. Hire people from all nationalities as much as possible
Americans hire Americans. French hire French. Spanish tend to hire Spanish people. Even if it is easier, you should hire as much as possible a team with as many cultures and languages as possible. Cultural cross pollination is a wonderful way to stoke creativity.
7. Register your domain names in the key countries you are interested in (and the large ones you are not interested in)
A common mistake made by most startups. Very difficult given how rare good domain names have become but you would absolutely try.
8. Protect your brand Worldwide
do not wait to sort out trademark in the key regions
9. Make a site that is language ready day one, even if you launch in English
More non-English content is posted every day on the web than in English. It is ok if you localize when you have built the product, but at least make it very easy to do by separating the language text files of the interface. Obvious? Yes. Do not forget that many languages have words much longer than english words and they tend to break the interface, take Finnish or German and you will see what I mean.
10. gather an international community since day 1
International starts the first day you launch the company. Having members from all around the World will give you different perspective and different uses of your own product. We have not even launched Seesmic yet but we have users from more than 20 countries who came and used it. We learnt each time.
11. Talk to the most active members of the community to help you understand their market and become evangelists there
these active members can be very powerful evangelists in the different countries, they can also help you get introductions to potential partners
12. Create an application that lets your community translate the site by themselves
the way Facebook translated its site in many languages using an application where members could do inline translation and then vote when there was a discussion on the best term to use. This was a brilliant way to come back with high quality and fast translation. It also helps you have languages you would have not even thought of launching. Do not forget what it takes to maintain them though.
13. Languages are not the same in all the countries they are spoken
French in France is different than French in Quebec so is Spanish different in Mexico and in Madrid. Words may not even be understood the same. email for example is “email” in French (it’s just as often the english word) and “courriel” in French canadian. Use “courriel” or “pourriel” (for spam) in France and some people will laugh at you. Same for “chat” which is “clavardage” in quebecois and just “chat” in France…
14. Do not think that Europe is the U.K.
Most US companies launch from the U.K. thinking they are launching in Europe. There are more than 20 languages in Europe, and the cultural differences between a Danish, an Italian and a Portuguese are huge. Succeeding in the U.K. does not mean you will succeed in the Netherlands.
15. Manage costs properly
Going international by creating your own office or dealing with a partner is expensive. Think about incorporating the company in a country you do not know, respecting social and work local laws, accounting, reporting… In some countries work is not flexible, if you had to close the office and fire your team it could cost you up to a year of payroll…
16. Never do a 50/50 deal with anyone
The famous “golden share” is very important. If you do 50/50 deal nobody has control and it leads to a mess most of the time. The best is of course to be in control of your own business.
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.
19. Create an international reseller program
Sharing a nice % of the business with your partners or resellers is a good way to get them motivated. Web hosting companies have been good at establishing worldwide presence by offering reseller programs, partner conferences, joint marketing, etc.
20. Kill your local copycats
Despite all your efforts, you will have copycats in many markets if your product is successful. Try to kill them first, if you are the leader you should have more traction and means
21. Buy your local copycats if you can’t kill them
Can’t kill them Buy the best ones to grow, if they are copycats they do not have that many exits possible, most of the time they were created for you to buy them. Think about making sure the team will stay in place and not only the founders…
22. Be very pragmatic
In some markets it could be a joint venture, in others it could be a partnership with a large player, and other places just creating your own team works
23. Do not apply any of this to Asia
I do not know the Asian market enough to judge what is happening there but it seems that most large US sites that launched in China pulled back or were not successful. The Japanese market has its own leaders, but I wont’ risk an opinion on an area I do not know enough, I would just be very cautious there.
24. Do not apply any of this to Russia
Everybody forgets the Russian Internet market, it is huge and growing fast, the leaders there are local and operated by russians. They even buy American startups - LiveJournal was bought from Six Apart by Sup.
25. This advice only applies to Internet startups
My experience extends only to Internet startups. Other young companies may find that much of this advice does not apply to them.
I think there’s nothing wrong with going local then global so long as your startup is providing ‘a human’ solution. Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook provides that basic solution so adapting to foreign markets in later years is a cinch. Sites like mint.com (great site) may be a great site locally but foreign banks and credit companies may not open up to its platform. Just my 0.2.
Everett - I think that’s a good point. Is going American-only a big enough market?
Sorry by ‘Human’ I mean- communication, groups, music, etc.
One thing that’s been on my mind: It appears that most local startup who do go global target Europe first? Why is this? From my following the many TC articles, the success of a company is measured by it’s view/eyeballs. If this is the measure, why aren’t more companies attacking China first?
Everett - plenty are…but there is little money there today per user relative to the U.S. and Europe. It’s a long term investment. And there are censorship rules. And human rights issues.
Loic Le Meur is a smart guy, but I don’t see a problem in Europeans selling their start ups to Americans if the price is right.
This is simplistic at best. For most startups the product or service and the core community matter most.
Defining a global market from the outset is a mistake because it fails to make the product better and it may distract from testing this product in a smaller local market.
The argument in the piece is made by ommision rather than by logic. Lots of companies tech and otherwise have grown from truly local services. Craigs List? C’mon.
I think broadly Loic is right, but it ignores that some startups work with a local focus, for example classifieds (real estate, cars come to mind). Even news focused sites like Norg Media can provide local only content and still go well. It’s very much content dependent, and also whether the vertical you’re targeting has a big enough base within each local market. Further that global companies don’t always translate well, for example Craiglist is the big FAIL outside of the US (mostly).
5 or so of Loic’s points would be a no brainer for anyone with experience managing a i18n and/or l10n team, so I would eliminate those 5 points by saying:
Hire someone with plenty of experience in i18n and/or l01n.
They (should) know well everything stated in points 6, 7, 9, 10, 13 and 14. They might disagree on point 12 though, depending on a number of factors. Community localization (not “translation”) can be a good thing if you know what you (and they) are doing.
So there. 7 points can be solved by making one different point instead
Is Craigslist really a BIG fail outside the US? You are right Duncan because Craigslist is unheard of outside the US, BUT it’s ‘classified board’ model has been widely copied worldwide. Kijiji, ECplaza.net, and even the almighty Alibaba are copies of CL (in a way
)
Web destroyed the borders.Now the time to build global brands with local variations.
Special attention to China,the huge and fast-growing web market.Thanks Loic.
>If this is the measure, why aren’t more companies attacking China first?
China.. kinda complicated even for the Chinese despite already no language barrier for them..
>even the almighty Alibaba are copies of CL
nay.. strongly disagree.. apples v. oranges..
As an aside, this discussion really isn’t complete without thinking about how awesomely Facebook is localizing the service using its own users.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008.....s-of-site/
Everett
true, as you say, in a way
As I said, I think broadly Loic is right, and you certainly shouldn’t ignore global markets (oddly enough a mistake made more often by US companies), but flip side some things work better locally.
Yup, localization is more than just a language and in many cases these adaptions (or the fact that you are ready for them) is more important than local language.
And I disagree on the FB translation progress for major languages. Small languages - absolutely.
Re the European market: roughly 350 million speaking more or less fluent english, with credit cards and interest in shopping due to the dollar exchange rate.
As an academic debate, sure, global is better than local.
But as others have said, the choice doesn’t have to be global versus local. In fact, most quality companies start out at a “local” level. ie. yahoo was a little search engine to search papers at stanford; facebook was a little thing at harvard.
I don’t think Yahoo could PLAN itself to be a “global thing” and then launch Yahoo. What is of more importance is your ability to grow globally. Same with facebook–they started very local–and grew.
So may be the larger point is to start out super local, build something extremely useful, and expand - which is sort of a DOH, but heck.
Mike, letting the community localize your site isn’t new. Of course all Open Source projects follow that model but even in the startup environment there are other success stories in this regards, such as Meebo.
The key when you’re a startup and not an Open Source project is that your product must first be loved by your users, so in order to achieve that “help us out and by doing so, help yourself” model, first you need to focus in fostering your community and product so they’ll love to contribute. Launching a site along with a localization kit probably won’t do it, so I have to subscribe the first sentence Ben said in comment #7.
In general i admire the way Loic works and his passion for his new start up. What i want to add in this post, is the fact that when you are talking about Internet you have to think globally because of the roots of the internet. Since there are no physical restrictions between countries, people and cultures, you just need a pc and an internet connection, there is no point in auto-restricting your target group. A company used to be local since it could nt sell its product to the other side of the atlantic or to a country next to it if it did nt have a physical presense. This is exactly what Internet allows you to do. Get up and running and the world citizens can drop by.
well said Zaid.
Good product. Grow community. Build strong partnerships. Don’t give up control.
You can do it anywhere and you can do it local or niche.
I think there is nothing wrong in going local, especially if you are in an early stage and especially if you have no connections in the states. Basically, local is a good beta site and it is much simpler to leverage your product. Once you established yourself locally, go global.
Actually Nicole, I have to agree with Michael regarding FB. 5 years ago most of my friends from Singapore, HK, Jakarta and Seoul were using AIM, YIM, calling cards to communicate with me. 3 years ago they started using Friendster, and now 8 out of 10 of these a$$holes (30+ yrs old) are throwing sheep at me and asking me to guess movie trivia? WTH!!!
Global is the way. Nice feedback.
Glad to hear it as I often hear Asia based VCs talking country specific and not with the global view.
This may be a key difference between VCs in Asia and VCs in Silicon Valley.
Most of what Loic is saying makes sense, he is a smart guy, so they would, but it is easy saying that a start-up ought to have an international outlook. However, an international outlook also involves a lot of costs, and most start-ups need to watch every penny they have and focus their resources on ‘manageable goals’. There is little point a start-up saying that they need to concour the US, China and Europe, when they, at the beginning, have a lot of other areas that also need attention.
Also, there are plenty of websites that have focused on their local market (www.xing.com, http://www.qype.com) and once they established themselves in their own market, are slowly venturing out into other countries in Europe.
What I see as a crucial market for any European start up is the US. It is a huge market with one language (as supposed to Europe or Asia which has many different languages) and being successful in the US can make or break a company.
We as a European start up will be launching with three different languages (English, Spanish and German) and our focus after targeting Germany, the UK and Spain will be testing the market in the US.
Nothing really new has been said… everyone knows that everyone can use a Web service is it is in English, and not vice-versa. That languages are the real border… But how come that also if start-ups have original ideas and success, the only way to survive is to be acquired or have new funding…
I think 14. is something Americans should keep in mind: “Do not think that Europe is the U.K.”
So true. Between Germany and Spain, Italy and Sweden or UK and Greece is only a distance as short as between Philadelphia and Florida, and still languages and mentalities are extremely different.
LOL @ your disclaimer about Asia and Russia.
I feel sorry for the Indian Internet Entrepreneurs. There is the “Promise” of local Internet booming with increased penetration in the coming years. But they need staying power to be around till then. There’s little funding, seems like no-one wants a new global idea to come out of India. But there is plenty of money for travel portals etc. - localization of stuff already successful in US.
Johnyzar…i disagree somewhat. it does not make sense for a startup to position itself globally. how can you cater to the world citizen (is there even such a thing?)…sure people around the world can drop by, but with the limited resources of a startup you cant possibly satisfy the needs of a so called world citizen. you need a localized, niched product/service to attract that core group of users and then expand from there without losing your origins. this is whats going to build customer loyalty for startups to build upon for growth. by jumping to “global” too fast you miss a lot of key parts in making sure your product as well as your brand can sustain a global audience, even if it is cheap enough to maintain using internet as a platform.
i think its crucial to stay local once a brand is recognizable and expandable as well as acceptable on a global scale.
anyways, i think le Meur should title this more as Global or Buy…meaning if you dont have the capacity to become global early on, you better be ready to prepare yourself to buy and M&A out of your local sphere of influence.
2:21 am and i still have a philosophy paper to write
Oops…my name - “Are you jealous”
Anyway from what I can see in Seesmic the second language is French… and from what I can see is increasing… Will write a post about it…
there’s nothing wrong with local startups, they’re more accurate tu user’s needs, they dont make the same money if successful, but not everyone makes a goal from “selling to google”…
Michael,
I agree completely. I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with trying to localize a startup web company as long as there is a REAL advantage in localizing it, however, i do agree it is impeccable have a viable plan for national/international expansion or you will end up becoming a brick and mortar business with similar localized physical constraints.
For my company Metrofunk.com (an invite only social network for trendsetters) the mission was to empower trendsetters around the world in the lifestyle industries (nightlife, fashion, film, music etc) by providing them with an online showcase as well as various branding and marketing tools. However, such an endeavor would not have been possible without the support of a true grassroots movement and following from a localized area to demonstrate the model works.
I ended up spending three years in nightlife promotions and working the local ranks within the New York City entertainment industries and developing a strong marketing base, while concurrently, in stealth mode, building the technology and management team behind Metrofunk.com (and boy do we all know how long some development plans take “slightly” longer than expected).
Now that we have the full support over all the major trendsetters within the New York area we decided to take over a popular exclusive nightclub and rename it Club Metrofunk (full story at: http://www.metrofunk.com/press.php#press3 ) to provide an offline representation of what we stand for as well as give our users a consistent medium dedicated to letting them accomplish their networking and showcasing necessities. With a successful localized model, we will able to prove that our online model can be duplicated over every single major metropolitan city around the world (LA, MIAMI, LONDON, PARIS, MILAN, TOKYO, HK, u get the idea).
I guess, a combination of the two (global model, but localized approach) makes more sense these days where the Internet is more about tools to make life (both online AND offline) better rather than the old days where people’s online and offline lives were more disconnected.
Hope this one helps others looking to get into similar spaces.
Anyone in the New York City area who is interested in seeing if our idea worked out please feel free to rsvp for our Launch event at : http://www.metrofunk.com/press.php?id=30
I am with Loic on this matter, Do you have the ambition to grow your startup to extended levels and perhaps the wish to acquired, go global and mainly go US/Valley. This will help you a lot building your business. One of the interesting parts in comparing Europe and i.e. Valley is that collaborating in Europe is a very strange thing, most startups are narrowed down to their own adventure and forget, or don’t want to work together with co-startups to grow faster or help!
I had this great example a year ago, being in SF , attending Ad-tech. During lunch you have to sit at a round table of 10 , in SF everyone just starts talking to on another and get connected and basically see it there is someone interesting to maybe work with, I explained to a girl next to me at that table, if you do this same thing in europe, all 10 people will be just silently sitting and eating lunch. There’s your difference!
On the other hand Europe can be a great market to get your ” prove of concept” if you’re ( financially) nog ready or capable to head overseas! Invest in this and these europe results will help you when you reach the point when you can start working in the US!
I know Loic by reading and following his startup adventure. I am also a beta user of Seesmic. I consider Loic as a successful entrepreneur who has a lot to teach to new entrepreneur. But I can agree at all about what he said. When you are young, with not enough relationship, not enough money, and you want to start your own startup, do you have to give up because you don’t live in SV or anywhere in United States and can only think local to begin? Come on guy! USA is not the center of the world. Ok it is a big market, the startup ecosystem is better than in any part of the world but thinking local does not mean die! If i create something in France, adapt my products to the french customer, I could easily satisfy myself with a local market and then think global.
PS : check in China, South Korea, many local startups and big success for them!
#16 - Never do a 50/50 deal with anyone.
Sounds very unfair…
1. There are a lot of exampels that it did work out (Google - Sargey & Larry are 50-50 aren’t they?).
2. It sounds you are afraid of losing your CEO position and this is probably the real thing. Many entrupenure starts as CEOs, many of them afraid that after a while the VC will dump them. Being able to have more than 50% which are not allways worth it make them feel more secure.
3. 50-50 is a “golden share” because it is fair to the other founder. He/She (usually the CTO) is giving as much as the bizdev/CEO guy. It isn’t clear why they shouldn’t share.
4. What is the mess that you are talking about ? (Not to have an opposition).
A post about Seesmic,Languages and Loic. I tried to express everything I think about this post in this post.
http://www.aninternetvoice.com/?p=78
In my opinion Seesmic has the risk to become not so Global as Loic hopes.
Some obvious stuff in particular for Europeans who know very well these limitations and are used to different cultures. But still useful as always, tks Loic. Not sure about copycats part, copycats can actually be fun and in the end become more successful than the original tks to better inovation or.. luck.
Now that Loic is at it, why won’t he give his views at how Europe could develop a center or centers for silicon valley type capital funding that would finance the Europeans’ global visions for their web startups?
And perhaps return to Europe to see that that vision comes true?
Sell your Seesmic stocks when they’re still worth a coffee cup…
Russian Internet market is huge and grows fast, but main part of Russian startups are copycats from “foreign” startups, for example:
facebook.com - vkontakte.ru (even design is copied)
songza.com - mp3shki.ru
youtube.com - rutube.ru
etc etc
Of course there are lots of unique Russian web-projects, but still copycats are usually more popular then “foreign originals”.
I’d love to relocate to San fran to work on my projects but I don’t have the connections or cash to make a move work. Ok I could go the YC route but if they selected me which I highly doubt they would as I am a single founder then I would need a lot more cash than the 5k to make it work.
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.
Good post.
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).
@alexis: no…. Loic is is kinda right. You can not innovate in a copycat. You can only make things better. That’s because innovating means creating/imagining stuff that doesn’t exist, and not improving what already exists. But this is pretty complicated, isn’t?
Loic is again dead on. While America is a rich prize for users, there are other markets that all of us should consider. My startup is focused on the Latino market. The real question is…..with the internet the whole globe becomes accessible. So why wouldn’t you broaden your appeal and open up the gates to see what and where you could find new customers?
There is going global and having everyone use english, and there is global with different languages and cultures. So localizing the site language is easy, localizing your users is pointless.
If your community relies on large groups then different languages are just going to annoy everyone and it fragments into broken sub-groups and you lose the inertia of a large cohesive userbase. If you have many small groups then sure, it will help to get more people on. The problem then is to monetize and present these to the ad sales house as a unit they can sell to. At the same time telling the backers that all the bandwidth you are burning for the 500K users in russia and china one day might actually come good even if they are degrading the service for the ones with money.
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.
Loic’s tips are always helpfull, but I kindly disagree on one point: letting you community translate your website can be a disaster, depending on how much of your brand goes into the way the website speaks to its users.
Netvibes did a great job crowdsourcing translations, its brand is elsewhere, but Facebook is a total failure in French, IMHO.
Overall, pretty usefull stuff, I’d like to hear more about Russian and Asian markets though
I am wondering why he had to leave France and move to the U.S. in order to build Seesmic. Apparently he can’t follow his own advice or otherwise he could do what he is suggesting from France.
@steel rule 1, to address the global market first move out of france, then move out of london then reside in SF as it is more global.
“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.
A flooded market for startups. Major players are established. Too many companies competing for the same thing. Get with a rising star and add your talents for better chance of success. Major players have sewn up there genres. There is only so much that people want to see and do on the internet and those markets are full. Information overload dont let your startup get lost in it. Vator.tv has hundreds of startup pitches for a year and a half now and none have broken the ice into a mover and shaker startup. You might want to get funding first just to sit at the table. Prayer might help.
got a question here, to expand a site globally, does it require to export the site to foreign countries at all? or one can just simply translate the site in other languages and host them on a server in US?
Am I missing something? Points 17 and 18 appear to completely contradict each other….
17: “Do Key Partnerships With Large Local Players”
18: “You would better partner with a small site”
Huh?????
————
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.
Going global is good. But it is very difficult for a startup because of resource and funding issues. I’m the founder of http://www.budgetpulse.com. We have more users from other countries than US. However, to customize the site for different countries is a chalenge with our limited funding and resource.
Think global as you create your business… but move to SF.
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.
Loic is right by saying that you should consider future internationalization upfront so you establish the right IT infrastructure for your website at the very beginning and don’t need to make expansive redesigns later on (don’t forget UTF-8 encoding ;).
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!
Louis, I actually started LeWeb conference in Europe, even in Paris, and it has become the largest web event in Europe, so I think I have made that as a contribution and keep doing it, to improve things there. I have an entrepreneur a week from the 2000 participants from last year that emails me because he raised money or found a partner from LeWeb.
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.
This post, TC, and Silicon Valley are focused on the global web… sites that try to serve everybody from a distance. Like Hollywood, this is geared towards children and the internet equivalent of couch potatoes… cubicle time-wasters. And industry insiders.
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?
Completely disagree with the leading idea of your post, Loic (go global, don’t focus on local).
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.
They think the long-term growth is here? They are missing the cherry on the top. How to bring the bottom the pyramid to web 2.0. But don’t worry - Africans will create a new web 2.0 - African style and make the money themselves. Here a few stories how they are doing that. http://angryafrican.net/2008/0.....can-style/
I think this post is more about mistakes made in the past, rather than the best strategy for the future. There are many human interactions waiting to be digitized on the local level.
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.
C’est vrai Loic,
I fully agree that we must immigrate to Silicon Valley to get more opportunities, I also believe that SV is the place of dreams to Internet entrepreneurs. But what if you have somme projects and no financial to immigrate? Can you help me to come over there? I wait your email.
My email is datchoua@gmail.com