Key considerations for a strong SEA go-to-market strategy

At some point when startups begin scaling, founders must reevaluate their go-to-market strategy. In some ways, entering a new market is a form negotiation: There are terms that the market will set for a company, and there are those that the founder should be setting themselves.

New markets will demand things from the firm that will be unfamiliar: Maybe the startup needs to accept payments using local methods or currency. Maybe the local market calls for additional services beyond the current offerings. Or maybe it’s simply that no one in the team speaks the local language. Entering Vietnam is pretty tough if there are no Vietnamese-speaking sales, marketing, or customer success muscle present, for example.

In any market entry, figuring out what new capabilities are required by the market is a key factor in a startup’s decision-making process. At the same time, there are also terms that founders and CEOs should be setting themselves, with foresight on what their implications would be.

Requirements that the market will impose

Any market will have table stakes. If a company lacks these requirements or capabilities – be it a product, service, or a piece of tech – the key decision to make is whether the team needs to build these missing components, partner with someone who offers them, or buy them from somewhere else.

Whether the company chooses to build, partner, or buy will be determined by three factors.

Is it possible to build the capability?

In some cases, it simply won’t be possible for a startup to build the missing component. In China, for example, there are legal and regulatory hurdles that bar foreign firms from operating wholly owned subsidiaries, making partnerships necessary.

Is it cost-effective to build it?

In other situations, it may be that building it is not something that’s cost-effective to do. To give an example, creating a machine translation program from scratch is likely not a good idea for a startup when there are several vendors in the space.

If it’s not an activity that’s core to the company’s value proposition and a third-party vendor can do the work for a reasonable fee, building the capability would also not make sense.

Is it a core value proposition that the startup should really own?

If the company lacks a capability but it makes strategic sense to develop it, the team will likely have to employ a more transitionary approach by supplementing the firm’s capabilities in the short run, with a view to build it themselves in the future.

Terms founders should be setting

Implications for Southeast Asian startups