Minimum Viable Localization: 4 steps to adapt your product for any market

Photo credit: Takashi Hososhima.

“Never venture, never win!” –Sun Tzu, The Art of War

It’s about time to bring some science into localization. In this post, I’ll present four steps that you need to follow when bringing your tech product into any new market. It’s based on an interview I gave at China Business Cast, and it does reference China a lot, but it’s true to any tech company going into any new market (from B2C in Brazil to B2B in England).

I spent the last three years as Asia Pacific CEO for my company Leverate, taking it into several markets in the region, with a focus on China. I’d be lying if I said that we were organized about going global. In fact, we made every possible mistake in the book (most of which I will discuss and warn you about later). But in time, we learned to be more systematic.

Over the last three years, I became obsessed with the concept of taking a company global. I saw firsthand that it can create game-changing revenue streams and how subtle it could be. I took every opportunity to speak with founders who were involved in similar journeys.

Here are the steps in taking your company to a new market:

Step 0: Make sure the market is right for you

There’s a good amount of homework to do before expanding into a new market, but I won’t cover it in this post.

Why this is step 0 should be obvious: new regions are hard to enter and there is a big opportunity cost in choosing your next frontier. If you’re like us—not as rich as Uber—and live in a complex industry, you can only be serious about expanding to one or two markets in a given moment. So, choose your frontiers wisely.

Step 1: Make the perfect localization list (aka your wish list)

“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.” –Sun Tzu, The Art of War

A little planning won’t hurt. It’s common to see companies trying to enter a market without understanding what it takes to win there in the long term. That’s bad because you then run the risk of bad business results or, if you severely underestimate the effort, even entering the wrong market.

How should you make this list? Take one or two days and speak to (1) potential customers or domain experts in the country, (2) people who already took tech companies to the country, and (3) customers who already have business in the country (for example, if you have an American client who has a team in China, they would usually love to share their pains).

List everything that you need to change in your products to be strong in the new market. This includes both visible work (special features and special behaviors for this market) and invisible work like hosting, payments, mass mailing—the stuff that currently work in other markets and need to continue working in the new one.

True, you don’t know everything now. You can get crazy and over-plan. But don’t. Don’t design features or systems. The point is to force you to understand what it means to be present in the country. Aim to have at least 10 items on the list, and don’t be surprised if you have 20 or 30. For each item, estimate how many weeks you need to develop it. You can use simple labels like small (one week), medium (four weeks), or large (eight weeks or more). This is a good exercise for stakeholders in the company.

Step 2: Develop your MVL

Step 3: Launch and measure

Step 4: Iterate and develop more as you learn from leads and customers

Summary