Growing Pains: Challenges Faced By Startups And Emerging Companies

Brian McConnell, Localization Technology Partners

I’ve spent the past twenty years working with startups and emerging companies to build out their localization and international growth technology and teams. Being based in San Francisco, I’ve worked with a wide range of companies of all sizes and stages of development, from seed to post-IPO. As varied as these companies were, they all struggled with international growth in similar ways and took longer than they should have to figure things out.

The simplest explanation for this is that almost nobody has prior experience with international growth, or if they did, it was in the context of a much larger company that had already figured out tools and structure that allowed them to scale. Startups and early stage companies are inherently shambolic, especially when they are figuring out their product and how it fits within the overall market.

The accidental owner

International growth and localization initiatives typically start in a reactive or ad hoc manner, often in response to organic demand in a new market. While most companies intuitively understand that international growth is important, there is rarely a strategy in place early on. One pattern I have seen at most of the companies I have worked with is that they will tap a random product manager who happens to be bilingual with this effort.

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BOSS: Hey Alex, you speak Spanish, right?

PM: Si, senor!

BOSS: Congratulations, you are in charge of launching our service in Mexico, in addition to the ten other things on your plate!

This person then needs to become an expert in many things at once because translation is one small part of international growth. They typically struggle with this, and then eventually realize they need to bring in an expert. In the meantime, the company wastes 6-12 months, a delay which can be critical if competitors figure this out first and get a foothold in international markets.

ChatGPT university

The accidental owner problem is compounded by the fact that much of the information about localization technology and services is authored by vendors. There isn’t an efficient marketplace for these services, nor are there many sources of vendor neutral information about them. The localization tech and services industry is unique because it is comprised of hundreds of companies that are specialized across several dimensions. There is no Amazon or Walmart that dominates the industry, so finding the right vendors can be a challenge for newcomers.

The problem is that vendor authored information is the primary input into search and AI tools that the person tasked with becoming an overnight expert will rely on to make decisions. Often they will land on vendors that while they may have the best SEO strategy are not the best fit for their use case. This is the problem with AI. It is great at answering questions in a domain you are familiar with because you can judge the accuracy of the response. But when you don’t know what you don’t know, it is only as good as the information it was trained on.

I would often be called in to fix situations where a company had chosen localization technology and service providers that were a poor fit for them. Most companies start out with app localization, and then later realize they need to adapt many other customer touch points for international use. This involves a lot of cross-functional coordination and system integrations, which is one reason why it is important to talk to experts early on, before decisions that are difficult to undo are made. Content management systems (CMS) are a case in point. A few of them like Contentful are designed for multilingual operation from the ground up. Most of them are not. A company that chooses a CMS without multilingual operation in mind will often have to replatform content, which is expensive and time consuming compared to getting things right from the beginning.

Who owns this?

Another issue that early stage companies encounter is that there is often no clear owner or sponsor for international initiatives. It is common for different teams within a company to do their own thing. Product has one content platform, while marketing uses another, and customer support still another. The lack of coordination among teams creates a real mess for whoever is responsible for international growth and adaptation.

My general advice for companies is that when they begin focusing on international growth, there needs to be a clear owner and advocate for the effort. It usually works best if product, backed up by engineering, owns the work for adapting the product for international users. Otherwise, this is often treated as a downstream checklist item that produces mediocre results. This involves a lot more than translation. For example, subtle things like font choices influence how an application is perceived in different markets.

Premature localization

Another pattern that happens a lot is what I call premature localization. This usually happens when a growth engineering team decides to adapt the product to a couple dozen languages because that drove growth at a previous employer. The best signal that it is time to start adapting your product to new regions and languages is when you see organic demand, especially in regions like Japan. If your product fills a need, early adopters in other markets will discover it, even if it isn’t adapted to their preferred language yet. The problem with premature localization is that it can be a costly distraction, and can also create the perception that localization isn’t worth the effort if results don’t materialize quickly. It is also difficult to turn languages off without alienating users, so it is better to err on the side of caution by adapting a product for markets where it is already seeing demand, or where the total addressable market is so large it would be foolish to ignore.

What does success look like?

Of all of the companies I worked with, Notion got things mostly right early on. I attribute this to two things. First, the founder Ivan Zhao is from China, and so he understood the importance of making the product accessible to users globally. Two, he and one of the other founders were living in Kyoto Japan during a critical period of the product’s development. Many of the design decisions they made at the time resulted in a product that was inviting not only to Western users but also to people throughout the Asia Pacific region, even though the product itself would not be formally localized for several more years.

From there it was a natural progression to localize the product and other touch points, and over a period of two years, Notion went from English-only to 12 languages. Today it is accessible in 19 languages and dialects, and well over two thirds of its users are outside of the United States. While adding languages helped, the real work was to build a product that was globally appealing in the first place.