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6 Comments

All-in-one solution to manage business and operations

TL;DR or main idea: I wanna open up to global markets but not sure if people need an all-in-one app.

About 6 months ago my business partner and me have joined a startup to revive their business management product. Now, we both are inexperienced entrepreneurs so in this 6 months time we have observed the user behaviors, we figured out what this product's capabilities and goals are, and researched what can we do about it.

The product is basically a task and project management tool with extras such as inventory tracking, human resources and accounting/finance (that is heavily localized for the Turkish financial system) functionality. It does nothing exceptional in any of its modules, but it is rather a collection of basic functionalities which an emerging business might make use of.

Over the 6 months we had a total of ~50 sales with little to no ad money and almost no other ways of marketing. With the previously existing customers the current number is 75 and MRR usually bounces between $300 and $1000. (Currency rates between USD and TRY (we charge TRY) are changing very rapidly, that affects the MRR values considerably.) So we can say that it somehow validated itself in Turkey.

Now the thing is, we want to expand the product to global userbase. The technical requirements are mostly met, translations were ready from day one, it was designed to work with USD, EUR, GBP and TRY as the user's main currency.

What we are not sure about is if businesses in other countries would make use of such a product. Since we know almost nothing about how things work in other countries we wanted to get some feedback before throwing it in front of end users.

Our product is called Workif. Any feedback will be highly appreciated.

on April 18, 2020
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    i didn't have to read anything more than your first line...

    .. there is ALWAYS a market for a well-designed, community-driven product.

    so, go for it. keep going.

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      Hey John! I was just going through your profile after seeing the post you just shared. This community never fails to inject me with a dose of motivation. :D

      We will keep pushing forward. Thanks for your input.

      1. 1

        of course!

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    The price seems to be really low ($4 - $ 13 per customer), even for Turkey?!
    I would assume there's a lot of local regulation you would have to implement to expand to other countries. GDPR, local accounting rules, local banking and e-invoicing APIs, ...all of that is done already?
    What's stopping you from expanding in the Turkish market first?

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      Thanks for chiming in!

      We will update the price before going global, current price was set before we joined and we haven't touched that yet.

      GDPR compliance is mostly done since we have something very similar in Turkey as well. We are thinking about either discarding localization-necessary parts of modules and simplifying, OR expanding to every single country one by one and implementing their localization needs. The latter is kinda PITA and we need to make sure people need those details before committing our hours to implementing them.

      We are expanding in Turkey (well, not as much as usual right now because of COVID stuff) but why limit ourselves, right? Also, Turkey is not really a market to reach high valuations in the startup stage, especially with our target demographics. Many known/successful Turkish entrepreneurs agree on this.

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        Consider that you would also have to have marketing & sales in all these other countries, and also local customer support. Since your product is not of the kind where you'll have first mover advantage if you internationalize quickly, I wouldn't know why you would incur all these costs as long as it's still much cheaper to expand within your home market.