How I got more customers easily by changing where I compete
I used to think the problem was my fitness app.
The videos were decent.
The product was useful.
But every time I posted in the US market, it felt like I was fighting against thousands of other fitness apps, creators, coaches, and ad-heavy competitors.
At some point, I started asking a different question:
What if the product is not the main problem?
What if I’m just fighting in the wrong place?
I noticed that fitness and home workout content seemed to be getting more attention in Japan, so I decided to test the same app in a different market instead of changing the product again.
The idea was simple:
Same app.
Same type of content.
Different market.
I started posting Japan-focused content for the app, with Japanese captions and a local angle.
After one week, the app reached 20 downloads from Japan.
That was the first time I seriously realized that “where you compete” can matter as much as “what you build.”
The tricky part was distribution.
Posting from overseas did not reliably get the content in front of Japanese users. I wanted the test to actually reach Japan, not just be translated into Japanese.
So I used Reach Japan Lab, which helps post content through Japan-local devices and accounts. That made the test much cleaner because the content was actually being distributed from Japan, not just translated for Japan.
My biggest takeaway:
Sometimes the fastest growth experiment is not changing the product, the pricing, or the funnel.
Sometimes it is changing the market.
If you are building a game, language learning app, fitness app, or any product that works well with short-form video, Japan might be worth testing.
There are probably many products that look average in one market but become much more interesting in another.
I’m now trying to think less about “Is my product good enough?” and more about:
“Am I showing this product to the right market?”
Curious if anyone else here has seen a product perform much better after changing the target market.
Smart reframe, and I agree that founders over-iterate on product when the real variable is the arena. One caution I’d add from watching others enter Japan: 20 downloads proves attention arbitrage, not market fit. Less competition on the content side often coexists with harder monetization on the payment side. Japan in particular is forgiving at acquisition and brutal at retention, where shallow localization shows up fast in payment methods, support expectations, and UX conventions that captions alone don’t cover. So the experiment I’d run next is not more downloads but whether those 20 users are still active in week four. If they are, you’ve found a market, not just a quieter feed.
The distribution detail is the part I would have underestimated. I’d have assumed Japanese captions were enough, so the point about the content needing to actually originate from Japan rather than just be translated is a good catch. Was there a clear reach difference before and after you started posting locally, or was the 20 downloads already the “posted from Japan” version? Trying to gauge how much of the lift was the market itself versus the distribution method.
Really interesting experiment.
Distribution is something people underestimate a lot, the same product can feel completely different just by changing the market.
I'm curious how you validated that it was market fit vs just early algorithm luck.
Interesting. Do you think it was actually the market that changed, or just that the distribution channel happened to fit that market better? curious because I'm starting to think channel and ICP are much more connected than I first assumed.
This is a useful reminder that distribution is often more important than iteration. The interesting part isn’t just localization—it’s that “same product + different market constraints” can completely change perceived value. The challenge is turning that insight into a repeatable system rather than a one-off growth hack.
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