International customers emailing

Hi Frederick, fellow frenchman here! I don't have a technical answer, but thought you might find this opinion helpful anyway.

Our product https://www.logology.co is based in France too. All of our initial network of users (friends, family, professional acquaintances...) were French. Yet, we decided not to translate the website and only offer English.

There are two reasons why:

• translating everything takes time and adds technical complexity, like you're experiencing right now. This takes energy away from product and marketing, which is more important
• for a global product, the French market is small. Eventually, 95% of our users will be outside of France, so we shouldn't focus more on them than on Germans or Italians. Better to focus on the North American market to start, since it's the biggest and easiest to get into. Also in my experience, people from the US are way more willing to try new things and spend money than French people, so they're easier to convert

Looking at your website, it's a podcast business. Even relative to population size, the podcast industry is not as mature in France as in the US. I don't know more than a couple of people among my French friends who listen to podcasts. But almost every American I know does (young, old, male, female, etc.).

I don't see much downside in dropping the English translation for you, except maybe lose a couple of French customers that really can't read English. On the flip side you will have more time available to build your product and market it to US customers.

The thing is, French founders often seem hesitant to build a global product right away. It's been shown in studies over and over again: we have the lowest "global ambition" of any major countries and tend to "stay home". That is the reason why there are almost no French unicorns, even though we're one of the most active startup ecosystem in the world.

I'm guilty of it too. I naturally want to show my product to French people that I know, and give them an experience that they easily understand. But I think it's a trap. I might gain a couple of users right now, but I will have spent a lot of time building for a small and difficult market instead of a big and easy one . Spending the same amount of time on the US market will pay off 10x more in the mid term.

In any case, you have a valuable and useful product in a huge market. You clearly have an opportunity here. Keep pushing ;)