Non-English Hackers - do you try to build your brand internationally or are you focusing on your country?
As a non-English Indie Hacker you need to decide: do you focus on your country first or are you trying to build your business/brand internationally from the start?
Both have pros and cons.
I am currently struggling to choose.
What is funny is that I don't worry about my knowledge of English per se - which I think is acceptable - but rather I worry that on the international market there is already a lot of competition for... basically everything.
In your own country it's much easier to find a market that is not already full of competitors. In fact, most of successful stuff in my country are just "Polish <<instert successful international product or content here>>".
On the other hand, you might hit a ceiling much earlier and also there is something disheartening about knowing that most of the people in the world will not be able to enjoy your stuff.
What did you decide to do and why?
I struggled with this dilemma too, when building FeedBear. Eventually, I decided to go international from the start, but I'm not convinced it's the best approach.
When you start local, you have easier access to the market. Once you hit the ceiling, you can expand to the international market with a solid customer base. That usually means a refined product with a lot of social proof (testimonials, reviews, ...).
I was thinking that as well.
After you are "nr 1" in your country you probably would have enough resources to expand beyond your country in an easier way.
The problem is, my businesses are currently supposed to be mostly video content and community based.
So you would have to basically start from 0, recreating the content in new language and building a community from 0.
If I would have just saas, it would be MUCH easier I believe, because I could just translate the app and that's it.
Yes, you're right. With content & community product, you'd have to start from 0. But still, the resources and know-how from building a local #1 will still be there.
Israel has 9 million people, so the population is simply too small to make a successful SaaS model.
If I'd make something in the travel area, food business, transportation, etc, I'd probably start local.
But for classic SaaS services I think there's no point.
That's one of the biggest dilemmas I've been facing these past months. I have several ideas and deciding whether I should focus on my own market (France) or do it internationally freezes me.
That's basically the starting point before even being in a position to brainstorm a domain name.
Landing pages and websites could easily be translated later down the road, it's not an issue.
But building a product whose audience will be built around podcasts and videos is another beast, I don't see how I could have a YT channel in both french and English without confusing the audience
Easy... It depends :D
I think it really comes down to the nature of the business. Some projects are extremely national by nature and don't make sense to start out with an international approach. Whereas others do. If you share a bit about your idea, maybe advice could get a bit more specific?
Point in case, we we're looking at a local idea where we would sell and deliver something within a few hours to customers. That is obviously to start out a very local idea, although it has potential to become more broad with time/success, but I think it would be most important to test out with your local market to prove product/market fit (assuming it is relevant, otherwise the whole point would be mute), before trying to build something that could then scale.
Well, but even if business if not very local, it still might make sense to focus on your country.
For example internationally the space of "learn marketing" newsletters might be too crowded, while on the other hand in your own country the same market might be borderline empty or simply not very high quality.
This is especially true for countries that usually play "catch up" with the west, like Eastern Europe.
Totally agree, hence the it depends
It would primarily come down to you making that judgement call of whether it makes sense or not, and what you believe would be the right approach for your idea.
We're currently working on another idea that could work all over Europe (or the world for that matter) but we think it would better to win the Danish market before turning it international, as we can weed out some of the hiccups and build a stronger userbase to propel us into the next markets.
Like in your case, I think it would be easier to gain more traction by becoming the XX of Poland / best xx in Poland and use that as leverage to go further, than join a big mix of everyone head-on. But that's just my take.
Hope either way that you find your path, my man!
We are targetting the international market at Engagebound (https://www.engagebound.com/).
Why? We are based out of India and our people lack trust while buying online. So, we wanted to go international to improve customer acquisition and revenue.
I started writing a newsletter about tech news in Spanish and in a short format (https://diezlineas.substack.com/welcome) for a few reasons:
It's very early days though and I'm still figuring out how to:
At OneGlobus we are targeting the international market from the very beginning. Ukrainian market is so much smaller compared to Polish and the competitiveness here is already huge in our niche.
We planned on starting internationally (English first), but due to Google giving us great rankings for native keywords (German) we were forced to switch to a dual strategy after a few weeks. That means much more work for us, but it might be an opportunity. Sadly German B2B in retailing is not open for English - might be different for more tech-savvy industries...
I am kind of having similar problem, where I wanted to go international, but I am having much more "accidental" success in my own country. :D
And the market here is obviously much smaller, which makes me scared it will not be enough to monetize successfully.
Unfortunately my business model relies of having a larger audience.
I'm currently focusing on my own market (Japan) because I find it easier to approach and talk to my target customers considering physical distance and time zone. Not saying that I'm succeeding at it though lol
In my case, I started my newsletter in English only. Why? Because part of of my readers are here on IndieHackers. I see many companies founded in Brazil, my country, as a sort of copy cat, adapted and translated to Portuguese with great success.
I also wrote an article here how I write in English as a non-native. This is another challenge apart from providing value to readers of my newsletter
International definitely as all my projects are primarily for an English speaking audience. In your case, I would go internationally too. I'm Slovakia so your neighbor.
You can build your brand in parallel so I don't see any disadvantage to going international from start.
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