Why limit a product launch to a specific region?

Some industry such as music has regional licensing agreements, so they need to negotiate and pay per region they want to distribute in, that constraints the resources and slows stuff down.

Localisation, legalisation and other might also be an issue.
And there is the expected value for the efforts, which creates this "the future is here it's just not well distributed yet" expending.

There is also kinda localised pricing and cheating sometimes... So you might want to price something in accordance to region, but that has implications.. other regions seeing it, setting expectations etc... so that might be another reason to defer regions.

With high performance like streaming services you might also have technical considerations, so for best performance and costs pricing you put servers in a close to target region, some regions are really hard to get servers at for example... bigger companies might do full facilities which is a multi year project...

but basically think about it like idea validation
Do we believe US people would pay 10$/month for music - yes
EU - yes, what do we need further, translations and marketing ok...
Will it sell in countries with average income of <1000$/month - not much, how much effort is it to duplicate what we did in other countries - a lot... decision - do not invest

Asking this question tends to think about the tech side, not about the people side of sales, marketing, support, business development, which needs people and is a capital and time investment..

I do support the idea of international 1st without limits, but I get some reasons while it doesn't happen... some of them are legacy :/

It depends on the product. For my product wanderium.com, for each country I support I need to go out and get a ton of data for that country and a lot of the recommendations I show depend on a user's country too. For example, for US citizens I need to go fetch all the US visa data for 200+ countries and I show things like travel friendly debit and credit cards but financial products like that depend on a user's country. Each country I launch in requires some upfront work and I only have so many resources at the moment.

Also, there's increasingly more and more country or region specific regulations around personal data which my product deals with so I think increasingly you'll see more products take a measured approach to launching in different countries.

I assume it is different legalisation and accounting needs.

I have exactly this dilemma right now.
I'm working on hiring (recruitment tool) SaaS and not sure if I should start operating locally (Country Georgia) or should I start operating worldwide.
I see some challenges to start operating worldwide:

• Data protection regulation for different regions
• Localization

It’s more like a conversation around 1) licenses, 2) policy, 3) language and 4) localization.

One business works doesn’t means you can take over the world. Look at Uber, WeWork, Airbnb etc

I’m still waiting for music features for Instagram story in my region. Huh.