Would you be ready to export your side project to France?
The idea is quite simple :
You’ve a side project and you’ve validated your product-market fit (with revenues).
Your product is mainly focus in your country.
My question is, would you be interested by someone who will take care of an other market to grow your business?
This « country manager » will take care of all the translations, support and will copy all the marketing efforts you’ve already applied in your language/country to get clients.
The business model for this service could be a commission based on sales.
I will be really curious about your thoughts and this project?
Best regards,
Olive
I'll be really interested, though my personal need would be to export my project LinuxJobs.fr https://www.linuxjobs.fr outside France.
Ok great, good to know!
I liked the idea at first but seems like a huge price to pay ongoing for translation service. "growing" my business seems a little far fetched as a business model because you would be responsible in growing business in all sorts of niches...
I see your point.
But of course if one day I need to work on this service I will focus only on industries that I know.
If you've a real estate software and I've not network/link with this industry, I won't be confident to work for you.
Because again, I don't see this service just as a translation service. I'm talking of course about translation, but a lot of solution need some supports to client, sometimes onboarding... The country manager could take care of hard sales as well, cold calling... To post articles on specific blogs...)
I think it's too easy to just translate a website with a hope of getting traction without doing any thing else.
I think that's true... my mobile apps are available in French, but this has not magically acquired any French customers...
And for sure you're not the only one facing that
I'm curious about the name of your app now :)?
mobilit.ee
Hey Olive,
This is great. Not only commission based, but also partnership. There is a large market to consider (US - Canada - France) are you fluent in both English and French?
Happy that you find it great.
You've a specific project that fits with this idea?
I would love this. While Propertyments already has localization built it, it's severely lacking in translation. Right now the translations are kept in XML files and at some point a native speaker would need to step through the English key-values and update the French/Germen/any other XML lists.
The other consideration would be the Stripe dependency. Is Stripe Connect available in France/other regions? I'm not sure how widely available it is yet, but is absolutely required for the rent collection portion.
Great to know that you could be interested by this kind of service.
And yes, Stripe connect is available in France (+23 other countries)
I think, for anyone (like me) whose background if software development, someone offering a sales service on a commission-only basis is appealing.
Technically, it may depend on the costs of building a French version of the product. If the original product was built to support pluggable languages, then it's very easy, if you can provide the text. If not... it can be time consuming to add this ability. I've done a lot of work in software localization, and my experience is that many (most?) developers do not think about other languages (even developers in bilingual countries like Canada).
The technical part was one of my doubt (to copy a product in an other language).
If It's too time consuming It can easily be a no go for a lot of developpers.
Thanks for your point.
i18n is the simple part: it requires little work at the start of the project and consequent application throughout.
l10n on the other hand can take more effort, e.g. I'll have to connect other APIs to talk with local data providers.
Sure. If your product relates to something that has, for example, legal regulation in a particular country (like financial services), this adds another dimension entirely to supporting another country.
You're right: translation is easy if it's built in from the start, and I usually build it in because it doesn't actually add extra work - if done from the start. If it's not done from the start, on the other hand, it can be a long and tedious job to retro-fit.
100% my plan. budgetfuchs.de and focused on the german market. we will soon push it there, but once it is profitable I want to find partners in the rest of europe.
One issue is of course finding APIs like finapi.io
Yes I guess if you depend on an API only supported for a specific country It can be a problem.
The time needed for implementation is very acceptable. If there isn't any API that solved the problem of accessing 80~90% of the banks in a country, then I wouldn't even try it.
If you know a service like finapi but for france, please do let me know.