Get best of the week

How to launch a startup in foreign markets during quarantine: Reddit, Product Hunt, resources in Latin America



Image: Unsplash

The last couple of weeks have become a difficult test for any Russian business projects, and there are no prerequisites for improving the situation. The ruble is falling, it is becoming increasingly difficult to work under quarantine, but something needs to be done. For online projects, an attempt to enter foreign markets may be a good option. But how to do that?

The last few years I have been living in the USA and have been actively studying options for promoting companies here and in Latin America. As a result, a certain experience has accumulated, a list of useful tools and approaches that I will share in this article. An important point - all the described actions take place exclusively online, which is important recently.

The material is intended for project managers who want to test demand abroad in the conditions of a limited budget and not very pleasant prospects in their home market and, ideally, support the business with foreign exchange earnings. The post was great, I hope it will be useful. Go!

Identification of countries for tests, basic localization


At the first stage, you should decide which countries you are interested in during your tests and attempts at international expansion.

Usually, everyone wants to “enter the United States”, forgetting that there is not only a large market, but also huge competition. As a result, attracting traffic and users may not be so simple and cheap.

On the other hand, there are countries in Latin America that are close to the United States, and if it succeeds in “catching on” there, then in the USA it will then be easier to start. There are no universal recipes here, but it’s a good idea to study where projects similar to yours come from (of course, all startups are unique, but still) take traffic. SimilarWeb is ideal for this.

For example, if you are making a new meditation application, then SimilarWebwill show you that the two main players in this market, Calm and Headspace, have the main traffic in the USA, Great Britain, Germany and Canada, and approximately the same figures in Australia and China.



Calm



Headspace

Conclusions from this information can be made different, but in general it becomes clear what languages ​​it is worth localizing your website / product to start communication with an audience in a new country.

Localization itself is a separate process with its own complexities. However, the basic problem can be solved with Upwork- On this freelance platform there are editors and translators who will help you inexpensively adapt your content to any language. There are bilinguals among them, so you can find a person who knows Russian and English equally well, and then adapt English-language texts to conditional Spanish for simplicity.

Of course, to find a team of translators / editors it will take some time and effort - I had to deliberately deal with this for several months. However, in the end, you can quickly and with minimal cost get the right content.

Strategy Development


Before you begin the active phase of marketing tests in foreign markets, it is important to determine your goals. They may look like this:

  • Attract the first English-speaking and Hispanic users, compare their behavior patterns.
  • Get coverage for traffic growth in targeted regions.
  • Start increasing sales.

In each of these cases, different tools can be used in a different sequence, and the costs can also be different.

In general, for our startups that are not well-known abroad, in our experience, this scheme works well:

A month or two of content marketing work - filling up a blog, guest posts, maintaining social networks.
Access to some popular platform in a given region for attracting attention.
Building a sales funnel in a new market, work to optimize the attraction of traffic.

If no one knows about you in the USA, then trying to get into Forbes or TechCrunch is useless; it won’t work even for money. It is much more logical to first say something about yourself on your resources and in some lesser-known resources, offer your product on social networks, and get a return. And only then plan high-profile activities and increase the use of paid marketing channels.

For example, you can use the IndieHackers.com resource to communicate with entrepreneurs in the United States. Users of this site, firstly, can themselves become your users, secondly, they are very loyal to new projects, thirdly, they have experience in working with products, so they will provide valuable feedback. Here is an example post from the creator of another project asking for constructive criticism:



If you don’t know what resources users from non-English speaking countries communicate with, it makes sense to start Reddit - there are subsections for the main languages ​​on this site. For example, you can easily chat with users from Latin America there. Here are just some of the subreddits:


If you don’t know any native speakers of the required language, and there’s no budget to pay for translating messages in Reddit to nets with Upwork, I recommend using the Deepl.com translator . It works with the main languages, and the quality of its translation is much higher than that of Google Translate. For posts on social networks and basic communication with users - this is what you need.



Announcements of the project to attract traffic


After you attracted the first users, talked to them, and also left some digital traces of the existence of your project in the desired language, you can proceed to more active marketing activities.

At this stage, we are talking about project announcements in order to attract a large (relatively) amount of traffic, new users, and start making some sales at minimal cost.

If we talk about the English-speaking audience, then there are a couple of effective options. The first is the Betalist.com site . Startup announcements are published on this site. This can be done for free, but then it will take about a month to wait for the project to appear on the main page. At the same time, there is the possibility of accelerated moderation with the announcement in the mailing list of the service - it costs $ 129.

In our experience, posting on this site can yield up to several hundred visitors per day. Compared to the cost of a click when using contextual advertising in social networks and search engines, it’s not so bad. Of course, you will have to take the time to prepare the announcement and images, but it's worth it.



Announcement of a “zero” project on Betalist.

Next option: HackerNews website. This is an aggregator of links to technological articles. The project was launched by one of the most famous startup incubators Y Combinator, it is visited by more than 13 million people.

Good technical articles have every chance to get to the main page and get traffic comparable to the fact that they get successful posts on top Russian-language resources. There is also a Show HN section, designed specifically for startup announcements:

image

In our experience, there have not yet been any high-performing placements there, but it’s free, and even a minimal chance of success is worth the effort.

Of course, the most important English resource for the announcement of startups is Product Hunt. About how to prepare for access to this site, I wrote here .

In short, the algorithm there is:

  • You will need to find a popular user (hunter) who agrees to publish a link to your project. This will give the first flow of traffic.
  • Prepare content in a familiar format on the platform. You will need good images, gifs and videos demonstrating the product, an animated logo.
  • Plan activity on release day to support the project and receive likes regularly throughout the day.
  • Actively communicate with users, answer questions.
  • Prepare some unique offer for Product Hunt audience.

image

As for the Spanish-speaking countries, in our experience, the Meneame platform works well . This is a Popular Hispanic resource (~ 10 million visitors per month). Visually, it is similar to Reddit - it also publishes links to interesting materials and text posts. The main audience of the resource is from Spain, but there are also Hispanic residents of North America.



Partisan collections of the “N best applications” format, or “Top ways to do ...” work well here - a link can go to a post in your corporate blog, so that all traffic will go directly to your site.

Other than that, Taringa- A site in Latin America with an audience of around 25 million users. There are also many different sections, and users can publish their materials for free.



Conclusion: what's next


The implementation of the activities described above will take you at least two months. During this time, you will localize your product and website in the necessary languages, get the first users and be able to chat with them, make the first sales.

Then comes the stage of analysis and planning of further actions. You need to understand how expensive it is for you to travel abroad, what exactly it brings, how important metrics grow rapidly, do you have enough resources to wait for their growth to the required level?

If the answers to these questions allow you to continue, then you need to plan ahead. It's impossible to build a reliable marketing strategy on your blog and one-time activities like Product Hunt. Therefore, you will have to work on SEO, interact with the media, build an affiliate program.

I will discuss the solution to these problems in the following articles. In the meantime, thanks for your attention, I will be happy to answer questions in the comments.

More articles:


All Articles