“GOING GLOBAL” IS MUCH easier said than done. That’s according to Patrick Llewellyn, the CEO of 99 Designs, an online graphic design marketplace based in San Francisco with offices in Melbourne, Berlin, Paris, London, and Rio de Janeiro.
“A startup that wants to go global has to build trust in each new market locally,” he says. Customers respond to companies that provide a service tailored to their needs, so localization is essential. “But it’s both time-consuming and expensive.”
Llewellyn says the company, founded in 2008, still thinks like a bootstrapped startup, which has helped it expand its reach. “We’ve managed to go global while using a minimum of resources,” he says.
For companies interested in entering a foreign market, Llewellyn says the minimal starting point is a website on a regional domain operating in the local language. Your next step should be to hire one support person to give you feedback about local customers’ desires, or their complaints, he says. (99 Designs uses freelancing sites such as Upwork to hire native speakers; it also hires local public relations and marketing professionals on a contractual basis.) “You can hold off on other aspects of localization, such as offering adapted payment options, while you are building your initial presence,” he says. “But you do need that crucial element of a person fluent in the local language and culture who can relay feedback.”
Another way to enter a market affordably is to acquire a smaller business that already has local traction and presence. “This gives you both market entry and instant local reference data to test against and, unlike just opening an office, it also creates a newsworthy event,” Llewellyn says. “There are obvious PR, social media, and SEO benefits to that kind of event, but just as importantly it shows your commitment to the region or country.”
Once you’ve expanded, Llewellyn recommends managing that market locally. “Our one major hire in each new market we enter is a country manager,” he says. “We then ask that person to treat their operation as its own mini-startup.” The country managers drive strategy, head up marketing, create events, and perform all ongoing local translation, he says. That way, they are truly immersed in that market. “They’re able to create an authentic tone with customers because they understand both the region and our business,” he says.
Finally, Llewellyn says 99 Designs relies on a variety of communications tools to keep its far-flung teams together, including Dropbox, Slack, and Basecamp. The company also uses Trello for project management, Blue Jeans for videoconferencing, Atlassian Confluence for information sharing, Geckoboard for dashboards, and Google Docs for real-time collaboration. “We also use Smartling, a translation management platform that lets us quickly launch versions of our site in different languages, while controlling costs around translation,” he says.
Going global is costly in terms of time, money, and focus. But it’s an effective way to grow a business, as long as you develop a strong connection with your new market, Llewellyn says.