To be successful in business, you need to venture abroad, but international success requires foresight. Because American startups can readily tap into a billion-dollar market without having to translate their offering, it does not mean that European Startups can do the same. If you wish to export abroad, you can only do so successfully if you invest in translation.
In particular, startups from export-dependent countries should not underestimate the linguistic diversity out there.
But let's start from the beginning!
Market research and industry institutions regularly publish key figures and facts about the global startup market. It is noticeable that companies face the same challenges in these three key areas:
Keep reading to discover how this works!
For many startups, customer acquisition is a struggle. This is because, on the one hand, it is competing with many other similar companies, and on the other hand, customers do not want to be acquired easily. After all, in this digital age, the starting point of the purchasing decision, on the buyer's journey, has changed.
An important success factor is, therefore, a steady flow of communication with your target customer base in their own language. To grow your customer base, it is essential that you target a broad and multilingual customer base as early as possible in your sales cycle. So, don’t focus only on your home market, which your offer appeals to well enough. Focus instead on a few key foreign languages, so you can broaden your customer base immensely:
An estimated 1.5 billion people worldwide speak English, including approximately 375 million native speakers. This illustrates the success of English as a lingua franca for internationalization. We recommend at the very least, translation of your offering into English. Do consider translating your corporate communications and also localizing your product for the desired target market. And depending on which customer base you want to attract, choose either British English or American English.
After English, Spanish is the second most important language in the USA, with more than 45 million speakers. Spanish is spoken in much of the United States in addition to Spain and Central and South America. However, if you want to cover most of the continent linguistically, choose to translate into Spanish LA.
Around 1.3 billion native speakers communicate in Chinese, of which 900 million alone speak Mandarin. However, its written form is Chinese Simplified in mainland China and Singapore or Chinese Traditional in Taiwan and Hong Kong, so choose wisely. We would recommend localizing into both versions to cover all your bases.
About 650 million people speak Hindi. Combined with English, it covers most of the overall Indian market. However, you can choose to localize into other languages spoken in India: Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Punjabi, Assamese, or Maithili.
More than 185 million people speak German. It is used in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. But did you know that it is also spoken in Italy, Brazil, Alsace, Lorraine, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Namibia, Poland, Slovakia, and Belgium? This smaller group of languages could sometimes represent a significant market opportunity. For example, translating even only customer-facing communication into these smaller groups can very quickly become a good revenue stream.
As you can see, deciding which language to focus on can only be worked out based on the most commonly spoken languages in a country, and where you want to sell your product. This is the key for customer acquisition success.
As with the target group approach, we recommend that you include internationalization and translation of customer feedback, in your product development process very early on, ideally right from the beginning.
A timely handling of international customer feedback, suggestions for product improvement from promising markets, and keeping an eye on trends in different countries, will help your company to:
A late decision to internationalize, for example, in the post-production phase, causes considerable additional expense and effort, with costs rising and deliveries late. In many cases, a half-baked solution is chosen, resulting in a significant quality loss and increased costs.
We recommend that you choose a holistic way to product development: internationalization and localization with a focus on a well-translated quality product right from the start.
This quote from Hermann Tietz, founder of the department store Hertie, illustrates our advice well:
"Quality means the customer comes back, not the goods."
Usually, an increase in sales through targeted customer acquisition with needs-based products covers a large part of the company's growth. But sometimes, staff and finances are other important factors to consider.
For instance:
Although many startups finance their investments from their own financial resources, this is not always possible. Often, additional capital must be procured elsewhere in order to grow the company. Pitching financial investors the idea of a multilingual product (rather than a single language product) can bring you some benefits and even some foreign investors, too!
A multilingual offering will give your financial investors a:
As with customer base acquisition, you increase the size of your investors’ pool by offering a multilingual product. The better investors understand your business concept and your goals, the more interesting it will be for them to evaluate your business proposition. If you sell exclusively in one territory /language, that could already be a barrier to your business.
Investment seed money for startups to grow is scarce in some countries, which in turn reduces growth. On the other hand, foreign investors, who generally also make higher investments, can be the growth drivers here.
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