The founders and senior execs of emerging companies often struggle with this question because there are so many competing priorities within early stage companies. There are a few signals that will tell you when it is time to start.
Signals And Triggers
Organic Traction In “Hard” Markets
When I was at Notion, we saw early traction in Japan and Korea, which was surprising because those are low English markets with a high language barrier. In spite of that, customers were authoring wikis and databases in Japanese, even though the UI and other assets were still in English. If you see organic usage in markets like this, start immediately. Language support can only help, especially if you want to move up market.
Regulatory Compliance
If you want to operate in certain regions, Quebec is an example, you are required to be accessible in Canadian French. EU language accessibility requirements are another consideration for companies operating in this region. While language support is only one part of operating internationally, it is a hard requirement in some markets.
Important Customers Are Demanding It
Another signal is that important customers are demanding language support. This happens a lot with bigger accounts, especially in regions like the EU. This is sort of a no-brainer, but be deliberate and refrain from adding languages in an ad hoc or reactive manner.
One thing you don’t want to do is use localization to chase prospective deals. Once you have rolled it out, you can’t turn it off without alienating users.
Competitors Are Already Doing This
This is another important signal. If competitors start adding languages, that’s a sign that they see value in those markets and are likely seeing traction there. If you fail to follow them, they will have an opportunity to capture business that you’d otherwise have a shot at.
Lyft is a counter example. They localized late and struggled with international expansion whereas Uber invested early in both localization and correctly adapted their products to global markets. Both companies started at about the same time in San Francisco. Uber is a global company valued at $150 billion while Lyft is a mostly US company (plus a few Canadian cities) and is valued at $5 billion, less than a fraction of its 2019 IPO price. OOF!
One thing you can do is have an agent that scans competitor touch points to look for language names that will appear in a language picker. From this the agent can figure out what languages the competitor offers. If you see that signal, then follow up with a more in depth analysis to determine if the launch is pro-active or ad hoc, if they have an on the ground presence, and other factors related to the competitive landscape. It is much easier to compete if you are in the market, than it is if you are late (as shown in the Lyft vs Uber comparison).
You Have Established Product Market Fit
The other main criteria is that you have established product market fit and are shifting focus to GTM and customer acquisition. You generally do not want to start localization before PMF because you don’t yet know which markets you should prioritize or if your product will even work there.
Lyft offers another counter example here. There were two things that really held them back from being a peer company to Uber. The main one was they didn’t adapt their rideshare service so it was culturally and legally acceptable in other markets. What Uber did was operate as a licensed taxi booking agent, so if you ordered a ride in Berlin, you got picked up by a licensed cab, which worked great. Uber also diversified into delivery, which became an important business unit in itself. So while Lyft had product market fit in the US, it really didn’t elsewhere. Unfortunately, the execs were insistent on making rideshare work in markets where it wouldn’t.
As shown in the Lyft vs Uber comparison, just because you have product market fit in your home country doesn’t automatically mean you have PMF in other regions. SaaS products and digital products generally have fewer barriers to usage compared to products and services that have physical, on the ground elements.
We’re Not Ready Yet. What Should We Do?
If you haven’t found product market fit, you shouldn’t rush into localization, and you’re probably conserving cash, but there are a few things you should do so you don’t box yourself in.
The first, and most important thing to do, is to train your EPD team on internationalization best practices. Simple things like adding a displayMessage() function to your UI library will prevent you from acquiring tech debt which is expensive and time consuming to retire later.
Another thing you should do is to invest in content infrastructure that is ready for multi-language operation. Make that a consideration when purchasing CMS, help center, life cycle comms and other platforms. That way adding languages is a configuration change instead of a forced migration to another platform, another expensive and time consuming trap companies get into.
Lastly, do things to get out users’ way. The most important thing Notion did was to design the product so that users could author content in any language, even though the UI was initially English only.
These and other topics are covered in the related reading section below.
We’re Hitting Some Of These Criteria. What Should We Do?
It’s time to start getting ready to do this. Besides the steps mentioned above, you’ll also need to think about which translation platforms and service providers you’ll want to use, which languages and regions you should target, and other considerations.
At this point, most emerging companies don’t need to build out an in-house localization team, but they need expertise and vendor neutral guidance, which is where we can help you. My number one recommendation here is to put someone on it who is a strong project or technical program manager who can work in tandem with a localization expert.
The typical sequence of things you’ll need to do at this point is:
- Audit your code base to identify refactoring work that needs to be done such as externalizing or wrapping strings (prompts), formatting dates, times and numbers, etc.
- Select a CMS that supports multiple languages and integrates with TMS platforms you are considering.
- Select a TMS that integrates with the CMS and other systems you are considering (ideally steps 2 and 3 are done together due to the dependencies between these systems.
- Identify the initial set of regions and languages to target. Also consider Spanish for the US market as a first launch, to decouple adding languages from international expansion since that often has additional concerns beyond language support.
In the early stages of building out localization and internationalization much of the focus is on systems and infrastructure. Later on, the focus shifts more toward operational scaling.
If you’d like to discuss next steps, feel free to book a consultation.
Related Reading And Action Items
Get Out Of The User’s Way – before you localize your product to other languages, there are usually low effort things you can do to fix issues that are blocking users.
Global Ready Coding – a short list of low cost and no cost design and coding patterns you should follow to prepare for future localization and to avoid incurring expensive and time consuming tech debt which will slow you down later.
Choosing A Global Ready CMS – you will probably settle on a content management system before you decide to start adding language. This article describes criteria to keep in mind when evaluating these platforms.
Choosing A Translation Management System – when you are ready to start adding interface languages, it is time to purchase a TMS. These platforms, like content management systems, are a critical piece of infrastructure that orchestrates translation work in a repeatable, scalable manner.
Which Languages Should We Target – this is also a good time to consider which languages and regions to target first. This article describes a data driven methodology that considers a number of factors to do so.
Spanish As A Prelude To International Expansion – one thing to think about is launching Spanish for US Spanish speakers. This decouples adding language support from geographical expansion, which de-risks early efforts while producing measurable easy wins.