If you launch astartupin your home country, you might discover its a pretty small market.
you might launch globally basically from day one.
Well, I know a thing or two about that.
Perceived strategic choice
First of all, why did we decide to start our international expansion?
At that time, we had only one product, an on-demand delivery service.
Our clients used it as a backup option for their existing delivery solution.
But we believed there was a broader market we could capture if we expanded internationally.
Our strategic choice has turned out to be the right solution, and theres a key lesson here.
So weve decided to centralize product development to make a world-class product with specific fine-tuning options for local markets.
Thats probably the right way for all gig economy companies.
Most of our clients use our service directly.
We acquire them using digital marketing.
Having a single brand for all of these countries comes in handy.
Local teams are focused on localization marketing campaigns and provide local marketing insights.
Thats why we have built our IT infrastructure to be easily deployable anywhere while using the same code.
And we have ensured we can update it quickly as we improve it.
You might need to restructure your entire organization to manage ten or more countries.
We have built the divisional structure by geographic principle.
Working in multiple countries requires rethinking the way the company is governed.
We need people to do customer support, sales, account management, product, and marketing localization.
We start by looking for a country manager whod be able to jumpstart our operations.
Looking for the right person for the business position in your native country is not easy.
Doing it in another country with another culture and mentality is similar to hiring people from another planet.
We are placing job descriptions on LinkedIn intending to find ambitious and entrepreneurial people.
They have the technology on hand; all they need is to start operations and develop a business.
We arent looking for ideal solutions.
Whats important is how the potential candidate was thinking, the decks structure, and the language used.
There is a multitude of specific regulations and details that require close attention.
For example, there are simply no addresses in many places in India; instead, there are landmarks.
This imposes restrictions on determining pick-up or drop-off points coordinates and consequently the calculation of client tariff.
For us, it means that movements inside each area are much more accessible than transfers between them.
In our case, we made all the landing pages on websites and applications customizable.
Our tariff system with delivery zones and different fares for different types of transport is fully customizable.
Most of the parameters can be done by a local team.
A fully localized product doesnt mean yet that product is ready to launch.
If a client places an order, there is still no one who can fulfill the order.
Thats why after product preparation, we launched the courier acquisition.
I will say we were wrong.
For example, when we opened in China, we made a brand specifically for the region.
The Chinese are very fond of their local services, and sounding like a home-grown business worked well.
It took significantly longer in comparison if you start with the one united name everywhere.
Thats why eventually weve decided to rebrand all of our regional companies under a single name.
It took a lot of effort but we still believe it was the right choice.
Looking back
We have started building an international company in 2016.
Now, we have more than 80% of our operations coming from non-native markets.
And its all worth it.
I believe in several years, my company will be in a row with huge international logistics giants.
Story byDmitriy Zubkov
Dmitriy co-founded Borzo, the leading crowdsourced same-day delivery service operating globally.
He has been a C-level executive for 12 years.
