Winning at home teaches you almost nothing about winning abroad.
A market twenty times bigger isn't your market with more people in it. People buy differently, there are far more competitors, expectations of a supplier are higher, and every assumption that quietly held up at home gets tested all at once, usually in your first month.
We've done this from the inside rather than read about it. Running New Zealand for two international data businesses, taking a New Zealand safety platform into the US and Europe, and running product and partnerships across the UK and Europe before that.
Christian teaches Export Essentials for New Zealand Trade and Enterprise.
For companies doing well at home and preparing to export. Particular depth in North America and the United Kingdom.
Choosing the beachhead.
A beachhead is the first market you commit to properly, chosen because it is winnable rather than because it is large. Everything else waits behind it. Get it right and the second market costs a fraction of the first. Get it wrong and you spend two years learning that in the most expensive way available.
Most of the argument is about which one, and most of the evidence people bring to that argument is anecdote. Where the product already gets pulled rather than pushed. Where the buying process matches how you actually sell. Where support hours are survivable. What it costs to be credible there rather than merely present.
The decisions that cost the most to get wrong.
Companies already winning at home.
Companies already winning at home, with a product that travels and a reason to be somewhere bigger. North America and the United Kingdom are where our own depth is, and that is where we are most use to you.