Global by design, not by default

Kevin O’Donnell, founder of Global10x and former VP of International Growth at Dropbox, joined Jason Hemingway on the In Other Words podcast to talk about why international growth keeps failing at companies that should know better.

The global SaaS market is on track to reach close to $1.5 trillion by 2034,with the fastest growth coming from markets outside North America. The opportunity across international markets has never been larger, and it is accelerating.

And yet most companies pursuing that growth are doing it with an operating model built for one country.

Products designed around domestic customer assumptions and go-to-market playbooks that assume what worked in the home market will work everywhere else. Kevin O’Donnell has spent more than twenty years watching this approach fail, at Microsoft, at Nitro, and at Dropbox, where he served as VP of International Growth. His diagnosis is blunt.

“You never reach your full potential by having this bolt-on process. But again and again, it is how it’s treated.”

Why treating international growth as a bolt-on keeps failing

This is an operating model problem. When international growth is treated as something that gets bolted on at the end of the process, every foundational decision has already been made with a single market in mind. The product assumptions, the pricing structure, the messaging, the user experience. All of it reflects the assumptions of whichever market the company was built in.

The teams making those decisions are being customer-centric for the customers they can see from where they’re sitting. The rest of the world falls outside that frame of reference.

A product team launches a feature domestically and adds Germany to the roadmap for later, rather than asking whether they could launch in ten markets at once. A marketing team builds a campaign that works in English and hands it off for adaptation, without considering whether the underlying assumptions travel. The decisions feel sound in the moment, and they just happen to exclude most of the world.

Consider Dropbox. One of the most recognized product-led growth stories in SaaS. Hundreds of millions of users worldwide. And underneath that, a significant commercial blind spot. In 2024, Dropbox generated $1.1 billion from markets outside the United States, roughly 43% of total revenue. A substantial number, and by Kevin’s assessment, a fraction of what was possible.

If a company with Dropbox’s global footprint wasn’t capturing its full international potential, the question for every other leadership team is uncomfortable. What are you missing in markets you think you’ve covered?

Who should own international growth?

The structural issue behind this pattern is straightforward to identify and genuinely difficult to fix. In most organizations, international growth is the second or third priority of multiple people. Product is focused on one market, marketing is looking at another, and nobody is seeing the whole picture or is accountable for the outcome.

CSA Research found that B2B buyers are three times more likely to purchase when addressed in their own language, and 40% of consumers will never buy from a site that isn’t in theirs. The revenue case is clear. Yet no single person owns the responsibility of turning that data into an operating reality.

Kevin’s recommendation is structural. Put someone at the C-level table whose entire job is international growth.

“It makes international the top priority of somebody sitting at the C-level table, rather than the second or third priority of many different people.”

A global-first mindset, one that builds international considerations into product, pricing, and go-to-market decisions from the start, needs someone at the table to hold the business to it.

That person changes every decision they’re present for. They ask what a pricing change means for users in Japan. They flag that a product launch designed for one market won’t work in another. And crucially, they hold the business accountable for international performance in a way that nobody else in the room is mandated to do. Without that presence, those questions don’t get asked and the accountability doesn’t exist.

The role requires holding twenty or more markets in view simultaneously. Kevin’s approach is market tiering, grouping markets by revenue contribution and growth potential, with different strategies for each tier. But the tiers have to stay dynamic, reviewed quarterly, and reshuffled when the data demands it.

The real value goes beyond resource allocation. It gets marketing, sales, product, and research aligned on what tier one actually means, because in Kevin’s experience, those teams are often pulling in completely different directions.

What does “shifting left” mean for international growth?

When teams with international expertise only enter the picture at or near launch, the consequences ripple through the business in ways that rarely get traced back to their origin.

Regional marketing teams ignore content from headquarters because it’s too U.S.-centric to use. They become content creators rather than marketers, or localization managers rebuilding from scratch what should have been built for them from the beginning. Features ship without consideration for how users in other markets will navigate them. Expensive rework follows.

Kevin calls this “shifting left.” Move international expertise earlier in the cycle. Instead of reviewing a feature at launch and figuring out how to adapt it, have someone in the design kickoff asking how a Japanese user will navigate it. Instead of adapting a product page for Brazil after it’s written, have someone in the planning meeting questioning whether the pricing structure makes sense for that market.

“That early involvement can add so much value to those teams that lack that expertise. And it avoids a lot of expensive mistakes, and rework, and failed launches later on.”

Why most companies don’t have an international dashboard

Most companies Kevin works with don’t have an international dashboard. They look at a single global revenue figure and assume the story it tells is complete.

When you break performance down market by market, the picture changes. A market with strong adoption but weak paid conversion suggests something is off with pricing or messaging. Rising churn in another market points to a product experience gap nobody has investigated. A tier-two market showing unexpected traction may deserve more investment than it’s getting.

These signals are sitting in the data. Nobody has built the reporting to surface them. And the teams closest to international markets are making it harder for themselves by reporting on the wrong things.

“A lot of localization teams will still report on how many words they translated last quarter. They need to stop that immediately. Frankly, nobody cares about that.”

When those teams connect their work to conversion, activation, and retention, the conversation changes. When they can show that a localized experience in a specific market drove a measurable lift in revenue, they earn a seat at the table where strategy is set.

The shift Kevin describes is fundamental. Localization teams sit on more market knowledge, cultural expertise, and customer insight than most organizations realize.

The ones that learn to articulate that value in commercial terms will be treated as growth contributors. The ones that keep reporting on throughput will keep being funded as a cost line.

In a landscape where AI is making it possible to automate high-volume content at scale, teams that can’t make the strategic case for their expertise face a difficult question about their future role.

How AI is changing international growth

The AI conversation in international growth tends to center on doing existing work faster and cheaper. Kevin thinks that misses the point entirely.

The genuine opportunity is in use cases that never existed before. Creating original, culturally specific content for a particular demographic in a particular market. Audiences that previously received nothing because the cost of producing anything for them could never be justified.

“In many ways, this is not replacing anything. It is net new. In the past, there was zero content for these audiences.”

Kevin calls this hyper-localization. Not the same content in a different language, but original content shaped by a specific audience’s cultural context, demographics, and market.

Content for students in Barcelona who speak Catalan that reflects who they are and where they are.

He sees this becoming a requirement for marketing teams rather than an experiment. The ability to reach niche audiences with genuine specificity at scale is moving from competitive advantage to baseline expectation.

That means having a multilingual content operation that can manage both. One that gives marketing teams the ability to create and adapt content across languages and markets from a single place, with the right level of human oversight applied where it matters most.

Should you build or buy your localization infrastructure?

Kevin has an unusual vantage point on the build-versus-platform question. At Microsoft, he led the team that created an in-house localization platform. They revisited the decision every few months. He now advises companies to stop doing what he did.

His test is one question. What business are you in? If the answer is delivering international experiences for your customers, that changes the calculation. Spending engineering capacity maintaining bespoke infrastructure for problems that platforms solved years ago is a misallocation of talent and time.

“What business are you in? Are you in the business of creating a localization solution, or are you in the business of delivering international experiences for your customers?”

One enterprise client he worked with had a large team keeping custom tooling alive. When they moved to a platform, the team wasn’t cut. They were redeployed to work that actually differentiated the business, building extensions and solving the problems that were genuinely unique to their company. The well-solved problems were handed to infrastructure designed to handle them. The standardization a platform imposes turned out to be a benefit in itself, removing the habit of treating every challenge as a unique problem requiring a custom solution.

Platforms like Phrase are designed to help companies manage multilingual content operations at scale, so internal teams can focus on work that genuinely differentiates the business.

Every market is a new market

“A copy-and-paste approach to go-to-market will fail. You need to treat global expansion as finding new product-market fit in each market.”

Your brand and your existing playbook will get you in the door. They will not carry you to the growth your board expects. Every market requires its own understanding and its own investment. The companies that have internalized this are creating distance from competitors that will be genuinely difficult to close.

And the most underestimated market to start paying attention to? Kevin doesn’t hesitate. South Korea. Rarely in the top tier when companies plan Asian expansion, but with focused investment, he saw significant B2B traction there at Dropbox. The opportunity is there for companies willing to look past the obvious.

Where to start

If you’re looking at underperforming international revenue, Kevin’s advice points to a clear set of first moves.

• Build an international dashboard. Break your global revenue figure down market by market and start looking at what the aggregate number has been hiding.
• Assign accountability. Whether it’s a dedicated C-level role or a senior leader with an explicit mandate, someone needs to own international growth as their primary job.
• Audit your operating model. Map where international expertise currently enters your product, marketing, and go-to-market decisions. If the answer is at the end, start moving it earlier.
• Ask the platform question. If your engineering team is maintaining localization infrastructure, ask whether that’s the best use of their time and talent.
• Reassess your content strategy for AI. Identify audiences that previously weren’t commercially viable to serve and start exploring what’s now possible. At the same time, be clear about which content is high-stakes and needs to stay in human hands.
  

Kevin O’Donnell is the founder of Global10x and former VP of International Growth at Dropbox. This article is based on his conversation with Jason Hemingway on the In Other Words podcast.