Bolt-on or built-in? Rethinking international growth

[00:00:00] I think it starts with telling the story that matters. So, a lot of localization teams, they will still report on how many words they translated last quarter. They need to stop that immediately. Frankly, nobody cares about that. It would be like an engineering leader reporting on how many lines of code was written last quarter. It’s not relevant. Instead, if they show up at a product review and talk about how the localized checkout flow in Germany grew usage 40%, then you’re connecting work that they did with a material impact on revenue and on the customer. If you actually show how adapting a CTA, or adapting a homepage for hyper-marketization, hyper-localization in Japan increased sign-up rates for a particular product, then you’re actually showing the work we did made a difference. And so we can do more of that. And by focusing on the metrics that your leadership care about, you’re going to get their attention. And by saying, my priorities are aligned with you, by also collaborating, working together on these same priorities, we can achieve more, we can do more. And that’s going to be a very natural way to open the [00:01:00] door to working together. So, start with just telling the right story, communicating better without doing anything different 

[00:01:11] Welcome to In Other Words, the podcast from Phrase, where we speak with business leaders shaping how organizations grow, adapt and connect with customers around the world. I’m Jason Hemingway, CMO at Phrase, and today we’re talking about international growth as a deliberate business engine. Many B2B SaaS firms want global ARR, but still treat expansion as a future phase rather than a design principle. My guest today is Kevin O’Donnell, founder of Global10x. Kevin has spent more than two decades leading product and international growth at Microsoft, Nitro, and, most recently, Dropbox as VP of International Growth. He now advises SaaS leadership teams on global strategy, go-to-market execution, and building the systems needed to scale internationally. Kevin, welcome. It’s really great to have you with us.

[00:01:56] Thanks, Jason. Really great to be here.

[00:01:58] Well, let’s get underway then. [00:02:00] And I always like to really ask about people’s career and you’re no different. And you’ve built a career across, you know, we said Microsoft, Nitro and Dropbox and now at Global10x. Can you kind of walk us through your professional journey and what guided you towards this idea of global growth as your focus?

[00:02:18] Yeah, I’d be happy to. Overall, I saw a pattern throughout my career where companies would build great products, but they would again and again treat international customers as an afterthought. And so from the very beginning at Microsoft, I was involved in product development and helping product teams deliver to global audiences. And we realized that when we could help product teams ship faster, deliver to global audiences immediately, they would capture more market share. It became a competitive advantage for them. So, a lot of my early career was really about enabling those product teams to ship faster, to ship in all languages simultaneously. [00:03:00] And it made sense that navigating that space between product excellence and global execution gave me more grounding in what it means to be successful. And after Microsoft, I deliberately decided I needed more commercial experience, particularly about connection to customers, understanding how the sales part of things worked. So I joined Nitro, a document productivity company. I learned about how companies buy software, why they buy it, what it takes to deploy and use the software after they sign that contract, and how SMB companies and enterprise companies with global scale have very different priorities and very different support needs. So that led me a lot to understand. Not only enabling product teams, but selling to customers, supporting customers after the fact in multiple languages, in multiple markets, is complex and feeds into what it takes to grow revenue. And then Dropbox came along, asked me to join their team and lead [00:04:00] international growth. And it felt like a very natural connection point between the work I did at Microsoft, shipping product globally and the work at Nitro around growing product and growing product commercially, putting those two together. I really loved my time at Dropbox. And the thing I learned there most of all is that Dropbox, a phenomenally successful company, huge scale around the world, yet they had a blind spot when it came to selling internationally. They had this massive audience that they weren’t fully capitalizing on. And I realized if Dropbox have this blind spot, when I looked around, so many other companies too also have it. And so that led me to Global10x, that I want to work with companies to help them capitalize on their potential and grow globally better, to deliver a better customer experience and then deliver more growth for their own company.

[00:04:50] Interesting. And so when you look at those kinds of blind spots, all that sort of learning along your journey. What do you think? [00:05:00] Even today, when you’re at Global10x, what do you think that most leaders still underestimate about growing internationally?

[00:05:08] I would say one of the biggest common factors is they treat international expansion as a bolt-on. They treat it as this act of translating or localizing that they could do at the end of the line, okay? Right before they release a product, right before they start a marketing campaign, they will send the artifact or the product through this translation engine. And then at the other side, will be an experience that is ready for the world. And that usually fails. You never reach your full potential by having this bolt-on process. But again and again, it is how it’s treated. And so I always feel the core operating model of a company, how products are developed, how marketing and sales campaigns are thought about, how strategies are formed. It must be built with international in mind at the very beginning.[00:06:00] 

[00:06:00] Yeah, and you’ve talked and written about this idea of a global first mindset. And so rather than the strategic and the leadership having that kind of philosophy of a global first mindset, what does that actually sort of change in almost day-to-day decision making or decisions?

[00:06:17] The easiest way I would put it is it’s about having empathy for the international customer. So, when individuals in product to marketing engineering teams or design teams are making decisions every day, they will typically put the customer first. They’re used to doing that, and they always have the customer-first mindset. It is a good way to ground their decision and do the right thing. However, if they lack the perspective and understanding of what global customers need, of their frame of reference, of how they consume the product, how they buy it, how they enjoy it, what their requirements are, then those decisions will be rooted in a U.S-first or Anglo-first mindset again and again. And so they might still be a [00:07:00] customer-centric approach and doing the right thing by the customer, but they will have this gap, and those decisions will not be well-informed. So a product team, they might, you know, instead of asking about, can we launch this feature in 10 markets at once? They might just say, “Oh, well, we’ll launch in Germany later.” And it’s a very different way of viewing product development by taking that approach.

[00:07:21] And is that sort of, if you can put your finger on one kind of structural or operating decision the leaders and practitioners can make early that materially changes that kind of international focus, is that the one thing or is there another single thing that they could start doing to make that shift?

[00:07:42] So, the one organizational shift I think that can be very powerful, it is to create a C-level position that is head of international. Not enough companies do this, but for companies that take that decision, it can have a profound change because it makes international [00:08:00] the top priority of somebody sitting at the C-level table, rather than the second or third priority of many different people. So, when somebody’s at that table, when decisions are being taken, asking the question about users in Japan and Argentina or asking about sales strategy and how it’s well balanced, then it’s going to become noticed, and it will be reinforced again and again every day.

[00:08:22] Yeah, I imagine that role is quite a tough gig, though, because you’re kind of looking across what could be, you know, 12, 13, 20 different markets at the same time. And how does that person, I mean, you’ve done it yourself, right, at Dropbox. How does that person or how did you kind of stop that kind of market-to-market focus and really listen to all of them at the same time and kind of amalgamate? That must be quite a challenge, right?

[00:08:46] It is, yes, because the dilemma with international focus and international growth is that every market needs attention and every market could be treated as a unicorn, and you could put all your effort into to each [00:09:00] one and probably grow it effectively. But you don’t have that bandwidth, obviously. The best approach I find is through grouping and tiering. So, find a taxonomy that works for your company. A classic one would be tier one, two and three, and tier one would be your most important markets that bring in the most revenue, most reliably. And that might get 60% of your investment and 60% of your time. Then tier two might be high-priority markets that need attention. They might get 30%, 35%. And then tier three are the ones that are low potential now, but you’re going to watch. These are markets that could mature in a couple of years. And with each of these tiers, you can apply a different strategy, different investment level, and you’ll find practices and patterns that work in one. And then you can roll out across many others in addition. So, I think that’s a very common, good way to avoid this scattergun approach of trying to keep track of 40 different markets at once.

[00:09:59] Yeah, it’s interesting, [00:10:00] isn’t it? I think that tiering is a great idea. And do you allow for, you know, in your experiences, do people need to allow, I mean, it sounds obvious, but how do you do this? How do you allow for those tiers to change? Because they can be non-static, I guess, as you kind of go lower down, some markets might. And if you vary it by things like products, certain products in certain markets might be more. How do you handle that kind of?

[00:10:24] Yeah, completely. I think they should be dynamic. I mean, a fixed list is no good because they will shift. Certainly, you should review it once a year and potentially more often than that. I think there needs to be a quarterly checkpoint where you’re looking at a dashboard across all the different tiers. You look at the metrics that matter and seeing did the work we put in last quarter meaningfully shift the dial? And what are the metrics that we’re looking at? And, you know, some markets will surprise you, and there might be a tier two market, but actually something’s taken off in that market. And you want to promote it and give it more attention. Of course, it’s the right thing to do. The highest [00:11:00] value I find from the tiering is not just creating a dashboard and allocating resources. It’s in that consistent approach across the company. So, it means marketing, sales, product, research. They all have an agreed set of what tier one means, because so often I find marketing will look at Japan, but product is looking over at Germany, and maybe research is looking at India. And they’re all split into different directions. And you have this conflicting focus in the top of the company.

[00:11:31] So, if your advice is that single person that can do that kind of looking across all the markets, dynamically adjusting it, or has there been examples or have you been in situations where it’s not quite as senior as that? And is that a pitfall? How do you kind of make the case to get that in order, if you see, or make that job a priority for the business?

[00:11:52] Yeah, it’s very often not at the C-level. I think it needs to have the attention at the C-level, even if it’s [00:12:00] not sitting there. So, you definitely need a C-level individual, whether it’s head of marketing, head of product, head of sales, who is committed to and understanding the potential of international growth and international expansion. And if you have that and they’re committed to it, then it’s a case of letting the data drive you there and having a regular cadence of looking at international performance monthly, quarterly, where you show up, and you’re talking about the metrics that matter to the company, but on a regional level. And I don’t mean APAC and EMEA-type of sales forecasts. If we’re actually looking at product usage data, about adoption data, about acquisition data, the numbers that are per market and collated together corresponding to the investment you put in. So, taking that approach and then by inviting those key leaders from across the company to be there for that review, that’s how you can hold people accountable.

[00:12:56] And I guess some of the role is getting their [00:13:00] interest, is tying yourself to the business goals, right? Is being very clear on what they are.

[00:13:07] Completely, yeah. If your focus for international expansion or localization is not tied to the business goals and you are not well aligned with that, and you can’t explain the work you’re doing in tandem with the ambition of the company, then really you are reinforcing that narrative of you are a cost centre, you are doing bolt-on translation work. You could be outsourced, and it would still be done effectively and efficiently. Whereas if you can tie that narrative to we’re helping the company achieve its growth goals, we’re helping it perform better in different markets, then you’re an intrinsic part of building that story.

[00:13:46] Okay, well, that’s fascinating for kind of building the organization and actually raising the profile of what localization can deliver and multilingual communication with customers, isn’t [00:14:00] it really? But let’s take a little bit of a light moment as we do usually in this and we talk about automation, which is a massive topic at the moment, but we ask a kind of personal question, you know, what’s the one thing in your work day that you today wish you could automate?

[00:14:18] I’m going to pick my calendar management. So, I am context switching probably every 15, 20 minutes of the day between meetings, clients, projects, writing, and I tend to align my to-do list on my calendar very closely, setting aside time for different tasks, but it gets interrupted all day. And so, I’m constantly managing my calendar and shifting things around. I would love to spend less time managing my calendar and more time just executing what’s on it. If it was easy to automate, I probably would have done it by now. I don’t think it’s easy to do, but I’m waiting for somebody to do that for me.

[00:14:54] Yeah, or some clever AI that can help you do that at some point, which is [00:15:00] an excellent segue, even if I do say so myself, into our next kind of topic, which is many podcasts, you can’t get away from talking about AI, and we’re no different in technology and in thinking about that, and especially in globalization. You describe AI as reducing friction in global execution. Where do you see or have you seen it driving real advantages for businesses today?

[00:15:29] The most interesting use cases for AI-based solutions are where you can enable brand new use cases that wouldn’t be economically viable in traditional ways. So, it’s where you could, where AI makes the impossible possible. I think that’s where there’s step change value to be had. And that’s why I think it’s really interesting. Rather than simply finding faster, cheaper ways to do existing work. That’s good. That’s fine. But that’s not interesting. So, [00:16:00] one thing I see gaining a lot of traction is using generative market content for hyper-local audiences. It’s something that’s very expensive to do if you use traditional localization, where you’re starting off with a piece of text, or you’re looking to local agencies to create content for you. But now at scale, you can create high-quality content for very niche audiences in different markets. And in many ways, this is not replacing anything. It is net new. Like in the past, there was never, there was zero content potentially for these audiences. We didn’t even translate anything there. But now we can create something rich, engaging, that’s going to remove the friction for those local audiences to connect with your product or your brand in ways that is going to be a step change forward.

[00:16:52] Yeah, because traditionally, those sorts of things would have cost a lot of money, or taken a lot of time or having to get people involved. So, it does [00:17:00] open up new places where you would have been prohibited from going before.

[00:17:04] It’s a game-changer, yes. And I think it is going to become a requirement for more teams to do this, particularly marketing teams. They have the means to have this global reach, not just in terms of scale, but now in depth and breadth. So, I think that ability to connect with very niche audiences, you know,, students through Catalan in Barcelona, not just localizing content in Catalan, but actually going very niche into different demographics in different regions. That’s brand new and that’s compelling.

[00:17:38] Yeah. It’s like that. We call it hyper-localization, or hyper-personalization, and it’s using context and demographics and more than just saying, oh, this piece of content can be translated into a language that we didn’t do before. It’s okay, you know, somebody who’s over 50 in Catalan or wherever that has this background. It can all be changed. It’s very context-rich [00:18:00] while still solving the problem of how do you communicate in that person’s language in a personal and relevant way. Really interesting. So, one of the other things about AI is this kind of idea of, you know, speed to do that, as well as, you know, more things can be done. Forget the adaptation piece for a moment, but just more stuff coming out, you know, because people can generate it wherever they are. What are those sorts of risk areas that you see where you might still need that human element of judgment to kind of protect all those things like trust and clarity of communication or brand voice or, you know, conversion, essentially?

[00:18:40] Yeah, I think it’s important to understand what high-stakes content means for your company and start with that. So, high-stakes content that needs perfect quality is usually where the consequence of error is really high. So, there might be reputational damage, legal exposure and lost revenue. So, this is often [00:19:00] legal, compliance, medical, financial material, but I would add to the list your homepage, your pricing page, any brand-defining moments that you have in your collateral. That’s where it really matters. And you are creating extra risk by removing humans entirely from that process. So, thinking about where humans add that value of trust, but also creativity and connection, that’s important. And so by introducing AI, you’re allowing more content to be created, as you say, but then you can be more selective about where humans can add that value. So, a content strategy that understands high, medium and low stakes will help you get there.

[00:19:44] Now, that’s interesting, isn’t it? So, you touch on something that I think is more important for teams that are doing this now, which is this content strategy side of things, which is where I think we’ll talk about it in a minute. But where localization professionals can kind of tack themselves into sort of business drivers. But [00:20:00] that kind of idea that the content is, not all content is created equal, I guess, is kind of that thing. And if it’s about strategy, then you need to start aligning those teams and have a strategy, right?

[00:20:12] Completely. Yeah. I think it’s always worth asking, what job is this content doing for us, and what do we expect it to do? So, is it going to convince, convert? Is it going to build trust? Is it going to inform? Is it going to help a customer when they’re stuck? So, by understanding the job of the content and then the moment when it will be consumed and how and where it will be consumed, I think you can figure out the level of priority. And also, is it higher or low stakes? And then, correspondingly, how do you measure the impact of that and the success of that content? So, a strategy needs to cut across all of those different dimensions, and then you can layer on the appropriate way to either automate, curate, review or [00:21:00] editorialize.

[00:21:01] Looking ahead, then, so you’ve got your audit, you’re in good shape, but let’s look into the future as far as we can in a dynamic environment like today. What do you think the biggest change will be in how teams create and deliver those experiences, those global experiences, whether it’s in marketing or wherever, across each of their international markets?

[00:21:24] I think one of the biggest changes is that the platforms and tools that are helping to create these experiences will assume global intent from the start. I think, still, so many platforms, such as marketing technology platforms, they assume this monolingual, single entity creation of an artifact. I think that’s going to change I think the capabilities are there now where you can have one to many, many to many zero to many different experiences created and those tools are not necessarily [00:22:00] today well connected with the marketing technology tools and the writing tools I think we’ll see those come together in a couple of years through either mergers or a new entity that will be created so that out of the box you are creating for a global audience and you can decide here are my goals for this marketing campaign, here’s my audience, here’s what I want to achieve and so immediately from the starting point you are thinking about local audiences, about localization, about personalization, and you’re doing that from one single platform

[00:22:32] It’s interesting, the platform idea and something I wanted to talk to you about, you know, you have this idea of a platform that is kind of your hub for that, so you sort of just said. Why do people still need that rather than saying, you know, I’ve got a dev team, and we’ve got some, you know, we’ve got some LLMs, can’t we just cobble this together and kind of do it? You know, isn’t that enough? Do we still need these platforms? How would you sort of answer that?

[00:22:56] Yeah., I like this question a lot. At [00:23:00] Microsoft, I led a team that created our own in-house localization platform. And we always debated this every couple of months. We would say, is this something we should do or not? And the question I asked back then is the same question I ask now. 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? And what is the best way to make that happen? So, to your question, you know, can you justify creating your own disparate set of solutions and tools? I mean, you can do it, certainly. But I think very few companies can actually justify doing that in this day and age. There are enough high-quality platforms out there to leverage that. There’s more advantage from leaning on a platform. So, you’re going to get the platform’s core capabilities and the expertise built into that. With a platform, there is typically zero cost to scaling incrementally. And then [00:24:00] you just get that out of the box, and you get the ecosystem around the platform. And then there’s one more thing that I think is underestimated when it comes to platform versus roll your own, which is that a platform will encourage a degree of conformity and standardization within the company. That is a good thing. So, if you lack that, every problem you will come across will look like a unique custom problem that requires a unique custom solution. You’ll get into the habit of having to maintain bespoke tools and unique solutions to everything. When in fact, in marketing, in localization, the problems are not that unique. In fact, they’ve been well solved, and there’s a lot of standardization and benefit in standardized solutions for that. So, while every company has their own unique use cases, they’re the exception rather than the rule. So, I would say decide what business you’re in, and decide what is the fastest way to get back to serving that business need?[00:25:00] 

[00:25:00] Well, I mean, I would agree with that completely. But I think it’s interesting from your perspective when you’re talking to a lot of teams that are in this kind of place, to go platform, or can we think about it ourselves? But where have you seen, or have you got any examples, where using that platform can make global execution faster and more reliable compared to that kind of doing it? So, you mentioned Microsoft; you did it yourself, but I mean, that was a while ago, wasn’t it? But have you seen examples of where platforms can actually do it rather than doing it yourself?

[00:25:29] Yeah, there’s two examples that come to mind. So, one was a client that had gone through, it was a SaaS company that had gone through a funding round, and they had to expand internationally very, very quickly. And they had no in-house localization team, they had no spare development capacity, and so they needed a full-service platform that could just connect to their internal content systems and make localization happen. And it made perfect sense for them. It was minimal [00:26:00] overhead. And within a month, we were global in a couple of languages, so it was a really good example of. They were focusing on their core competency, they were focused on what they had to deliver, and then localization was enabled with them. Another example, I worked with a much larger team. It was an enterprise company that had a large localization team. And they had built their own infrastructure for everything. And it worked well to a point. But when we took a closer look, we realized they were spending a lot of time maintaining and building updates for well-solved problems. And so we decided they need to bring in a platform. And they didn’t fire the team, but they redeployed the team to the pieces that actually mattered. It was building extensions onto this known platform and actually building the unique value that they cared about, rather than maintaining this central platform that, you know, started creaking at the edges at that stage.

[00:26:56] So, that’s a really interesting point. And it sort of raises a [00:27:00] question. So, if you’ve got engineering and product leaders that are thinking about building on top of that kind of shared layer, that platform layer, what sort of things are they thinking about? What should they consider? Rather than, you know, thinking about building all from scratch, what are the areas that they should focus on? You mentioned a couple there, but can you go into a little bit more detail?

[00:27:21] Absolutely. So, product teams are well used to building capabilities where features can be turned on and turned off. I think that’s the very simplest starting point of what you need to do when you’re enabling global experiences. You need to think about how users might want to extend your product, how they might want to integrate with your product in local markets or how local companies might want to integrate with it. So, thinking about integration points, connection points, thinking about adaptation of usage through different platforms, mobile usage, mobile web usage, thinking about the different dimensions of [00:28:00] how your product and your feature might be used beyond the confines of the narrow, happy path. That’s what’s key. So, it’s about looking for ways where your path will be flexible, and your experience will be flexible along that path. And that can only happen by letting those product and design teams understand and maybe visit local markets where you can see the needs of users up front and gain that perspective.

[00:28:27] So, let’s move slightly away from the actual plumbing, as it were, the infrastructure side of things, and talk about the people, the teams. You know, you’ve worked with loads of different localization specialists, people, globalization, international, you know, VP of Growth yourself. And you also talk a lot about this idea of teams shifting left. What does that mean for those teams and especially inside technology organizations or any organization, actually, that are looking at [00:29:00] international growth? What does shift left mean, and what’s the concept you’re trying to get across there?

[00:29:04] Yeah. So, shift left at a very simplest concept means moving earlier in the cycle. So, shifting left on a Gantt chart, for example, or a schedule. So, moving earlier in the cycle to be rather than at release time, focusing on the work at hand, thinking about a design time or build time or development time. So, it means aligning localization with the core mission of the organization to begin with. So, understanding the priorities of the product marketing engineering teams at the beginning, creating feedback loops. So, the expertise of the localization team actually informs those earliest decisions. So, instead of a localization team reviewing a feature at launch to help figure out the right way to localize it, they’re actually in the design kickoff meeting asking, “How will a Japanese user navigate this feature? Will it be appropriately designed for them?” [00:30:00] Or instead of localizing a product page for Brazil, actually being in the design meeting up front and thinking, what is the appropriate pricing mechanism for Brazil? Have we thought about the right pricing structure here? So, that early involvement by the localization team can add so much value to those teams that lack that expertise and that experience. And it avoids a lot of expensive mistakes, and rework, and failed launches later on.

[00:30:28] Yeah. And so, I guess that’s looking at the product side. On a go-to-market side, it would also be get them, if you’re thinking about new markets or new product lines, get the teams that will be helping you craft the relevant cultural copy or materials early in that, almost when you’re thinking about it, right?

[00:30:48] Completely, yeah. So often, I talk with marketing teams who are in different regions. And I would ask them about, you know, why do you create so much of your own copy? And they [00:31:00] say, “Well, because we get a lot of material from HQ, but we have to dump it. It is irrelevant for us. It’s very U.S.-centric, or it assumes too much about how users in the U.S. will use it. It doesn’t think about our use case.” And so they end up becoming content creators rather than curators or marketers. However, when they have been able to effectively influence and work upstream with the HQ and the core marketing team, they can actually influence so that the origins of a marketing plan are built for global usage from day one. And there might be different strands of it built earlier and initially and saves a lot of rework and usually delivers a far better strategy for everybody.

[00:31:45] That’s interesting, isn’t it? That idea of influence. And it kind of leads to my next question. And it’s actually, how do people kind of get in the room, you know, to build that influence just beyond or shifting left, beyond sort of [00:32:00] just getting involved at the end? How do they actually, when they’ve got all their day jobs, and they’re very stretched to kind of deliver what’s on the, you know, the list of things to deliver for the teams, how do they get in that room? And what steps have you seen that they can use to get the visibility, to get in the room, to get the recognition when they’re stuck in this kind of, you know, hamster wheel of, oh, crikey, we’ve still got loads of things to do, right?

[00:32:25] Yeah, it’s not easy. There’s no point pretending it’s easy to do. If it was easy, they would have done it already. And particularly because they’re often not invited into that room in the first place. They have to find their way into that room or even find out what meeting should we be in to promote the values of our international users. So, I think it starts with telling the story that matters. So, a lot of localization teams, they will still report on how many words they translated last quarter. They need to stop that immediately. Frankly, nobody cares about that. It would be like an engineering leader [00:33:00] reporting on how many lines of code was written last quarter. It’s not relevant. Instead, if they show up at a product review and talk about how the localized checkout flow in Germany grew usage 40%, then you’re connecting work that they did with a material impact on revenue and on the customer. If you actually show how adapting a CTA, or adapting a homepage for hyper-marketization, hyper-localization in Japan increased sign-up rates for a particular product, then you’re actually showing the work we did made a difference. And so we can do more of that. And by focusing on the metrics that your leadership care about, you’re going to get their attention. And by saying, my priorities are aligned with you, by also collaborating, working together on these same priorities, we can achieve more, we can do more. And that’s going to be a very natural way to open the door to working together. So, start with just [00:34:00] telling the right story, communicating better without doing anything different or without taking on brand-new work. That’s a great starting point.

[00:34:07] And it’s not just one metric, is it? Because I’m sure for different businesses, it’s different metrics that are important. It’s about finding the metrics pardon the pun the metrics that matter to that kind of business, isn’t it?

[00:34:20] Yes, it does. And it also depends where you sit in the organization. So, a localization team that sits within marketing, they might want to look at pay conversion or sign-up rates as the metrics that matter. If you sit in product, you might look at product activation rates, you might look at NPS scores or something like that. So, finding the metric that is related to the mission of your organization. That’s the best starting point.

[00:34:49] Yeah. And even, as you say, start with what’s my immediate line of management care about, and then go from there and look across from that. Interesting. [00:35:00] So, I think that’s some good advice for some of the practitioners. Let’s take it, sort of, to mid to large-size business that’s already international, what would you look at or how would you, you know, it’s okay, we’re doing OK. We’re doing everything the business asks of us. But what would you do, or think about, or start thinking about, to make global growth more effective and more efficient? How would you sort of approach that? Because some customers are already, you know, we’re okay. You know, the business things were okay, but yeah, okay, you are today. But what do you do to do more?

[00:35:34] Yeah, there’s usually two simple things I would begin with. One would be a simple audit of their international experience. So, from start to finish, what does it look like? How does it operate? What are the gaps? Where is the friction? What are they missing? What is their missed potential that they might have in different markets? Second, I would actually ask for the dashboard. More often than not, there is no international dashboard. That’s the one thing to [00:36:00] change. So, I would create a dashboard. Say, let’s look at the data. What is your paid conversion rate in different markets? What is your churn rate? What is your activation rate? In many companies I speak to, nobody’s looking at that data. They’re looking at a global figure, but they’re not looking at it market by market. And they’re probably missing something significant. They might be missing the fact they have high churn in India. They might be missing the fact that they have high activation in France, but very low paid conversion. Something’s going wrong there. So, by identifying these opportunities very quickly, you can figure out we have two or three key markets that need attention, that need us to change our approach. Something’s not working here in terms of our content strategy, our monetization strategy, or our user adoption. And then, that’s the starting point.

[00:36:50] Yeah, and it’s a good opportunity, right? Because if, like you say, lots of people aren’t really doing this or looking at this, then it’s a massive opportunity for people to go into somewhere and provide [00:37:00] immediate or provide unique value that nobody else has really thought of or is looking at, right? Okay, so if there’s one hard truth that you think needs to be kind of heard by people about global expansion that you think leaders would appreciate hearing, what do you think it would be?

[00:37:16] My number one is that 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. So, your brand reputation and your existing playbook for go-to-market will only get you so far, but you have to then tailor and adapt your approach for the market you’re intending to go to.

[00:37:39] Okay, right. So, we’re getting towards the end now, Kevin. And thank you for a very interesting discussion. I’ve got a few quick-fire questions for you, you know, in a few words. What’s the most underestimated international market that you see at the moment?

[00:37:54] I will say South Korea. It’s not always among the top one or two when you [00:38:00] look at Asian expansion. But with the right attention, you can really drive B2B growth here. We made a priority for Dropbox. We saw a huge traction there by investing correctly.

[00:38:12] South Korea. So, if you could sum up global growth in one word, what would it be?

[00:38:16] Opportunity.

[00:38:18] Excellent. And then other than this podcast, a book, podcast or a newsletter that you really like and would advise everyone to read at the moment?

[00:38:29] Yeah, a couple of months ago, I came across a Substack newsletter written by Hilary Atkisson Normanha, and she writes on localization, AI strategy, with very, very practical insights and takeaways, as well, worth the look.

[00:38:46] Well, Kevin, that’s it. Thank you for that. I mean, fascinating discussion from your career all the way through to kind of practical advice for practitioners and leaders thinking about internationalization. So, brilliant. I look [00:39:00] forward to speaking to you again. And just thanks for coming.

[00:39:03] Thank you, Jason. Enjoyed it.

[00:39:04] Well, Kevin, thank you very much for joining us today. You made a massively compelling case that international growth is a core operating decision and that it should be designed early, and funded properly, and run with a lot of discipline. And with that, that’s it for another episode of In Other Words. I’ve been your host, Jason Hemingway, and a big thank you to Kevin O’Donnell for sharing his view on building global businesses, the reality of scaling go-to-market across markets, and how AI is actually reshaping international growth. If you enjoyed today’s episode, be sure to subscribe to In Other Words on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or your favourite podcast platform. You can find more conversations on leadership, growth and what it really takes to scale globally at phrase.com and thanks for listening again, and see you next [00:40:00] time.