The Pillars of International Growth — How to Set Up, Hire and Scale a Growth Strategy and Team

The Pillars of International Growth — How to Set Up, Hire and Scale a Growth Strategy and Team

Expanding a company's operations internationally is a significant undertaking that requires careful planning and execution. There are several key factors that companies must consider to ensure successful international growth. In this article, we will explore the pillars of international growth and discuss how to set up, hire, and scale a growth strategy and team.

Product/Culture Fit: The first pillar of international growth is achieving product/culture fit. Just as a company must establish product/market fit before it can grow efficiently at home, it must achieve product/culture fit before it can grow abroad. This means adapting the product to meet the needs and preferences of the local market. It is a common mistake for companies to see early traction in a market and falsely conclude they have achieved product/culture fit, when in reality, they are being fooled by a small subset of users who do not represent the majority of the market.

To ensure product/culture fit, companies should focus on customer accessibility. This involves adapting the product's performance, pricing, and payment methods to meet local needs. For example, internet speeds in many markets across Asia, Africa, and South America are much slower than in the U.S. and Europe. Optimizing website and mobile app performance is critical for ensuring that customers in these markets can consistently and reliably use your product as intended. Additionally, understanding local market payment needs is crucial for achieving widespread customer adoption. Often, seemingly inferior products win out over more advanced alternatives in certain markets because they are more accessible to customers.

Universal Currencies: The second pillar of international growth is having one or more universal currencies to fuel core growth loops across international borders. Universal currencies can be cash, content, or connectors that help drive growth and engagement in new markets. Companies should identify and leverage these universal currencies to maximize their international expansion efforts. For example, Pinterest relied heavily on content to scale internationally, using its visual medium to expand rapidly into countries even before investing significant effort in language-level or content-level localization.

Local Competitors and Strategic Advantage: A third mistake that companies often make when expanding internationally is underestimating local competitors and failing to identify a strategic advantage that sufficiently differentiates their product offering. Each country has its own unique culture and habits, and companies must understand these nuances to succeed in international markets. It is important to ask why a customer would choose your product over any other local startup that understands the market better than you do. Companies should conduct thorough market research and identify their unique strategic advantage before entering new markets.

To effectively navigate international expansion, companies can follow a 4-phase framework for internationalization:

1. Local Availability in English: Make the product available with no changes.

2. Language-Level Localization: Localize the language of the product.

3. Content-Level Localization: Invest in local content tailored to local users.

4. Feature-Level Localization: Invest in local features to meet market-specific needs.

Measuring Progress and Ensuring Growth: The best ways to measure progress toward product/culture fit are to measure customer retention and look for accelerating organic growth. Companies should pay attention to customer retention and ensure that it remains stable and parallel to the x-axis. A flattened retention curve or smile curve indicates that there may be issues with product/culture fit.

In addition to product/culture fit, companies must ensure that their product is broadly available to local customers to sustain growth in international markets. This involves optimizing product performance, adapting pricing to local market conditions, and understanding local payment methods.

Now, let's shift our focus to setting up, hiring, and scaling a growth strategy and team. While success cannot be attributed solely to the growth team, having a growth team in place early on can help accelerate overall company growth. Facebook, for example, launched its growth team when it had around 50 million monthly active users and saw flat month-on-month growth. The growth team became a key driver of Facebook's rapid expansion to 2 billion monthly active users today.

However, it is important not to hire a full-fledged growth team until you have ensured that you don't have a "leaky bucket" problem. The focus should be on long-term retention and stability. Benchmarking your retention against companies in your specific vertical can help determine if you are on the right track.

When building a growth team, it is crucial to hire individuals with prior growth experience. Former founders make up a significant portion of growth experts, and their experience can bring valuable insights to the team. Setting clear goals and milestones is essential for driving growth. The goal should be a specific, measurable target that the entire team works towards. It is recommended to set a goal that is halfway between "sandbagging" and "too hard to achieve" to motivate the team while still being realistic.

Identifying the right channels for growth is another important aspect of a successful growth strategy. Understanding user behavior and finding relevant channels early on can significantly impact growth. Referrals are often a top channel within the first year of a company's growth. Running experiments and testing different approaches is key to finding the most effective channels for your specific product.

To scale a growth strategy and team, it is important to have a solid growth experiment dashboard in place. This allows for tracking and analyzing the results of experiments and helps inform future growth strategies. It is also crucial to maintain a growth mindset and make growth a part of the company's DNA.

In conclusion, international growth requires a deep understanding of the local market, adapting the product to meet local needs, and leveraging universal currencies for growth. Setting up, hiring, and scaling a growth strategy and team involves focusing on long-term retention, hiring individuals with prior growth experience, setting clear goals, identifying relevant channels, and maintaining a growth mindset. By following these pillars and actionable advice, companies can pave the way for successful international expansion and sustained growth.