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.

Customer Accessibility: A company must make its product accessible to customers by adapting its performance, pricing, and payment methods to meet local needs.

Universal Currencies: A company needs one or more universal currencies such as cash, content, or connectors to fuel its core growth loops across international borders.

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.

emergent use cases can represent massive opportunities to gain traction in new markets, but many companies dismiss them as aberrant or unwanted behaviors and fail to capitalize.

A third mistake that U.S. companies in particular often make when expanding internationally is underestimating local competitors and failing to identify a strategic advantage that sufficiently differentiates their product offering.

“Just because you succeeded in one country, don’t assume you can replicate success in other markets without an understanding of your unique strategic advantage. Why should a customer choose you over any other local startup that understands the market better than you do?”

a 4-phase framework for internationalization that companies may find helpful:

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

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

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

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

The best ways to measure progress toward product/culture fit are to measure customer retention and look for accelerating organic growth.

In addition to product/culture fit, companies must ensure that their product is broadly available to local customers to sustain growth in an international market.

Product performance: 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 it was intended.

if you’re applying your U.S. price in markets where your target customer has less disposable income, then you’re unlikely to see much traction.

Payment methods: Understanding local market payment needs is critical 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.

Provided the company has a sufficiently high customer lifetime value (LTV) to support its customer acquisition cost (CAC), it can reinvest cash generated from mature markets into ad campaigns to jumpstart nascent international markets that are critical for the next phase of its growth.

One example of a company that relied heavily on content to scale internationally is Pinterest, which took advantage of its visual medium to expand rapidly into countries even before it needed to expend significant effort on language-level or content-level localization

the TripAdvisor team realized early on that travelers from different countries were interested in the same popular destinations that already had many English-language reviews. TripAdvisor made these reviews available to international travelers by manually translating the most popular reviews and integrating on-demand Google Translate translations for the rest.