Launching Internationally: An Applied Framework for New Markets
I've launched consumer products into new markets three times and supported hundreds of startups to land in one. Each had a different market entry thesis, level of investment, and starting point. Across those three experiences, the pattern I saw was consistent: teams that treated a new market as an extension of HQ had more difficulty and slower outcomes than those that treated it as a new business.
This is what I've learned across those expansions, broken into the three phases: evaluating market entry and readiness, launching, and scaling once you're in.
Where I've done this:
Resy: Restaurant reservation platform, per-seat SaaS, backed by Airbnb, later acquired by American Express. I was the first person on the ground in APAC, building the Australian market from scratch.
Startup Chile (Corfo): Government-backed accelerator. I worked as a policy officer supporting international startups entering the Chilean market, which gave me the infrastructure side of market readiness.
GroupRaise: Marketplace connecting fundraisers with 10,000+ fast casual restaurants across the U.S. I sourced, hired, and managed a team of over 40 in the Philippines supporting U.S. partners.
Dovetail: B2B SaaS customer intelligence platform. I lead post sale, originally operating from Australia before establishing a U.S. presence in San Francisco.
Market Evaluation
It's natural to follow demand and assess market readiness. An important question to consider is what institutional structures exist to support you once you arrive.
At Startup Chile, I saw this from the other side. I was part of the enablement and infrastructure that made a market viable for foreign companies in the first place: facilitating capital access, advisory networks, intermediaries. The highest-performing startups were the ones that aligned with government policy goals where channels and support already existed, like mining and energy.
That experience permanently changed how I evaluate market readiness. Before you build a market entry thesis case, you need to understand what's already in place and what you'd have to build yourself. If the intermediaries don't exist (pharmacy partners, regulatory pathways, local advisory networks) you're not just launching a product. You're building the market conditions for it to succeed. That's a fundamentally different investment thesis and most companies don't price it in.
I was responsible for deal flow between startups and private-sector investors. When there was alignment between developmental goals, such as energy and mining, and startups building in those spaces, the companies incorporated more quickly, were acquired faster, and had better access to capital. Companies without that alignment faced more uphill battles that had not been factored into their market entry approach.
Questions to ask:
- Who are the local partners you'd need on day one, and do they have any reason to work with you yet?
- What do the unit economics depend on that's different from your home market?
- What would it take for a customer in this market to believe you're serious about being here?
Launch
Most launch playbooks say start simple. Easy wins feel good but they don't tell you what needs to change across the entire experience.
At Resy, I focused on the most complex customers first. The four lighthouse deals were restaurants with high booking volumes operating across city and regional locations. Their customers travelled between venues, creating a network effect. Repeat bookings came quickly. These partnerships also revealed what the product needed to compete locally. The personalisation that local competitors couldn't match became the differentiator: anniversary tracking, occasion notes, gifts sent from the menu to arrive at the table.
The metric that mattered most wasn't revenue. It was whether the reservations team could redirect time from fielding phone calls to higher-value work like events and private dining. Across those first accounts, phone-based bookings dropped by 23% within the first 3 months, which gave measurable time back to focus on more impact activities like one-off bookings, large scale events, weddings etc. When we could demonstrate that shift, the product sold itself to the next restaurant.
Owning Localization for your Market
At Resy, there had been zero localisation: no local date formatting, no local webpage, no compliance with Australian marketing regulations, no local marketing budget. The total investment was two people. Even within Australia, what worked in the cities didn't translate to regional markets.
My first reaction was frustration. Why enter this market if none of these things had been thought through? But I quickly realised that localisation was the unique value I could offer. The gap between what existed and what the market needed was exactly the space where I could have the most impact.
I replaced the U.S. acquisition strategy with brand activations and local influence: partnering with local food and lifestyle brands for co-hosted events, getting the product into the hands of people who shaped dining culture in each city, and building relationships with restaurant groups who carried credibility in the market. When there was buzz in a regional area, I tested it. A restaurant opening generating local attention or a food festival drawing crowds became a signal to run a quick activation and see whether interest converted into bookings. Some of those regional tests worked and became expansion targets. Others didn't, and we avoided committing resources to markets that weren't ready.
I ran these validation exercises and presented results back to headquarters to prove or disprove assumptions before committing resources. I advocated internally for product changes (local payment methods, a local website) that signalled to customers this wasn't just an American product with an Australian landing page.
Within 18 months, the Australian market grew from 3 to 400+ restaurants and was generating 125,000 in monthly booking volume, enough to justify dedicated local resourcing and expansion to Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane, and Byron Bay.
Recommendation: Rebuild playbooks with local specifics, then prove it works with data so HQ gives you the resources to scale it.
Scaling: segmentation is the difference between growth and chaos
When Resy was acquired by American Express, the business model changed underneath us overnight. The product went from paid SaaS to free, embedded inside a 175-year-old loyalty ecosystem. Renewals disappeared and the dynamic between customers changed.
The immediate reality: a surge of new customers outside our ICP, onboarding drop-off because the sense of partnership weakened without a dollar amount attached, and a portfolio that became significantly harder to manage.
The conventional response would have been to keep serving everyone the same way and hope volume carried the numbers. Instead, I ran aggressive segmentation. We sorted customers by brand alignment with American Express cardholders, booking volume, and commercial potential. Top-tier accounts became headliners, brand-aligned restaurants representing the experience American Express wanted associated with its card members. For the rest, we built simple cadences and community events to maintain connection without dedicated coverage. The result: the headliner segment retained at 90-95% compared to 70% across the broader portfolio, and average booking volume in that tier increased by 20% within the first 6-12 months.
This is where I learned that when features are commoditised, and the market heavily saturated, service becomes the moat. The differentiation was everything on top of the product: white-glove support, in-person presence, the business you could drive through the network. That principle holds in any market. When competitors reach feature parity, the post-sale experience is what retains customers and protects the P&L.
Building the team to scale
At GroupRaise, I hired and managed a team of 40+ in the Philippines without a staffing agency. We posted on local job sites, received thousands of applications, and built filters into the process (easter eggs that tested attention to detail). The hires were better than any agency would have found. At peak, the team was handling 15,000 tickets per month across 3,000 active U.S. partners.
Three things made this work: documentation and local leadership (I promoted a team member into a leadership role as a local voice who could surface issues before they escalated across timezones), building for resilience (our operations ran through unpredictable power grid blackouts, so we built systems that accounted for it), and using data to surface what humans miss at scale.
Recommendation: High-volume, process-driven work with clear documentation scales well with remote teams. Work requiring deep market understanding or nuanced partner conversations needs someone local. Match the model to the work—don't default to one model for everything.
Put someone on the ground when you have traction
I've done this both ways.
At Resy, I was put on the ground before there was any real validation. The market entry thesis for Resy Australia wasn't built on local demand. It was built on an Airbnb investment thesis that travellers would book restaurant reservations through the Airbnb platform. Australia was the experiment and the thesis didn't play out.
We had roughly three customers and zero brand recognition in Australia. Every conversation started from scratch: what the product was, why it existed, and why an Australian restaurant should care about a platform nobody had heard of. Without traction to point to, every deal took longer and there was no reference customer to do the selling.
At Dovetail, we did it the other way. The main friction of operating from Australia was practical. A handful of early morning time slots for U.S. customer calls, which meant we could cover roughly 10 U.S. calls per week. That limited not just coverage but the depth of those relationships. But we had >50 existing customers, proven value, and revenue before we established a U.S. presence. When we made the move, the change was immediate: U.S. call availability went from 10 slots per week to full business hours, in-person events and conferences became possible, and enterprise pipeline grew.
Recommendation: If you can close the first few deals remotely to validate the thesis, take that route. The move to local presence should be a response to traction, not a bet that traction will come. But once the signal is there, move fast. The gap between "we're interested in this market" and "we're committed to this market" is the gap competitors can take advantage of.
What makes expansion work
Every international expansion requires questioning the playbook, the segmentation, the product experience, and the operating model. The degree of rebuilding required is what most companies underestimate, and what makes the work worth doing.
The difference between a well-resourced expansion and a scrappy one isn't the outcome, it's the sequence. With significant resources, you run parallel experiments across markets, invest in localisation before you have traction, and staff local teams from day one. Without it, you segment earlier, validate faster, and earn every resource by proving the thesis first.
Both paths demand the same thing: someone on the ground who understands why this market is different, who has the autonomy to rebuild the approach locally, and who treats the expansion like their own business.