The Techcrunch Europas awards or how to start global
Vincent and me where at the Techcrunch Europas event in London last week. Even if we were not shortlisted to the awards (thanks everybody for your votes and your support! ) it was the opportunity for us to make our first steps in the UK Tech scene.
There, we had the opportunity to spend a great time with other founders, investors, and actors of the community from UK (obviously) but also from France, Germany, Italy, Belgium… Enforcing the feelings I got from Wozaik participation at Mini-Seedcamp Paris and Berlin that a real European community is emerging and becoming more and more active. And as a start-up founder I wanted to congratulate people that take the initiative to build and make this community live.
Actually an advice we often get is to start our start-up global from the beginning. Okay I totally agree with that statement… But how to put this into practice ? I mean it is easy to translate your product or service in different languages and to think you are global. I wish it were true! However, I am affraid that starting a business globally is much more than that.
First, even if you are building a killer ap, you need people to talk about it… Influencers. Well, some (few) of them are global, but the majority have a strong influence in… their countries. So if I want to start global I should know who these guys are and make sure they test my product.
Then let’s say your product has launched globally and you get users from everywhere. In which language do you think your users will give you their feedbacks, hmm ? They access to your services using their mother tongue, so it is likely that they will use the same language to communicate with you ? And what about the language you use to communicate with them ? When we started to post on this blog, we had messages from our French alpha testers telling us that they would like to participate to the blog (leave comments etc…) but they were not comfortable enough to write in English. I imagine then that if you want to get the maximum from your users you need local people to manage your local communities.
Finally, being global also implies to be aware of what is happening in your sector…globally. That means being aware of the new local trends, local emerging competition, local partnership opportunities… And I don’t mention the challenges in being global in sales…
That is why I am convinced that all the actions taken to gather and build this European community are very important. They create the bridges that are needed to bypass the limits of location, culture and languages to makes it possible to access to our huge European market. They give the opportunities to meet the local people that will help you in being global.
We are taking the opportunities to all these actions to be part of this emerging community (many thanks the very active Seedcamp team that organized amazing events all accross Europe and to Mike Butcher and his initiative of Techcrunch Europe) and will make all that we can to help to create, reinforce and tighten it.
PS: By the way you can find below my pictures of the event.
