united-states, idea, customer-developmentHere is the story; I have worked with different startups in the Middle East many of these startups do not scale in the international scene of scaling. They do not raise lots of money or acquire a big customer base. I argue that startups must sell in the European and the US market, but I found it pretty hard to conduct research on market needs, understand the cultural differences, and market the product to sell in those markets. I claim that a pool of early adopters (testers) will solve this issue, I claim that segmented early adopters based on product they used will make Middle Eastern startups interview and understand opinions from markets mentioned above
I would love to seed this discussion to get your opinions, is this a good approach or you suggest another approach to solve this dilemma. For now I am collecting interested early adopters on http://findearlyadopters.com/adopters/
I’m not sure if early adpoter is a generic segment of people, but rather a group of people in certain segment. If there was a app in real estate, many real estate agents would probably be interested from the get go, thus being early adopters for that service. Same group of people might not be fanatic football fans, thus not getting the beta-version of the next big thing in that field.
Testing target markets by finding existing groups in the desired field ( eg. entrepreneurship societies ) will work on small scale. Hiring a marketing person within target market could help to shape effective salescopy and get some traffic to localized landing page or such.
I hope there will be more discussion and better answers, because this is what I’ve been working on as well. Conquering new continents isn’t that easy after all.
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