And thank you for inviting me to present today from local to global. And um uh let me try this and, you know, 2020 in a nutshell. Basically, it was the best of times and it was the worst of times.You know, we know why it was the worst of times, don't have to go there. But why was it the best of times? We basically uh you know, it was a time for exponential growth on uh every single respecting technology from telemedicine to um uh from telemedicine, you know, to uh edit tech to um entertainment. Everywhere you go, you could actually see the the exponential growth of uh technologies.

And uh if you were uh a start up, right? If you were a small company or a small organization, uh you know, you suddenly realize that you're basically now you have customers all over the world, you know, even conferences like this and Grace Hopper and the Society of Women Engineers, they all grew tremendously, you know, they have now a global audience.

And today we're going to talk about how is the process when you first start, you know, um a a product and how you basically uh jump into uh serving an international market, then we'll discuss, you know, what, uh, what it takes, how does it look like I shared, uh what, what it takes to do am an international minimum uh available product.

How do you go about growing it? And I share, you know, a case study all in 20 minutes. Then basically, if you're familiar with start ups, you know, when you are in a very uh when you first start, you know, you create your minimum valuable product that it just includes just a few use cases. And when you get to um when you get to about $4 million then that's when you basically start to need to exponentially grow, you need to start to show that you have the, the b the the infrastructure to reach the international markets. And this is when uh investors are basically looking for your international strategy, then um uh you know, the technology landscape today is incredibly complex, right? Just think about it. All the different technologies are con converging uh at this point. And uh then beyond uh you know, beyond uh having the money, you know, you basically have to decide what is, what is going to be your exit strategy, you're going to basically go and sell, you know, once you start growing or uh you know, you basically go, want to go and uh you know, keep up the product and grow from the, from the very bottom.

Um Then what, how does that look like when you first start uh working on, on your internet, on your product? Even though you don't even have an international strategy yet, you basically have to think about just creating the basic infrastructure. Then then in um if you think about it in uh the uh in uh your phase zero, you know, you are basically just starting to create like an a minimum valuable product. You know, as you, you start to decide that you're going to scale into the international market, you basically select, you know, a few markets that you want to go in and you decide which uh use of stories are you going to be handling? Um And then you get to like a tier two level, you know, one is like you, you know, a tier one maybe Canada and Australia, you know, just English, English speaking markets, but that basically have different currencies. Uh But in a, in a phase two, you know, you're going to think about maybe the eu where you basically are handling different languages and you know, one currency and so on. And then finally, you know, you basically end up thinking, OK, I'm going to be ready for the world and I'm going to have like all my infrastructure ready to go.

Then with that, then if you don't do all what I'm saying from the very beginning, if you don't do the strategy from the very beginning, you are going to basically have to go back and re refactor, you know, all your code, your business project, your processes and everything to make it actually work.

And, uh, you know, this actually takes a lot of time. You know, I have examples of, uh, actually quite a few companies that didn't think about bring into the Middle East, um markets, you know, and, uh they basically had to go and refactor everything to support by the languages and that took them a couple of years and that's basically lost, uh lost time in a market opportunity.

Uh Then, um and then beyond that, you know, once you start to think about your product, it's not only your application, but you're going to have to think about like the website, your web app, you know, all your operational, your sales, your business processes, legal. You know, if you're familiar with the GDPR and all the compliance uh laws that exist actually all around the world, then you have to think about that. You have to think about customer success. How are you going to be, respond to customer questions and you know, and how you're going to market and pr you know, and uh establishing also different uh different prices for your different markets. And uh uh then with that, now that you have got your strategy that you decide that you basically want to do that your investment, you basically have to uh to go about creating your international minimum viable product, your minimum vi uh MVP. Then for some of you who are not familiar with this uh no, no lecture, you know, N is for market decision, G is for globalization, I is for internationalization and L is for localization. And basically the more you invest in your product and enabling into all the different uh international markets and languages, the more you can scale, then this is how this goes. Then this is the secret sauce.

And um uh you know, the your international minimum pro product has to be fast, has to be simple and has to be good enough. And I'll go into what that means. Then um then you start with the finding, you know, and all about the, the, the NDP S is always focus, focus, focus, you know, and you have to decide what languages and markets and platforms and browser, you're going to be the, you know, creating what uh uh the and basically a use case, a use case can be your first time user experience.

You know, you basically install the app, you go and you do the, the just the absolutely minimum, you know, you enter your name, you enter your um email address and then you may want to select your language right then no business processes. We don't care about that much right now about all the other uh components uh that, that impact the organization. Uh But just the app itself then with that, then you basically defined as I mentioned your user story, right? It's like if you are, if you're going to provide like a default local, it's like, are we going to default everybody to English and then they can change it? So they can basically um uh change it. Uh they can go into registration the landing page, you know, just one feature that we're going to be providing uh that we're going to provide, you know, for international development. Uh that if the user decides to switch the language can, how can they do that? And you know a confirmation email, then this basically this uh with this use case, you know, you basically touch like the D oh sure. Then how do you do that behind the the behind just behind uh the stage then you know, from the starting from the database and all your files and all your notifications, you know, all basically your cloud infrastructure, wherever you're sitting, everything has to be enabled, right?

Everything has to be unicode, you know, and ensuring that have um all the different uh language directories and so on, then we basically are not going to go and try to uh re invent the wheel ideally, you know, we use um a library of the shelf and there's a few, yes, but this library is actually incredibly heavy.

Then if we're just going to do it for a couple of languages or a couple of the markets, then we just use a subset of the library, right? And the same for the platform API then this will allow us to basically just enable our uh minimum valuable product. And you know, we, we end up with our local our app and then we're going to be able to capture some analytics. We do some minimum scripting just to automate, you know, some of the localization processes, you know, use a third party uh localization vendor that will allow us just to, you know, get uh you know, get uh some of the strings uh translated and talking about that, you know, you can do, you can kind of like double cheat, uh you know, cheat a little bit and just do uh you know, Google translate and we all know that it's not ideal, but at least allows you to test um you know, some uh some basic uh you know, scenarios and some selected use cases, you know, use false doors and just do your A B testing.

And uh remember what I said about that, the, the MVP just needs to be good enough. Then this is basically what our fidelity is. And you know, now that we have our NDP, we have tested it into, you know, a couple of selected markets where we have to get some of the analytics. We can basically figure out how we're going to scale and how we have to continue to do the continuous globalization then um you know, we basically, after we implement, we test on markets, we evaluate, we tune and we analyze and we basically have to repeat this a number of times.

You know, when I was at Microsoft, we went from 0 to 100 and 65 markets like in uh uh in 18 months. Then this is how this is the process that you do it, you do it basically in stages and you start just with a few uh you know, with a few languages and then you just keep iterating and increasing and increasing your um your market reach. Uh And then, you know, we need to ensure that we have just some basic tools, right? You know, we have our scripts, we have our dashboards to understand what's going on. We have created this the, the so localization with Google, Google translate, you know, and then we basically interact with the uh translation management system and develop portals. Then all this is integrated into our uh uh international development process. Uh just as an example, you know, I was one of the things I was told I was working with this uh small start up and uh all of them have uh many similar challenges. You know, they don't have the money, by the way, translations are cheap, they never think about it like, oh I can't expand internationally because, you know, more translations are expensive. No translations are cheap.

Uh you know, time uh the, you know, people don't have time uh to spend on the international, you know, the team may not have the uh you know, the the the technical capabilities to do that, right? Because they, you know, they are basically uh they don't know how to internationalize, they are pushed into so many different directions and uh you know, especially ship, ship, ship and, you know, international may not be a focus, right? Uh And then, you know, there's like all the technical challenges uh that exist with uh uh launching an international product. Then um all of them, you know, share these, then you basically have to ensure that you try to skip this and just go directly into the the day one approach. And what that means is that, you know, you basically create an architecture from the beginning that is going to be scalable from day one, you know that you use some, just some basic, you know, uh standard best practices, right? That you train the engineers about what, what it basically um they need to know for enabling the application, you know about UNICO about what they need to do about the string externalization and so on.

And then, you know, understand basically understanding who's going to be your partners or, or partners in localization and also evaluating whether you're going to have it in house or or outside house. And then finally, you know what you're going, how you're going to basically um make this uh uh public, just some basic uh just some basics. Then this was uh the, the, this was a little uh uh start up that I worked with. Then basically this start up was uh based in Poland and they wanted to start, you know, scaling into, you know, some European markets. And, you know, I basically, when I first started working with the CEO, you know, I wanted to make sure that we understood which was going to be our success metrics and under and basically prepare, you know, not only the engineering team but the whole company to uh to be ready for market scalability, right?

Then we decided based on uh some deals, what operating systems we were going to do what browsers, you know, what, what are we uh landing page was going to be, you know, what I was going to, how we were going to be paying for uh in the international currencies, uh you know, and just deciding what were going to be our selected user stories.

Uh And, you know, we decided that we were going to do just some low fidelity, you know, as I said, doesn't have to be perfect in English and Polish just to get the basics started. And then that we wanted to basically automate the localization as much as possible because that's a, that's one area that really saves you a lot of time once you basically write the localization scripts that, you know, that feed into the, the, the D MS. Then uh you know, that's something that you want to invest in and then that we wanted to have a positive impact. You know, I have seen many companies that basically invest a tons of money into going international and then they don't see results. Then we basically wanted to have a baseline and understand what we're going to be our metrics. And then from there, you know, say, well, you know, if I increase the number of users who come from in the tunnel in the web uh in the website, then you know, that is like a positive indication that, you know, we're getting traction in that particular market, even if, even if we are not seeing the revenue yet, you know, that may take, you know, one or two or two years to, to get there.

But you know, this is just an example. Then today, you know, I wanted to cover very quickly, you know, that the global strategy, you have to think about it from day one. You know, you have to start small with your minimum viable product and then scale and that you realize that, you know, if you decide to internationalization, then la later you're going to pay through legacy refactoring because that's like a super expensive. And then once you create, you know, the your basic infrastructure, you can basically go and um uh and scale through continuous uh globalization solutions.