Marina Shulga, Chief Product Officer specialising in AI-driven education and gaming-tech ecosystems across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Central Asia, offers practical lessons for SME leaders navigating expansion, uncertainty, and infrastructure constraints.

I have spent twenty years walking into businesses that don’t work or don’t exist at all, and turning them into ones that run. Not by importing a model from somewhere else and hoping it holds. By working out what a market is missing and building that missing piece myself, whether it turns out to be an education program, a selection process for new teams, or a working relationship with a government agency.

That pattern is worth examining on its own terms, separately from any single company or country, because founders operating in developing markets keep running into the same wall. A business model that performs well in one country can lose money in the one next door, even when the product, the team, and the ambition stay the same. The reason usually has nothing to do with the product. It has to do with everything around it: how people pay, how contracts get enforced, what regulators expect, what customers have learned to trust, and what they haven’t. In a mature market, the surrounding structure is already in place. A founder can assume it and get on with selling. In a developing market, much of it has to be built alongside the business itself.

Diagnose before you build

My instinct, when a business is stuck, is not to fix the part that’s visibly broken: better marketing, a new hire, a redesigned product. In an emerging market, the failure point is frequently upstream of any of that. A team with strong technical skill can still fail commercially because nobody taught them how to price what they make, how to raise money, or how to reach the people who would buy from them. A funnel meant to select promising ventures can sit at the end of a pipeline that has no earlier stage feeding it anything worth selecting. A platform worth using can go unused because the people it’s meant to serve never learn it exists, in a language and format they can act on.

None of these is a  failure of ambition. They’re gaps in the scaffolding that a developed market provides without anyone noticing, and that a developing market doesn’t have yet. My first move is always to locate the specific gap rather than assume the whole structure needs replacing. In practice, the gap tends to fall into one of a few categories:

• A missing stage in an existing pipeline. Something further down the chain already works, but nothing feeds it teams, applicants, or customers ready to use it.
• A cost structure that locks out the people who need it most. The training, tools, or support exist somewhere, but are priced in a way that only the already funded can access.
• A missing source of trust. No local institution is willing to vouch for a new venture, so capital and customers stay cautious regardless of the product’s quality.

Working out which of these is blocking growth before building anything new determines where the effort goes.

Work across product, expansion and government at once

Founders building businesses tend to specialise. Someone builds the product. Someone else handles market entry. A third person, if there is one, deals with regulators and government partners, usually as an afterthought once the commercial case looks solid. I have found that treating these as separate tracks slows everything down in a developing market, because each one depends on the others landing first.

A government agency has little reason to back a purely commercial pitch from an outside company. It has every reason to back an education programme that trains its own citizens, builds a domestic skills base, and is run by a company with a commercial interest in seeing that base grow. Pulling any one of these threads without the others tends to stall, because each layer feeds the next:

• Product creates something local people can genuinely use, and gives a government a reason to engage beyond a sales conversation.
• Business expansion turns that opening into a commercial structure: funding, facilities, a route to customers and revenue.
• Government partnership supplies the legitimacy, public backing and market access that neither product nor commercial planning can generate on their own.

Holding all three in the same set of hands, rather than handing them to separate teams that rarely speak, is what lets a market open in months rather than years.

Treat government partnerships as commercial infrastructure, not diplomacy

There’s a habit of filing government relations under public affairs, as though it sits apart from the actual business. In markets where the state still shapes who gets funding, facilities, and legal standing, that separation costs time. Governments in developing economies increasingly treat sectors such as technology and digital skills as infrastructure to invest in directly, rather than merely regulating them from a distance. A company willing to align its commercial goals with a state’s stated economic priorities, and to put something concrete on the table- training, jobs, a domestic pipeline of skilled workers- gets a different reception than one arriving with a straightforward sales pitch.

I treat the negotiation itself as part of the commercial toolkit rather than something bolted onto it as a separate function. Leading it requires enough command of the product and the business case to set terms a government can say yes to, and enough understanding of that government’s priorities to frame the offer in those terms. A memorandum of understanding with a ministry or state agency, handled this way, becomes the mechanism that unlocks funding, facilities, and local trust that a private company can’t manufacture on its own, rather than a formality signed after the deal is already done.

Make the method repeatable

A single successful entry into a difficult market could be luck, timing, or a relationship that happened to be in the right place. What I’ve tried to build is something that holds up when applied elsewhere, with a different regulator, a different currency, and a different set of local expectations, and still produces a working business rather than a stalled pilot.

That consistency comes from treating each market as a fresh diagnosis rather than a template rollout. The missing piece in one place might be a funding bridge between early-stage teams and the institutions willing to back them. In another, it might be a way of delivering business education cheaply enough to reach people who could never have paid market rates for it. In a third, it might be nothing more than the right conversation with the right ministry, held early enough to shape the terms of everything that follows. Stripped down, the sequence I return to in every market looks roughly the same:

• Map what already works locally, and what stops there rather than continuing into a full business.
• Name the specific missing piece: a stage, a price point, a partner, a source of trust.
• Build that piece first, before touching anything that already functions.
• Use it to open the next door, whether that’s a government relationship, a source of funding, or a customer base.
• Repeat the diagnosis in the next market, rather than exporting what worked the last time.

My method lies in the discipline of finding out, market by market, what’s genuinely absent, and building precisely that, instead of arriving with a fixed plan and hoping the local conditions bend to fit it.

Demand and talent are usually already present in developing markets. What tends to be missing, unevenly and differently from place to place, is the connective tissue that lets demand and talent turn into a functioning business. Building that tissue, deliberately and market by market, takes longer than launching into an established economy. It remains the route by which most of these markets get built at all.