Author, Eugene Ernoult, CMO at Weglot
When companies target a new market, they often fall into the trap of scaling investment before understanding that region’s differences and nuances. This can make international expansion more expensive, with budgets spread too broadly rather than focused on the right audiences. The recently finalised €5bn Scaleup Europe Fund may give businesses more money to invest, but funding alone isn’t the answer. What matters is having the right approach to turn that investment into sustainable growth.
Instead, businesses should adopt a community-first strategy. Rather than reaching out widely across a new market, they should focus on building genuine connections with a smaller number of relevant people. This could be anything from joining an existing local ecosystem or running a Slack or Discord community where members can ask questions and share advice, to hosting private AMAs and meetups and showing up at industry events. Ultimately, it’s about getting a chance to test products amongst relevant audiences, learn about the market, and build credibility.
By investing in those relationships early, businesses can build an audience that already knows and trusts their brand before they launch.
Build local understanding before scaling sales
Although a community-first approach may initially take more time, it gives businesses a chance to understand what new customers value. Businesses should start by targeting a smaller group of relevant people and using those relationships to learn before scaling outreach.
Glossier is a good example of the value of building a community early. Before launching the company, founder Emily Weiss built an audience through Into the Gloss. The blog’s active comment section gave her insight into what consumers wanted, helping to shape Glossier’s products and positioning before the brand launched. It shows how a business can use community insight to test its assumptions and respond to genuine customer demand.
And CMOs are recognising the value of this approach, with 89% believing that communities outperform all other channels for building trust and loyalty.
Take for example, Notion’s expansion into France shows how a fast growing SaaS company can scale community across a market. Rather than beginning with broad sales outreach, the company invested in the local startup ecosystem. It built relationships with select companies, including those that weren’t ready to buy yet but might be in the future. Notion also gave community members the building blocks to host their own events, including food, beeverage, and access to co-working spaces.
When Notion eventually expanded its commercial activity, it was entering a market where prospective customers were already familiar with the brand.
Entering a new market
When it comes to entering a new market, the relationships that businesses develop can also establish local credibility and reveal how people actually use their products. Over time, those relationships can create a network of advocates that help sustain awareness as the business grows.
Community activity can help a business build credibility before it has a sales team on the ground. Recommendations from local users, participation in relevant events, and market-specific stories can show that a business understands the people it hopes to serve. This can make later commercial conversations easier.
Those relationships can also give businesses direct feedback from the people using the product. They can reveal differences in how people work, what they expect and how they make buying decisions that desk research may overlook. Businesses can use this feedback to refine their language, messaging and content, giving potential customers the information and reassurance they need.
Finally, engaged community members can become advocates: sharing useful content, recommending the product to peers, and explaining its value in a way that fits the local context.
How can businesses put this into practice?
From our own experience and conversations with other founders, we know that many companies treat international expansion as an all-or-nothing investment rather than starting by testing demand. The same product will not always be understood or experienced in the same way everywhere, so businesses need to keep listening and adapting without creating unnecessary complexity for each market.
A few lessons stand out:
- Assume you know nothing
What works in one country might not work in another. That sounds obvious, but many companies overlook how different markets can operate. They use the same sales channels and the same messages and expect customers to respond in the same way.
Before committing to expansion, businesses should begin by understanding what is different about the market. In Germany, trade shows and physical presence are important for building relationships. And in the UAE, press presence is highly valued, with locals having a 59% trust rate in traditional media.
This isn’t something that can be learned through desk research alone. Local meetups, roundtables, and conversations with prospective customers create a faster feedback loop. They help businesses identify pain points and understand what makes a new provider trustworthy.
- Give before you ask
If the only reason you’re building a community is to get something out of it, people will notice. They’ll have little reason to stay engaged. People need a clear reason to participate before a business asks them to share feedback, make introductions, or recommend a product.
That value should connect to a problem the community already has. It might take the form of commercial introductions, practical expertise, career development or mentoring.
A good example is Salesforce’s Trailblazer Community, which provides members with free certifications and career credentials that demonstrate their expertise to employers.
Once a business has helped create something useful, requests for feedback or advocacy become a more natural part of the relationship.
The value of community-led expansion
Building a community isn’t something that happens overnight. It takes time.
But that time can be well spent. Entering a market with the wrong proposition and trying to course-correct after hiring, launching and spending heavily can be far more difficult.
Businesses still need to understand the difference between markets, identify pain points, and build relationships with prospective customers. A community-first approach can help them do that before making a much bigger commitment.
Funding can accelerate expansion, but it can’t replace local understanding.