Soft Landing: Navigating the Challenges of Expansion

The Beginning: How Expansion Starts

Expanding into a new market is one of the most significant milestones for a tech startup, but it comes with unique challenges. It’s crucial to adapt your product or service to local regulations, culture, and consumer expectations to ensure a successful entry. Everyone who walks the startup path knows that expansion is an essential part of growth, but it’s a road full of challenges.

The key to successful expansion lies in understanding this new market as well as you do your initial one. “Soft” doesn’t mean perfect; it means understanding your objectives and executing them efficiently.

Startup: What to Evaluate When Entering a New Geographic Market

Our nearly two years of experience supporting soft landing processes allow us to summarize the challenges into three main topics:

Understanding the Local Market and Entry Strategy

In a startup, execution speed, which is directly proportional to growth speed, is one of the most important attributes. However, to execute quickly, you need to understand both your objective and the market.

Explore the market. You need to know the place where you will launch. A few reconnaissance visits can help you understand the local nuances. Coordinate initial interactions, which can start virtually, then move closer to your clients. Afterward, you can begin the market entry process with a basic understanding of the terrain.

Having local support reduces the time spent in the new market, and if you have a local team, success! But always stay grounded and connected.

Understanding Local Regulations

Some founders believe that only startups operating in regulated sectors need to know the legislation. While this is true for industries like fintech, regtech, and biotech, when entering a new market, it’s essential to ask the following questions:

• What are the implications of each company type? Which one fits my operations?
• How should it be legally structured? What is the government’s stance on foreign operations?This is critical, and many assume that every country is desperate for foreign investment—no. The narrative may be one thing, but execution is another. Verify everything!
• Is everything in order at home? Setting up a business is fast and efficient if everything is in order. One reason we include legal, accounting, and tax support within our services is that when things aren’t in order, operating a new company takes more time than expected, and every helping hand counts. Administrative tasks are crucial, especially for B2B companies.

Cultural Adaptation

Even though we all speak Spanish, sometimes it’s hard to understand one another because every country has its own words and customs. Adapting your message is crucial to connecting with local customers.

There’s an adaptation process you must go through for your product or service—don’t underestimate it; it’s a key step.

Many will say: we use English, and that closes the gap. But no. If you’re in Latin America, you negotiate in Spanish, and you need to understand how the local market operates, starting with communication. You can have your materials in English, but in practice, the local language prevails.

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Overcoming Obstacles

At Boost, we’ve supported various expansion processes, and we can confidently say that each case has its own particularities, which define “success” as the speed at which a startup can begin operating.

Based on our experience, an opening process is successful when:

• There are key connections or leads that justify starting the entry process. Measure the market’s intent and response—market stats alone aren’t enough.
• The startup has a clear leader for the expansion process and a decision-making structure. Organize things internally before expanding.
• There’s a clear roadmap that outlines the steps to follow. It doesn’t matter if adjustments are needed every week; the roadmap sets a direction and focuses efforts accordingly.

Leads are generated while handling administrative processes. Particularly in B2B cases, the sales process is long and cumbersome, and it involves understanding a new market segment. Waiting to complete the process only delays your goals. Success comes when you work in parallel.

Three elements make the difference and complete the foundation: understanding your new customer to understand how you add value.

A Strategic Approach to Expansion

The soft landing process minimizes risks and allows for more efficient adaptation, though obstacles are inevitable in any expansion process.

At Boost, we’ve learned that success lies in quickly adjusting, understanding how your product or service must adapt to the new market. Listening to the customer and adapting the strategy may seem simple, but sometimes habits win out, and startups repeat strategies from other markets, assuming they’ll work again. Avoid these assumptions.

Each market has its own particularities, and the flexibility to adjust strategies and objectives is what sets apart the startups that achieve successful expansion.