The E-commerce Leader

[00:00:00] Jason: Find partners sound simple if you’ve got margin and if you don’t and you’ve just obliterated all of your margin through all your partners and all you’re doing is moving units that have no profit for you. Then you’ve created a system that is eliminated profit
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[00:01:15] Intro: Hey folks. Welcome back to the e-commerce leader. Today. We are talking about Amazon global expansion and today I’ve got a 10 step process to go through to help decide which Amazon international marketplaces you might want to sell. And if indeed it’s right for your business at all there is great opportunity and yeah.
[00:01:32] National expansion, but equally there is a lot of work that goes into it. So making a good evaluation of whether it’s worth it for you, and if it is how to go about it in the right sort of way from the strategic perspective is really, really important. So hopefully today will be really helpful to you. If you’ve got an itch that you wanted to scratch, then maybe you can help give you some structures that process.
[00:01:53] So enjoy the show.
[00:01:55] Michael: Number four is really pick your fight. So once you’ve looked at this to your point, go into one more market, don’t try and do lots at the same time.
[00:02:01] Right? So we’ve already really talked about that, but it’s really important. And the European union, even if you’re based in the EU is not a unified thing. Just like in the states, it turns out that they really different on sales tax. There are different VAT rates. There are different rules. France likes to be protectionist.
[00:02:15] Spain seems to be complicating things right now. So there’s always some kind of nuance going on. So pick one country, pick one marketplace and, and hammer that at that until you’ve either decided it’s not for us or it’s working, we’ve refined. It we’ve stabilized it. Yup. Okay. Evaluate barriers to entry, which is the scary bit.
[00:02:31] Number one is tax probably. You’re even kind of conceptually Americans freak out about VAT just as we in the UK or Europe freak out about sales tax, because it’s just not something in our daily experience. And the answer to that is just, it’s not, it’s a who, not how thing. And please can I just bake anyone listening?
[00:02:47] Don’t go on a freeze Facebook group and ask for tax advice. That’s not a wise idea. It’s either going to be completely wrong or it’s going to be completely wrong, but it looks plausible and you follow it, which is even worse. Just go and pay for some professional advice and think it through really professionally.
[00:03:02] If you’re talking sales tax, really think it through with a professional because it’s a complicated area. The second thing is you gotta evaluate freights. That’s normally pretty much of a commodity, but if you’re shipping from the UK to EU, you really want to make sure that we have, you know, some, some real experts on board because there’s a lot of people who think they know how to do it.
[00:03:20] A third one is translation and localization of listings and the linguistic side. And the fourth one is customer service. In my opinion, I’ve got a language background, so maybe I’m biased, but I think people make too much of that. You can hire that fairly easily. That is not too painful. People think that’s a big deal.
[00:03:36] I don’t think it is.
[00:03:36] Jason: One, that’s not on your list that would be interested to hear your thought on which I’ve heard Kyle say before his legal entity, you know, do you need a business itself in Germany or a business set up in whatever country?
[00:03:47] Michael: Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, that’s really one for the lawyers to Milo for, I suppose I would say my experience with, if you’re UK based and you want to sell in America, you don’t probably need a us entity.
[00:03:57] And I would argue that you probably do not want to be getting USFC because California, particularly, but other states, as well as starting to come after people for all kinds of taxes, I had never heard of in my life. And I’m not sure I’d want to be overexposed to that, to be honest. So most of the time UK entities seem to work in smash cut.
[00:04:13] Well, various America has a kind of alphabet soup of legal entities. So I’m wondering, going to go into that, but maybe I think that’s less likely to be the case than you might think, but you’d have to talk to a lawyer, I guess,
[00:04:26] Jason: what steps.
[00:04:27] Michael: Contact or find partners. So this is the who, not how piece, what existing partnerships do you have to solve issues already?
[00:04:32] And how quickly can you find help? And as I said, just make the offer to anyone. Listening do hit me up on PM or email me if you’ve got a specific issue around tax rates. One of the not because I’m an expert, I am not, but I know a lot of people who are as well, so that’s really quite straightforward, but the quality of your partners is critical.
[00:04:49] They need to know their business because without them, the whole thing falls apart with great people. You just phoned them, they solve the problem or email them or whatever. And then you move on.
[00:04:57] Jason: I think that there’s a sub thread though, underneath that one, that is a little bit of a tell for the quality of your business, which is as soon as you start to say, I need a partner for this.
[00:05:07] I need a partner for that. You start to see that the dollar signs, you know, changing, changing, changing, come in and you’re thinking, how do I pay for all of these partners to help me run this abroad? And it immediately comes back to. Economics of your business, the quality of your business, whether you’ve got unit margin and whether you’ve got a business, it really is a scalable.
[00:05:27] And, and this is one of the reasons why the businesses that have fantastic unit economics, and real, value kind of enhance inherit for you as the owner are much more scalable than ones where you’re eking out a real low margin. So obviously this, you know, find partners sound simple if you’ve got margin and if you don’t and you’ve just obliterated all of your margin through all your partners and all you’re doing is moving units that have no profit for you.
[00:05:58] Then you’ve created a system that is eliminated profit because you’ve expanded it too far with expenses that were too high based on their unit economics, I guess. That’s my thinking there
[00:06:09] Michael: a hundred percent. Right. And yes, everything you said is very, very true. And I suppose the first thing I would say is, yeah, if your unit economics are that bad, then you have a bigger problem.
[00:06:17] This is just a symptom of that as exactly like you said. And the other thing is, to your point of, you know, putting one channel at a time, And assuming it will work, you know, multiple channel expansion, assuming it will work is a great way to add to expenses without adding to your revenue commensurately.
[00:06:32] And as you say, give all your profit to current partners, and that’s very easy to do by the way, the partner who’s taking the biggest profit partner in the broadest sense. You’re you’re what are those little creatures swimming around a shark is Amazon. Let’s not kid ourselves, but also freight forwarders right now.
[00:06:47] Obviously going to take a big percentage because you know, freight super expensive and yeah, you absolutely have to have, an evaluation stage before you scale it. And, and that’s really critical to build in. So that’s one of my steps.
[00:06:58] Jason: Oh, there you go. Okay. Step seven,
[00:06:59] Michael: step seven. So check your resources against requirements.
[00:07:02] So obviously if you have to pay for a lawyer and you have to do a legal and C, by the way, quite likely you don’t, but you know, VAT, registration, visa, compliance, whatever. Okay, go and talk to people and evaluate, you know, get a budget together. What would it cost? And then, you know, add up the numbers and to your point, will your business support this?
[00:07:21] The ultimately will be no, which is fine. That doesn’t mean that’s wasted time because in two years time, your business may be differently placed. You go back to some of the same partners or similar, you’ve gone through the processes that will get up quicker. And you say, right, we’re now in a position to hire you to do extras, but just evaluate the capital costs and the time and effort as well.
[00:07:40] Jason: I love this one. And of course, if it sounds so simple, like, oh, just evaluate. But, but the challenge is they’re fixed costs and variable costs. And some of these marketplaces you’re going to be investing into in the early days. And you know, this is true for Shopify exercises as well, to build a Shopify site for your, you know, standalone brand.
[00:08:00] A lot of people come to us and we’re like, here’s all the expenses. And the question is, do they have the appetite to invest? It’s almost like farming, you know, are you willing to, you know, dig holes. Clear weeds, you know, shovel manure and watch your little baby trees that all feel like total expense with no benefit, grow into big, giant fruit trees that are giving you the, the fruit that you want.
[00:08:25] And the question is how rapidly does that fruit mature and how long do you have to be an investment mode versus a payback mode? Now I would submit to you that setting up an alternate country in Amazon is probably one of the fastest. Omni-channel opportunities that could exist. Cause you know that, you know, the system, you know, the economics, you know, the known that there’s no unknown knowns or no unknown unknowns or whatever Rumsfeld, but, but other channels like setting up a Walmart or setting up an eBay or Shopify, you could be investing in that for years before you break even, and you just have to have the stomach for it, but you also have to understand your math and say, okay, if these fixed costs eventually get to this sales velocity and the variable costs remain the same, I’m going to get to a place where I’m starting to extract more and more value.
[00:09:18] The more my sales velocity grows on these platforms. So I think this is the nuance here in this step, seven that’s it’s a little bit of, you know, go take a math class and kind of a strategic thinking class and really ponder, how could it work if I. 5,000 units on Walmart or 5,000 units in Amazon Germany.
[00:09:37] And, you know, think through that. Yeah.
[00:09:39] Michael: To your point. Yes. It’s strategy and financial literacy are absolutely critical. And when it comes to intellectual expanse, and again, it’s a symptom, not a cause really, if your business is a mess, then you shouldn’t be expanding internationally. You should sort that out.
[00:09:53] And it’s easy to say, and it’s easy to run in a day to day we capacity. I’m going to, I tend towards that and that is, I’m not criticizing anyone, but yeah, very good point. And the other thing I would say to your point, absolutely. The payoff versus investment thing, I would say from my experience of private label, product developments, a little bit different for the wholesalers resellers of course, is that you’re probably going to be.
[00:10:14] Putting money in for at least 12 months for a new product line. Whereas within Sonesta expansion, you know, maybe it takes you six months to get VAT registered in Germany because they’ve got a backlog. We not going to be paying out money constantly during that time in the way that you do with new product development and, you know, putting a ton of money down for capital, of the inventory is going to be maybe a one off cost and then some ongoing compliance costs, maybe it’s 200 bucks a month, maybe it’s 2000, whatever it is.
[00:10:38] And you know, it’s not going to be as big or as nasty in my experience as product development cost. So again, when you’re weighing the opportunity up, that might be well pushing you towards keeping the product offering the same, but expanding internationally because to your point, the payback time might be a lot quicker.
[00:10:54] So the cash flow characteristics could actually improve once you’ve done it. But yeah, you’ve got to think it through. You’re obviously right. I
[00:11:00] Jason: love it. And, and, and the reason I think that’s so valuable is because some of us get to the point where we have these business milestones we achieve, where if we’re fortunate to in the e-commerce space to say, oh, I’m paying.
[00:11:13] You know, lifestyle I’m full-time now with my business. Oh, I I’m full-time plus I’ve hired some people I needed and then any re another milestone. And then you’re like, well, I’ve got surplus money and what do I do with this? Do I just take it and put it in my retirement account or, or to make it work for me in my business.
[00:11:29] And so the investment into your business and other alternate sales channels is an obvious place to consider that will help you expand in the future. Okay. I love this. So what’s.
[00:11:40] Michael: So step number eight is really recognizing that despite all the planning we’ll have done and you will need to do some planning and some spreadsheets, I’m afraid you’re not going to get it right, because nobody has a crystal ball.
[00:11:49] So the main thing is to recognize that upfront and plan to do a market test, to what I’d call a minimum viable launch. Now minimal viable. It doesn’t mean small necessarily. So make sure you’ve got the money for it, but you’ve gotta evaluate the demand. Add on, you know, so how many units are you going to need for starters, once you’ve taken care of tax freight compliance, whatever, add on some units needed for launch as well, and then plan a launch budget, including PPC.
[00:12:12] And this is where to your point, Jason, that if you’ve done a launch in the USA, Amazon, or UK, Amazon, then doing it the other way round, it’s going to be very similar mechanics. And the backend systems work in a similar way. The costs may be different in scale. So the, the cost per click in U S are probably going to be higher than anywhere else, et cetera.
[00:12:28] But then my main thing is do that test launch. And don’t stress about going out of stock either is the Tesla. The main thing is to see, can I get to the point where I sell a certain number of units at a certain price, and therefore once I scaled up forwards and do it at scale, what profit per unit can I expect?
[00:12:43] And is this worth the effort? So that’s why you’re doing it. So don’t stress out about, oh, I’ve gone out of stock. Yes. Well, that’s good because you only put a thousand units into something you thought could handle 5,000 units every three months and you were right. That’s good. Go back order 5,000 units and then launch properly.
[00:12:59] But it tests, launches. An exercise, the humidity of now you do not have the ability to predict the future, so do your homework, but then go and test it and see if so
[00:13:08] Jason: then it begs the question of what we just talked about for which is for that test launch. What time duration do you put on that to say to yourself, this is a worthy amount of time that I really understand what’s happening.
[00:13:20] What would you give it in terms of,
[00:13:22] Michael: that’s kind of, how long has a piece of string question? I guess I wouldn’t make it too short. Put it this way. If you’re sick, if you’re not serious, you shouldn’t do it anyway. Cause it’s going to be work and risk. Right? So the first to your point, and if you’re thinking this could be producing a future stream of income for years, don’t, undercook it.
[00:13:39] Maybe you allow three months, maybe it’s six. It just, okay. But
[00:13:43] Jason: let me challenge your thinking. Wouldn’t you want to get through like any kind of big holiday sales thing? Like, I mean, if you’re you’re in European marketplaces, do they have. Like a Christmas time Q4 push, just like in the U is black Friday cyber Monday exists beyond just the,
[00:14:01] Michael: you talk about the timing as in which part of the season to launch.
[00:14:04] And then I would definitely avoid Q4 because if you’re coming from nowhere and everyone’s spending like crazy on PPC and ranking really hard because they’re selling very quickly, it’s going to be hard to make it then. So if that’s the question, that’s a simpler one to answer. I would launch. But any anywhere outside Q4 or whatever, the equivalent in gardening, for example, I know that, you know, February, March, April is a big, big time, so Lord’s outside of peak season.
[00:14:24] Jason: So, but to my point, the duration of your test and you comprehend the S the, the peak and the. Potential
[00:14:34] Michael: for a month. You’d have to have a 12 month launch because you’d need to get the, you need to get seasonal data. I suppose I’m talking about a smaller launch than that. And I suppose that in which case, yeah, UK, you’ve got account for seasonality, which is really hard to do.
[00:14:48] And there’s a lot of variability chucked into the equation by COVID right now. So to your point, I guess that this is a highly scientific test. I’m not saying you should ramp up from, you know, three months tests where you put 300 units into ordering 30,000 units. I mean, I guess take it in stages is maybe an in-between thing.
[00:15:03] I’m more in favor of, of it’s rooted answers to things rather than planned answers. If you see what I mean. Cause I don’t think, you know, necessarily, but I would say try three months, if that works, put what you think is six months where the stock, if you keep going out of stock, then go, okay, let’s ramp this up.
[00:15:19] Maybe get some investment partners or debts or whatever’s appropriate once you’ve got something proven and really ramp it up. But I would take it in stages I suppose to put it simplistically. Okay. What’s the. Step nine is evaluate that’s really, really important. You made your plan, then you’ve done a Tesla and there’s no point in doing a test unless you evaluate the numbers.
[00:15:37] And also the stress level. You’ve got to be evaluation for this sort of stuff. Isn’t just about money because some people stress out about things being out of. It’s a sort of mental thing that’s outside of their country. They stress about their inventory being more under risk somehow, or, you know, dealing with different languages or different cultures.
[00:15:55] Some people are fine with that, but stress out about inventory. I’m more like that. So, you know, mostly it’s a financial decision, but it’s also about focus and mental focus and stress. And you’ve just got to evaluate, is the game worth the candle? You know, did we make it profit or we it’s just a test launch.
[00:16:10] You know, do our figures tell us that once we scale this up, we should be able to do this profitably. And to the point you were making a three months launch or whatever it is is not really long enough to thoroughly answer that question, but it gives you a good, you know, some evidence in that direction.
[00:16:23] And so I guess that the next thing is really step time, which is double down, but don’t like quadruple down. So, you know, maybe, you know, add more inventory, but don’t abandon your beloved, you know, primary market that’s up and proven and running, and troubleshooting the issues, find new partners. If you’ve discovered that there was some, some box you didn’t take for some country or maybe change partners, if one of them turned out not to be that good and then budget for the next phase of expansion and allocate the resources and make sure by the way it sounds so simple, but don’t double allocate the resources.
[00:16:56] You can’t use the same money twice to expand your product lines in America. And then also expand into Japan. If you collocated it for one resource, make sure you’ve got some way of, of. Showing that in the system for yourself and for your team as well. I love
[00:17:09] Jason: this, this phrase you had in the show notes, which is double down or delete, and that’s really the heart of the challenge, isn’t it?
[00:17:16] Because what will most likely happen is you won’t hit a grand slam home run to use American baseball terms, or you won’t also have a massive implosion or failure. You’ll have some results that somewhere in the middle, and that’s the hardest, you know, type of result to evaluate, which is like, is this working kind of, well, do you kill it?
[00:17:37] I don’t know. And so that’s the hardest thing to really think through how do you double down or delete in that context and to your prior point about evaluating? I think that the thing to to think through at this stage is probably to the old Chinese proverb by heard wants is before you begin any game, understand the rules and how long you’re going to.
[00:18:01] And or something like that. I don’t know that it’s really the phrase, but that’s how I remember the phrase, but understand the rules and, and, and how long you’re going to play. Before you, before you start, because, you, you’ve got to create your own evaluation criteria. And if you don’t do that, you’ll do it.
[00:18:14] Your stomach will do it for you eventually, you know, your intuition will kick in and be like, I don’t know if this is worth it. Well, why don’t, you know, cause we didn’t ever think about whether you, it, but at some point the truth will come up from within you. And you’ll say this doesn’t seem right anymore, but those are the hardest things to decide upon because maybe you’re just needing to wait for the ugly duckling to turn into the golden.
[00:18:41] I
[00:18:41] Michael: said to this point, it says strategic slash thinking self-management point, which is really fascinating. I’m glad you brought it up. There’s a great book called the dip by Seth Godin. He’s always a good thinker. And one of the lovely things I’ve experienced about his thinking is the, the older he gets, the more content you boost.
[00:18:56] I think the more profound his insights are, which is not common. Most people just recycle the same thing for 20 years. And the dip is really instincts about strategic quitting. He says at the beginning of the book, I think we’ve met. I don’t know if we’ve done a podcast about it. He says, when is quit early and was quit.
[00:19:08] Often, the key is to plan whether you’re going to quit, because if you just follow your gut, it may be. And if you’ve got a refined entrepreneurs intuition, as you have probably Jason, after, you know, over a decade in the business, maybe your guts telling you a truth, but it can be that it’s your fear speaking.
[00:19:25] And if you haven’t made a plan for what our objective criteria going and how much money will we spend before we shut this down, how much time are we going to give it to your question of, should it be three months? I don’t know. Each individual business has owner has to decide, but you should put a number down time and a budget limit.
[00:19:42] And if you say, okay, we tried to expand into Germany. We spent a hundred thousand dollars in a year. Are we going to shut it down at that point that you should decide before you go into the test phase before you even launch the thing. Where do you cut it off? And I think in objective decision advanced doesn’t mean you can’t, you won’t it when you’re there.
[00:19:58] But I think that helps guard against you being different by fear, because at some point is going to be a lot of hassle and you’re going to hate it because that’s just reality of certain things deal with tax authorities and freight. They’re not fun things. Yeah. Yeah. I need
[00:20:12] Jason: to read that book. I love Seth Godin, but I’m pretty sure I disagree.
[00:20:15] I would S I would frame it this way. I think winners, are brutally honest and pivot relentless. To solve. What’s not working and maybe that’s called quitting. I don’t know. But I think if you think of people who are trying to do really complicated things, Thomas Edison, with the light bulb, or, you know, Elon Musk with landing a spaceship or a rocket on a pad in the middle of the ocean successfully, they’re, they’re brutally honest and have a system in their mind of iteration that allows them to go from this is horribly not work.
[00:20:52] You know, this is working horribly or it’s not working to what to change, what to change, to how to make the change and how that rapid iteration that maybe that’s the quitting the one way and, and trying a different way maybe to use that, dip idea. But I think that’s what I see people do. And other people who are less successful in my view are willing or more comfortable ignoring probably.
[00:21:20] And kind of being like, I just, you know, I’m going to set that over on the side here and not think about it. Whereas super successful people were like, I’m going to take that apart and I’m going to make that thing work. And I’m just going to keep grinding until I figure out why it’s not working and whether it can work.
[00:21:38] And really, you know, I just, I hate the idea of people quitting on stuff too. Hmm. Yeah.
[00:21:43] Michael: Well maybe the nuance there is the word equip may mean different things to different people. Pivot is maybe if you read the book, I mean, it’s worth reading. I’m unlike, you can evaluate for yourself and you may disagree and perfectly rightly so, but I think, yeah, pivoting is one way of looking at it.
[00:21:59] The other thing is, yeah, I’m not suggesting you just throw in the towel just because it’s a little bit harder and takes longer than you think and costs more than you thought, because that’s just normal for any new project, frankly, isn’t it, it’s more a question of not, you know, being bloody-minded and just keeping going for hours and decades, when you should take the hint that Germany isn’t for your product or Japan, certain products resonate in certain marketplaces, and sometimes the marketplace will give you the feedback.
[00:22:23] And as you said, if your guts telling you this isn’t working, that doesn’t mean you should give up an in slash expansion. It just may mean that product in that marketplace. Isn’t the thing. But you should maybe try the same products in a different marketplace and pivot. So, so that point in the end, it comes to the same kind of things.
[00:22:37] Really. Wow.
[00:22:38] Jason: This is just fantastic, man. This is probably going to be two episodes in our podcast. Before we wrap up, I want to just ask you to do to two things. One is to do a recap of the 10 steps, but also we usually have a set of resources in our show notes, and I’ve just noticed that your set of resources.
[00:22:55] You should just rattle them off to everybody. As we talk it through, just give us a overview of the, you’ve got like seven or eight bullet points here of resources. You want to do those and then do a summary and we can wrap.
[00:23:08] Michael: Perfect. Yes. So, our friend, Kevin Sanderson break it on international expansion and he’s a US-based, but he sells pretty much everywhere that there is an Amazon marketplace, as far as I could tell, certainly the usual ones.
[00:23:18] So he’s worth following. He’s got a nice knack of keeping things, fairly simple. He’s very positive to your point that he tries to see opportunity more than the problems. So he’s, you know, very. I mean positive, typically upbeat us kind of guy, guide for that. It sounds like Kyle hammer is your business partner in, in the advisory stuff for, I know.
[00:23:36] Well, this is the man to talk to you about US-based sellers selling into Japan, which is an excellent opportunity to explore for everyone. It doesn’t mean it will be for you, but explore at least, John Kent of, of rising sun commerce or a friend over in the UK deals with a lot of UK and us sellers expanding to Japan.
[00:23:50] And he lived out there and his wife’s Japanese. So he’s got a very thorough grasp of, of the culture. What will work there? What won’t, couple of other resources, if you’re selling a multiple Amazon marketplaces and keeping track of the analytics, including stock control, which can be a nightmare. As I said, Eva, Docker is very good resource for that.
[00:24:08] Pretty affordable and very powerful artificial intelligence system, simply VAT. If you’re wanting to sell you, if you’re UK based or us sellers setting in the EU or UK, they really are very, very good at this stuff. We’ve tried multiple different partners for VAT, and these guys deliver very consistently, YLC translations from
[00:24:28] I deal with lots of different marketplaces, different translating. And they’re very sophisticated about that side. And then two final things,
[00:24:34] Jason: sorry. Well, the letter, Y the letter L and the letter T Y
[00:24:39] Michael: why LT exactly, right. Yeah. They’re not the cheapest, but they’re very, very good. So if you’re serious, then they will do a good job for you.
[00:24:46] And I would argue you shouldn’t go into marketplace that isn’t a serious looking opportunity. Anyway, I think you’re wasting your time. As we saw earlier, two final things is mentioning the off Amazon expansion possibilities. Paul Sonnenfeld who’s based in Australia of merchant spring. They deal with analytics tracking across multiple different channels, including Amazon and off Amazon.
[00:25:05] And then Chris scrim, gore of pioneer based in the UK, is very good for coming up with ideas for multiple international markets outside Amazon, which is going quite a lot beyond the sort of scope of what we talked about today. But if you’re super ambitious, you may end up with. Being multi, multi channels in lots of different areas of the world.
[00:25:21] And there are many opportunities out there
[00:25:23] Jason: as well. I love it. So we’re, we’ll have all those references in the show notes again on the e-commerce leader.com. If you want to go and just click through, but, but you can obviously Google all that stuff, but to catch the specifics, check out our show notes for this episode.
[00:25:35] Okay. You want to give us a summary of your 10 steps and maybe just the top level reason why international expansion is a great idea for people and we can wrap it up.
[00:25:44] Michael: Sure. So the 10 steps versus step one, tie it into your bigger goals. Make sure that if you’ve got profit goals, medium term, or you’re wanting to exit in the medium to longer term, that it makes sense to add international expansion.
[00:25:55] There’s gotta be more upside than downside. Simply put second one is consider some of the alternatives uses of your cash and your time and your team’s sort of mental focus, which is new product lines versus new sales channels. Those are the classic expansion plays. Sometimes you should choose one or the other, And, to your point, Jason, one channel at a time, I think one product at a time broadly, unless you’re really good at mussels in products.
[00:26:18] I know a few people I trust with that. Number three, evaluate the size of the opportunity. Probably start at the biggest markets. USA is an obvious one. If you’re not selling there. Germany, UK, Japan, obvious ones as well in terms of decent size markets and Germany and Japan are probably. For my money, more likely to be good opportunities, just because it’s more of a barrier to entry.
[00:26:37] Step four, pick your fight. I choose one market at a time to expand into step five, evaluate the barriers to entry. They’re probably going to be tax freight, translation and localization, and a little bit of customer service. Frankly, you can probably get away with Google translate to start with there and maybe legal entity things you should probably talk to a lawyer.
[00:26:55] My suspicion is you can probably keep that simpler than you think. Anyway. Number six, contact or. Partners to take care of the things like that. Number seven, check your resources against requirements, not just money, although that’s obviously critical, but your mental bandwidth, number eight, do a market test or a minimal viable launch.
[00:27:11] How long should that be? Maybe it’s three months, maybe it’s six months, but make a plan and stick with it. Number nine, evaluate the test launch finances, but also mental stress levels. And number 10 double down or delete if it’s worth going into go down into it properly. If it isn’t make a proper decision and to shut the thing down.
[00:27:28] So it’s not floating around absorbing time and energy when it’s not producing an upside for you.
[00:27:33] Jason: Terrific list, man. Wonderful. I really, really appreciate your points of view on this. It’s fun to do this conversation with you. They’re based in England and for the U S listeners to be able to check it out, you know, in our statistics most, The audience is either us or UK.
[00:27:51] I mean, that’s, that’s like, you know, 95 and 90% or whatever, or either one of the other. So we kind of get this dual, you know, listenership. And so it’s fun to have this type of conversation the across the pond, I guess, as they say. So, thank you again for sharing your wisdom and insights on this one.
[00:28:06] Thank you for listening with us. For those of you who are watching live really, really appreciate the opportunity to serve you. It really is an honor. I’ll just make one final call to action. And that is if you have not checked out our foreperson conversation, that’s occurring now every week on the call and app, you can check out the e-commerce leader, call show on the call.
[00:28:26] We just did a hot topic on Tuesday, which was, using debt to fuel your growth hot takes. Yes or no, our perspectives, what we’ve seen, what we’ve done. And so you want to go check that out and go from there. So thanks Michael. As always for a wonderful
[00:28:42] Michael: conversation. Thanks, man. Always an honor. It’s talk it through with somebody with your insights and experience.
[00:28:48] Jason: Yep. All right, everybody. Thanks so much.
[00:28:49]