Every situation is different, I don't mean to preach like I know what is best for all startups, so take it with a grain of salt. MUBI definitely has a licensin

Every situation is different, I don't mean to preach like I know what is best for all startups, so take it with a grain of salt. MUBI definitely has a licensing burden, but it goes beyond that, even to very vanilla SaaS. My thesis is this: if you can't get traction in one country, then acquiring customers in other countries is not going to make the difference which pushes you over the top. It may be the case that the country which you can gain traction in is not your own country, which will bring its own challenges but still doable. However, if there is not one single country which can offer you a sufficient market then I suspect that trying to piece together a customer base from many countries will drown you in overhead. You can make qualifications like English-only, USD-only, EST-business-hours-support-only, etc, etc, but at the end of the day each country has its own culture and you end up diluting your effort. This is to say nothing of regulatory or billing issues (note that accepting and clearing payments in other countries is a lot more involved than just looking at Stripe's supported countries list). My experience is that the human mind, especially the software engineer's mind, is very susceptible to building a mental model where going global appears to be a small marginal effort. You can even design your business plan that way and it still looks relatively tidy, but then once you get into the weeds you find a never-ending stream of details you overlooked. I guess this happens in all companies, but if you are serving multiple countries it's just more compromises you don't want to choose between: do I do something that sort of works globally, or something that really works locally? Companies that have some kind of physicality like Uber or Airbnb obviously have to think even more locally to individual cities, but for the average SaaS my instinct is country is the right granularity.