Selling a service in a different country/culture than your own is a lot harder than you think. I would strongly recommend that you exhaust your local market (th

Selling a service in a different country/culture than your own is a lot harder than you think. I would strongly recommend that you exhaust your local market (the one that you know and understand infinitely better), before you think about expanding abroad. I'm speaking from my own experience. My first start-up was a tutoring / language instruction tool. The biggest market in the world for this is in South Korea, so we tried to launch there first. Big mistake. A few specific problems: 1) It's really hard to evaluate a) how good a foreign salesperson is, and b) how well they know the local market. Think about it. Most of sales relies on subtle, cultural cues (body language, slight intonations, really specific language), and it's difficult to gauge this. Much more importantly, though, anyone can tell you "oh yeah, I understand my local market in X space," and this is really hard to evaluate if you're not from/in that place. 2) Localizing is hard. Even if you hire coders and designers from the place you're trying to get into, again, evaluating their work is hard. Their work might look awesome to you (if you get lucky), but the viewing public of your launch market might think it looks terrible. 3) Your service probably has great applications around you that you haven't even thought of. For us, our workforce of smart, college-age language teachers, were equally suited for tutoring and and college counseling in the US as they were for teaching English to students in Korea. And the big difference was, we knew the US market infinitely better. These are just things I found to be true in my own experience, but if you want to launch in foreign markets, then good luck and all the power to you. If you do, the one piece of advice I would definitely give you is to find a local partner (someone who has YOUR interests in mind, whether through equity, etc.) and use that person to fill out your team/vet your talent there. This can mitigate a lot of the aforementioned problems.