3 ms·

Step 1: Have a version in the native language of the countries you target.

• davidw 20y ago
  This seems obvious, but sometimes I wonder... If you are aiming for a truly pan-european market, that's... let's see: English, Portuguese, Spanish, maybe Catalan if you're picky, French, German, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finish, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Russian, Maltese(sp?), etc... etc... That adds up really quickly. Also, if you are aiming for a comunity, breaking each little bit off into its own language group might make it take longer to attain critical mass. Also, most young people speak at least some English everywhere. On the other hand, you're never going to be the player in a market if you don't do the language - oknotizie.alice.it came along far after the likes of reddit and digg, and is basically becoming the site for Italy. Even limiting yourself to "important" languages, you have English, French, German followed by Italian and Spanish, which is a lot to chew on if you have lots of text to translate and keep up to date.
  • Tichy 20y ago
    I think ebay and Amazon are doing it by franchising?
  • lkozma 20y ago
    I agree. Another issue is that if you do a local version as an outsider, people will be able to tell that something's just not right, and you'll have a hard time competing with home-grown apps, that understand the local culture much better. There must be some reason that in most of the countries you listed, millions of people still use crappy 10MB e-mail services and social networking sites that are local to the country, and got the cultural factor right. Gmail and Yahoo all try to localize, but most people I know who use them are just annoyed by the translations, and quickly switch back to English.