Jason M. Lemkin argues that SaaS companies should localize their products early in the revenue cycle. Drawing on his experience running Adobe Sign/EcoSign while competing with Docusign, he recounts forcing full localization of a two-byte app around $3–4M in revenue after top customers (e.g., Facebook, Groupon, Google, Twitter) requested localized interfaces for international contracts; this drove wins with global sales teams.
Chapters
I do ask a lot of CEOs that I don't do that many CEO interviews, but I do ask them and I found that I'm shocked how late. A lot of SaaS companies localize at all levels. Back in the day when I was running Adobe Sign Ecosign and we were competing with Docusign, we fully. And it was a pain, right? We fully localized a 2 byte app all across every piece of it in every language under the world and we did it around 3 to 4 million in revenue. And the reason we did it, I had to push the team to do it. As a CEO, the team didn't want to do it. They didn't see it. But when I started meeting with our top customer, when I started, we had a lot of tech customers back in the day. So we had Facebook and Groupon and Google and Twitter and their sales teams were using us back in the day. And they said, I'm sending contracts to India, or maybe not India, I'm sending contracts to France, I'm sending contracts to Germany, I'm sending contracts to Korea. And it would be great if the all of the interface was localized. Okay. And we quickly realized we could win tons of deals in tech if we did this. So I forced the team to do it. And then we went on a run where we won like every sales team that was tech focused, that had a global salesforce, right? We just won every deal. So that's, I thought that's what everybody should do sometimes around 3, 4, 5.
