Local payment methods seem to be a really huge thing. For instance, I'm told that in India most people want to use Google Pay, and even street vendors have QR codes at their stalls. If anyone can weigh in on that I'd love to hear about it.
You don't even need a middleman. Your regular bank app also directly supports UPI payments.
Payment: CC are mostly used for BtoC but if you are a BtoB SaaS you want invoice and a local presence (ie no tax or currency shenanigans for your customer).
Hand on sales: Don't expect customers to sign up for a free plan and convert. Your conversion rate will be close to 0. Mostly scammers. Instead: Contact form, Cold call, go out to events, lots of drinking.
Regarding language: Many people do not speak English. I think that surprises some, but Japan is big and you can live forever happily only speaking Japanese. So if you don't support Japanese it's a complete no go.
More like noone speaks English, plainly put
Brutal! Is that true even for Japanese companies with a traditional sales force?
In no-trust society like India, where fake note, torn notes, fake coins can strike anyone. UPI is blessing to most.
As if the european market didn't consist of dozens of languages, legislations, cultures and histories.
> When should a SaaS company consider reaching out to Nihonium?
Aah, that's what the article is about
Even if you win on a feature matrix in theory (and is your feature matrix actually tailored to a local market!), the general sort of "well, local companies will be more responsive to our needs" is going to be very present.
Obviously people use Microsoft products for example but Microsoft has a _huge_ presence in Japan to support that. I have been on the receiving end of SaaS's trying to roll out their Japan sales strategy, and all the ones that got a nice and strong footing basically hired loads of local sales talent to do it.
Obviously Europe has a lot of fragmented business process things, but I think that many smaller European companies will be pretty habituated to buying services from outside the country because... well, there's no Salesforce Dot Com alternative based in Italy for example
(There are several SFDC alternatives in Japan)
Anyways the short thing is "buying services from abroad" is a perceived risk for Japanese enterprises because they will often not have to confront that issue, because the local market is "healthy"[0].
[0]: People will whine about the Japanese options being worse, but the options are at least there.
Not really. They just use whatever the Americans give them. What are they gonna do anyways? Europe is a captive market. (As is the third world.)
€334.8 billion worth of EU imports from the US
€532.3 billion worth of EU exports to the US
which shows a) that trade is heavily bidirectional and b) that US is importing more from EU than vice versa. So that doesn't add up to support your statement at all.
You are correct that to the outside the EU market negotiates as a single entity, like, say, an interface:
interface Market {
interact(string payload)
}
A consultant like Nihonium or whatever wont be able to help you really. Like any good consultant, they will be there to tell you things you already know. The motivation to do it needs to come fundamentally from your own company.
And even after doing all that, VCs will still undervalue your company vs a similarly sized US company.
sleepy_keita•2w ago