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Have you validated your MVP? (ie acquired enough initial users to know that this is a viable business idea, and commit the next few years to it). If not, then do not worry about internationalization at all, and do just English. Validate your MVP first. At this stage, you’re trying to find people who have a pressing, immediate problem to solve - and even if some of them are not native English speakers, it shouldn’t be too much of a deterrent because your product will still be a godsend to them. If you have already validated your product, or when you have done so, but it is not immediately clear what languages besides English you should pursue, then I would recommend still picking a second language to make sure that your codebase has basic, initial support for multiple languages. If you are not in a primarily anglophone country, or members of your founding team are native in another language, then pick that one (it’d be dangerous to pick a language you have no familiarity with, as a team, because high quality translators are hard to find, and translators who can work with your designers to address more subtle cultural details are close to impossible to find). This won’t solve all your problems - for instance if you support English and Spanish out of the box, but a few years later you realize you need to support Hebrew, you’ll likely have work to do to support a right to left script. But at least your codebase will have initial support for more than one language, which will make the effort a little less insane. |