OK, bear with me here. So, a US company can create a huge market for itself in the EU, but a EU company can't?
Seems that language and regulations are not the barriers here.
Even US companies aren't that "unified", they're hailing from a specific state (often California) and have nothing to do with the other 49. You could easily swap "California" with "Germany".
Looks to me like access to capital and risk aversion are the biggest problems. Always have been.
The UK is by far the best place for a startup in Europe, and I'd wager that will stay the same even after Brexit, as long as every other country has this obsession with saving cash and not investing in risky business, or any business at all.
Localization is easy, getting millions for a startup is hard. And God forbid you fail, you will very likely never get any funding from anyone in the EU and will have to move to the US. Such a waste of entrepreneurs.
> huge market for itself in the EU, but a EU company can't?
Yes, because that US company was already big in the first place thanks to its foothold in the US (a single-language market). The same thing was starting to happen with AliExpress just before the pandemic but I'm not so sure how things stand right now (politics-wise, mostly).
It's pretty hard close to impossible to become a "google" or "facebook" in the local German or French markets big enough to conquer the rest of the continent. Spotify and the rest of the similar European products have had the success that they encountered precisely because they focused on an international (i.e. English-speaking) market first.
I believe it's possible with a way bigger marketing/sales team, from all around Europe, so the product could be marketed all over Europe (and the world).
Basically, I think starting with just one language is a mistake - if you're aiming for the whole EU market, start with as many languages as you can.
Of course, that will be more expensive on a continent where funding is not easily available.
Some resellers, Wish and Joom for example, have ads in every European language, it's the same ad but with different text/voiceover. Seems to work pretty well for them.
Seems to have worked out well enough for Blocket.se/LeBonCoin.fr and Covoiturage.fr/BlaBlaCar.com...
Not to mention Nokia... until bought by Microsoft!
"OK, bear with me here. So, a US company can create a huge market for itself in the EU, but a EU company can't?"
US companies can create massive businesses within the US. They are backed by massive VCs, national press.
Once you're 'big in the US' you can knock out many other countries like dominos - except for those that are protected, or too big, or both.
EU nations are mostly separate. The Swedish market is basically too small to be relevant for most things, to have a credible business model you have to raise money on the basis of 'EU wide' and that's a hard thing to do.
French media doesn't care one bit about Swedish startups, just the opposite, they probably prefer their own.
Ebay and Amazon bought up all their smaller competition in Europe, that same pattern is repeated.
The language barrier is a relatively minor issue, in the great scheme of things. The real barriers are on practical matters on taxation and investment, like the VAT situation. While every country is allowed to have fundamentally different tax policies and regulation, there is no real level-playing field. The rules are still too loose.
We need a degree of fiscal integration at the federal level, similar to what the US have. At that point, smart people running smart companies will be free enough to deal with the cultural-border problems just fine.
Companies that have multi-lingualism built in and are a bit savy about EU-specific contexts do just fine. In fact if they do well in one country they tend to do well everywhere in the continental EU. We're all remarkably similar, despite the linguistic barriers and the remaining chauvinistic prejudices. I'm thinking about Zalando, Vinted, Idealo, ManoMano etc.
Local laws and regulation is a bigger issue I think.
Yes EU unifies a lot of things, but also leaves a lot of details up to the individual nations which means things aren't quite as similar as one might imagine.
Seems that language and regulations are not the barriers here.
Even US companies aren't that "unified", they're hailing from a specific state (often California) and have nothing to do with the other 49. You could easily swap "California" with "Germany".
Looks to me like access to capital and risk aversion are the biggest problems. Always have been.
The UK is by far the best place for a startup in Europe, and I'd wager that will stay the same even after Brexit, as long as every other country has this obsession with saving cash and not investing in risky business, or any business at all.
Localization is easy, getting millions for a startup is hard. And God forbid you fail, you will very likely never get any funding from anyone in the EU and will have to move to the US. Such a waste of entrepreneurs.