Building a Regional Startup Playbook

Steve Blank published an intriguing post on being born global or dying local (read it here). The post talks about a topic which we at Innovation Nest think about a lot?—?namely how do you grow global tech startups outside of Silicon Valley? Steve outlined three main points he wanted to bring across with his article:

1. A scalable startup typically requires a local population >100 million people

2. If your country doesn’t have that you need to be born global

3. Your country/industry needs a “go global” playbook

It is funny to read these three points, as they are very close to the original thesis with which Innovation Nest was founded. Poland with a population of less than 40 million people is by definition a “go global from day one” kind of country.

Working on our investment thesis we have created our own Startup Plybook for going global. We knew that Silicon Valley is the center of the tech world. We knew that the US is probably the biggest exit market for tech startups. We knew that if you dream of building a global tech company you cannot do it without injecting some of that Silicon Valley spirit into your company’s DNA.

Based on these few assumptions we have put together some key points to help us work with aspiring Polish founders who where trying to scale their companies outside of Poland.

We wanted to work with people who:
- had the courage and motivation to work on really hard to solve problems, effecting the lives of millions of people
- in their DNA understood that technology is a global play, and were willing to learn form the best in Silicon Valley
- were not afraid of hard work, hearing NO more than often, and had the ambition to really change the world

After many iterations (we love customer development) we came up with a framework which seems to encompass the most important elements of scaling a B2B SaaS startup out of Poland. Our playbook has the following steps:

1. Create the first version of your product (an MVP which provides enough value so that customers are willing to pay for it)
2. Close a few paying customers in Poland (proves that your product actually works)
3. Get initial (acceleration, pre-seed) funding in Poland (you will need some capital to test further assumptions of your business model)
4. Trip 1 to Silicon Valley (gather feedback on product and business model, establish first connections, understand competition, get a sense of the big vision)
5. Work towards $10k in MRR and ~20% in M/M growth (improve product, test channels, fill gaps in the team, plan growth)
6. Move to Silicon Valley for a month or two (talk to investors, get fundraising feedback)
7. Seed round in Silicon Valley (move the founding team, open seed round, start building US sales&marketing)
8. Scale dev and operations in Poland (you will need more resources to support growth)
9. US enterprise sales, $100k MRR milestone (move into bigger clients, direct sales)
10. A round in Silicon Valley (product-market fit reached, scalable MRR confirmed, time to grow faster)

UXPin (our portfolio company) validated many of these steps - few other portfolio companies following suit. Even though the framework seems to work well, it is no were near being perfect. We still see much room for improvement.

It is good to see that there is a breed of new funds working on similar issues. PointNineCap doing it in Berlin and BootstrapLabs in Silicon Valley. Both have shared their thoughts on the topic, and you can read them here and here.

If you are working on a Startup Playbook for your region/country, please let me know?—?would be great to exchange ideas an key learnings.