K atie c ouric

Importance of Global for Shazam
Chris Barton, founder and board director of Shazam, explains that when
they initially launched, the United States was not ready for a “Shazam-like
experience.” Europe happened to be more advanced in mobile technology at
the time and the company continues to be significantly more popular in
Europe on a per capita basis than it is in the States. Today, Shazam’s users
come from all over the world. The company is popular in Latin America,
Canada, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, India, Russia, and some parts of Asia.
Barton feels that if you want to achieve a maximum scale of users, then you
absolutely need to factor in emerging markets.
He warns, however, that emerging markets aren’t always easy to break
in to. He has seen that local competitors will often outdo foreigners in those
markets because they do a better job of localizing the business. So if you

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want to include emerging markets in your business, do your research and be
smart about it.
The Power of International Markets for Growth
If you have a product that can extend to other markets, look at global
growth opportunities—pay attention to them, consider them, and put them
on your road map. Eamonn Carey, an early-stage angel investor, has
invested in more than thirty-one companies around the world. He’s worked
with organizations as large as AB InBev and Nike; scaled businesses in the
United Kingdom, the Middle East, and Asia; cofounded and sold a parody
version of 
FarmVille
called 
FarmVillain
in Europe and the Middle East; and
is currently the managing director of the London branch of Techstars, a
worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs succeed. He loves working
with early-stage companies that have big plans and ambitions, hoping to
help them get somewhere interesting. With all his experience he’s a huge
advocate of investing in and bringing companies to emerging markets.
He explains that as an investor it’s frequently an awful lot easier, and
always an awful lot cheaper, to invest in companies in emerging markets.
The companies that he’s invested in out of New York, for example, need a
minimum of $1 million, usually closer to $3 million, to keep themselves
going for around eighteen months. Recently, however, he was in Bangalore,
India, meeting with a very smart six-person team working in artificial
intelligence who needed only $150,000 dollars to keep themselves going for
the same amount of time. From an investment value point of view, you can
often do deals a lot more cheaply in these markets.
He also pointed out that times have changed. Ten years ago it wasn’t the
case, but today the companies he invests in, whether located in the United
States or India, have a similar quality level. He attributes this to better
access to education. Almost everyone in the world can use Harvard CS 101,
look on iTunes University, Corsair, or U-2-Me. Broader access to education
has raised business quality across the world.

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The second big thing Carey notes is the scale of emerging markets. A
media company he developed created Arabic travel guides for cities in the
Middle East. Arabic is the fifth-most spoken language in the world.
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However, less than 0.5 percent of internet content is in Arabic. This
discrepancy points out a huge opportunity. Hundreds of millions of Arabic
speakers across the Middle East and North Africa aren’t seeing enough
content in their own language.
And this scale of opportunity is not unique to those regions. Indonesia
has 250 million people, India 1.3 billion, and Japan has 127 million.
Thailand and Malaysia each have tens of millions. Vietnam has nearly a
hundred million. A lot of emerging markets are huge. If a company can take
the best business practices from the United States and Europe and combine
them with local knowledge, there’s a major opening for success.
As mentioned before, the cost per acquisition can be very expensive in
the States and the United Kingdom, while in Saudi Arabia, India, Ukraine,
Russia, or Latin America the cost per acquisition of a follower is frequently
less than a cent. The same applies for the cost of other key performance
indicators (i.e., cost per lead, cost per share, cost per link click, and cost per
conversion). A lot of people will point out that you won’t make as much
revenue from users in other parts of the world as you will from users in
wealthier countries. Carey agrees that although this may be true, you must
consider your ROI. If you’re acquiring users at a fraction of the cost, it may
not be significant that you’re generating a smaller amount of revenue—just
be sure that the proportions are working in your favor.
Carey gives the example of a company he worked with named Wala. It
was a new bank that wanted to open in Ghana. The company effectively
built a massive Facebook community for hardly any money at all. It only
spent a couple of thousand dollars on ads, and because the cost per
acquisition was so low it reached half a million people very quickly. When
members of Wala’s team went and talked to investors and partners, they
were able to show them their large Facebook community. They had been
posting relevant content about finance and financial inclusion, which were
areas of interest to this community. All Wala needed to do was convert a
very small percentage of its following to actual bank accounts, and they’d
be one of the top ten banks in the country overnight.

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Stories like that make you realize that you can do things in emerging
markets that would cost you millions of dollars in the United States to
achieve. When you look at it this way, emerging markets suddenly start to
become a lot more viable.