K atie c ouric

Retention and Attention
If you target people in Indonesia, India, or Brazil, the engagement is often
ten times what you’ll see in the United States or the United Kingdom.
You’re going against fewer competitive sources of content and fewer
advertisers from domestic companies. Carey adds that in Brazil, Saudi
Arabia, and Middle Eastern markets, people typically spend four times the
number of hours per day on their phone than people in Western markets.
People in the United States or the United Kingdom may spend forty
minutes a day on Facebook, while the average person in Brazil or Saudi
Arabia may spend multiple hours. The appetite for fresh and interesting
new content, and the propensity to like and share is far greater than in
Western markets. This lower barrier of entry makes it easier to catalyze a
piece of content to go viral in emerging markets.
Popularity Helps Reach Bigger Markets
When speaking to the founders of Skype, Carey discovered that one of the
first international markets they launched in was Taiwan. Although Taiwan
is a small island, it has a market of twenty million people with strong links
to the billion-people market in China. People there started hearing from
their families for free with this new form of voice and video calls. This
made Skype go viral immediately.
If you can build an audience in an emerging market, you can very easily
start to build an audience in other markets. It’s similar to the WhatsApp
example in acquiring users in cheaper markets, building up an incredible
reputation with them, and then using that popularity to reach bigger
markets.
For example, imagine you want to get Coca-Cola as a sponsor or a
client in the United States or the United Kingdom. Going directly is often
impossible. But if you build up a huge audience in Indonesia, India, or
Brazil, it’s far easier to strike deals with the head of Coke in those
countries, which can then lead to introductions to the executives in the
United States or United Kingdom. And if you’re doing well in a foreign

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market, you have proof that your brand or company can drive success. If
you’re strategic and recognize how to maximize and leverage the potential
of building an audience in a specific part of the world, it can help your
business immensely.
Many start-ups believe that success equals raising $50 million from a
VC fund in Silicon Valley, having a bunch of engineers in an office in San
Francisco, and conquering the US market bit by bit. In reality, you can do
equally as well in emerging markets for far less money, and the outcomes
over time will start to equalize.
Carey says that if you want to solve a problem, think of the best
possible outcome and then work backward from there. Ask yourself what
steps you need to take to get where you want to go. What are all the
potential actions that lead to the point you want to reach? Start mapping out
how you get to each one of those. Eventually, a very simple and
straightforward path will form. And using the approach of acquiring users,
clients, and customers in emerging markets can be an unbelievably
powerful tool to get you where you want to go.