Why it’s time for app developers to go global Me: And for VCs
We've aimed globally from the first day of iFActuras. But according to investors, that's quite uncommon. And to some, even a bit scary. The normal procedure in Norway is: first get strong at home, and then run abroad. We really started in Spain. It's in Spain we've been doing marketing, and it's there where people are excited about our billing app.
Ironically we launched first in Norway. Due to the goal of starting with Windows Phone 7 in Spain, we launched iPhone in Norway, quietly in September. And just as quietly it has silently grown, so that we now can see that the first thousand customers beeing are going to be reached pretty soon...
BTW - Spain is running even faster.
But when we talk about our launch in US, South Amerika, India and China people don't really believe us. But we are acting on real global plans. Just wait and see!
A post from VentureBeat by Matt Marshall has the whole story. Here is a part:
Ironically we launched first in Norway. Due to the goal of starting with Windows Phone 7 in Spain, we launched iPhone in Norway, quietly in September. And just as quietly it has silently grown, so that we now can see that the first thousand customers beeing are going to be reached pretty soon...
BTW - Spain is running even faster.
But when we talk about our launch in US, South Amerika, India and China people don't really believe us. But we are acting on real global plans. Just wait and see!
A post from VentureBeat by Matt Marshall has the whole story. Here is a part:
A hundred million devices isn’t cool.
You know what’s cool? Five billion devices.
Okay, I borrowed most of that line from The Social Network. But just as a fictionalized Sean Parker was urging Mark Zuckerberg to think way bigger, I think app developers are setting their sights too low when imagining the markets they can serve.
Last year, a tiny subset of world’s population — the early adopters, gadget-hounds — bought 100 million smartphones. These smartphones excite developers, because they carry data plans. Data plans are a wonderful conduit through which developers can serve their content, letting them make big bucks.
But in the U.S., an early adopter market, the virgin land-grab might be nearing an end. In the U.S., an estimated 60 percent of subscribers will have a data plan by 2013, and that’s nearing saturation, at least relative to other places on the globe.
There are more than 5 billion mobile subscribers in the world, according to a study by Chetan Sharma. Which market should app developers be thinking about?
True, most of those 5 billion subscribers are using basic phones that can barely handle text messages, let alone sophisticated apps. But that’s changing. Growth rates for data usage in developing markets are far higher than in the U.S.
So now it’s time for developers to go global.