Where Should We Expand Next? A Better Way to Evaluate International Markets
Most teams expand into markets where they already make money.
The better question is: where are we underperforming relative to demand?
We were looking to expand internationally, but the process was messy.
Everyone had a chart. Nobody had the same definition of winning. Conversations kept returning to “Where should we go next?” without a rule for how to answer it—so the loudest story won.
Different teams pushed different narratives: revenue, traffic, strategic importance. Each sounded reasonable alone.
Together they made a decision almost impossible.
Problem
The core issue wasn’t a lack of data. It was how we were using it.
Markets were being evaluated on absolute performance: total revenue, total users, current conversion rates. That naturally biased decisions toward markets that were already doing well.
That approach ignores a more important signal: where are we leaving growth on the table?
Insight
A market with high revenue isn’t necessarily a high-opportunity market. In many cases, it just means we’re already doing well there.
The more interesting markets are the ones where user interest is high but conversion or monetization is low. That gap often points to fixable problems: localization, pricing, onboarding, missing payment methods.
Instead of asking “Where are we strongest?”, the better question became: “Where is demand high, but performance weak?”
What I did
- Built a framework to evaluate markets on relative performance instead of absolute totals alone.
- Compared traffic to conversion across countries; normalized revenue by purchasing power where it mattered.
- Segmented users by behavior and acquisition source to find high-intent, poor-outcome pockets.
- Surfaced outliers where intent was clearly high but outcomes were weak.
- Layered qualitative context: localization gaps, competition, and product–market fit signals.
- Aimed for a clearer way to reason about tradeoffs — not a fake-precision score.
Impact
- Surfaced priority markets that top-line revenue hid—high demand, weak conversion, room to move.
- Shifted the conversation from “Where should we expand?” to “Where can we unlock growth fastest?”
- Informed roadmap choices: localization, pricing, and onboarding tuned to specific regions.
- Reduced thin, everywhere-at-once effort in favor of markets where upside was real and actionable.