 Hello everyone, I'm happy to see you all joining this webinar today. We are going to talk about the growth and about the localization and how you can use localization as a growth lever. So without further ado, let's start. I'm Alexander, and I'm a member of VADETEIS, a VADESHES product of VADETEIS. I will stop now. I guess I lost more than 90% of you at this point because I was speaking in Latvian, which is my native language. And that shows you how important it is to localize your product, localize your experiences because otherwise you can be missing out on a big chunk of your audience. So now let me introduce myself in English language. So my name is Alex. I am a lead product manager at Localize, which is a localization platform. And today I'm going to talk to you about the localization as a growth lever. There are a couple of takeaways that I want to focus on and I want to make sure that you get out of this webinar. First, what growth means for your product and how to actually achieve it. Second, why international expansion and product localization should be part of your growth strategy. Third, what effective localization process looks like and how to avoid some common mistakes, how to actually get started with it. And last but not least, how localization accelerates growth in three industry leading tech companies. So let's speak about growth now. What's growth? Growth consists of three main inputs. And by the way, this is not something that I invented. I'm using this framework from Reforge, which I highly suggest everyone to take a look at. They are doing an amazing job at spreading out the word about the product management and about the growth in particular. So your core growth engine is built on these three pillars, acquisition, retention, and monetization. And previously, you could have been looking at the growth in terms of the funnel. So all we know this AARRR funnel. But we encourage you to take a look at the growth from the compounding loop perspective because eventually your growth engine, which as a set consists of acquisition, retention, and monetization is a combination of a number of compounding loops that they compound and they produce more growth as a result. So looking at the acquisition, what is the acquisition? Acquisition is basically it arrives from the marketing channels, but not only your product also can be a source for the acquisition. It tells new people about your product that it exists and that it can solve their pain. And that's how you attract more people to use your product. Retention is responsible for making sure that your users return to use your product. They are engaged with it. They keep on using it. And it's also an output in itself. It actually consists of three inputs, which is activation, how users are activating within your product, when they are reaching this aha moment, when do they understand that it allows to solve a specific problem, engagement, how you can make sure that they keep getting back to your product after they eventually got the value, and resurrection. It's about whenever you, for whatever reason, you might have some dormant users who stopped using your product, how you can make sure that you can pull them back, how you can win them back to make sure that they can continue using your product. And last but not least is monetization. It's about converting your active user base into the paying customers or finding some new ways to attract more revenue from existing audience. So think about upstills to hire plants or think about the cross-stills to other complementary products that you potentially can have, and so on and so forth. So let's remember this core growth loop and this three main inputs that the loop is based on. Now let's take a look at the McKinsey seven degrees of freedom of growth. And that's basically a framework that I won't go into too much details, but I highly recommend everyone reading a bit more about it. So once you know what is the core growth engine of your product, you need to think about the different tactics and strategies that you can deploy in order to make sure that you can get this growth. And today I'm going to talk about the seven principles, not from the theoretical perspective, but more to kind of show you how they can be applied to a real-life context. And I will be using Notion as an example. I hope everyone is familiar with what Notion is. It's a popular note-taking and project management tool. And let's take a look at Notion through the plans of these seven points that you see on the screen. So first one is selling existing products to existing customers. So for example, we know that there is a lot of users who use the personal plan of Notion to manage some day-to-day things from their personal lives. So let's target those who have registered with the company email address and they are using the personal plan. And let's try to upgrade them to the team plan in order so that they can use it in the business context in order to make sure that they can use it in their workplace. So that's number one. Number two, acquiring new customers in existing markets. We can target the same cohort by offering them a personal pro plan if they encourage to use within their organization by inviting five users to try the team plan, for example. So that's kind of another tactic that you can deploy in order to acquire new customers, but like in the existing markets. Third, creating new products and services. So in this case, for example, let's say that Airtable, which to some sort of extent competes with Notion, is increasing in popularity. And we could develop a table-based view to decrease users' loss to Airtable. So that could be something that we can do. Developing new value delivery approaches. Let's explore new sales channels that we can use. Let's explore the partnership program. Let's explore the consultants that we can work with who can help sell Notion as a product. Five, moving into new geography, something that we will focus on heavily today. So Notion's expansion to Japan was very successful. And now using the same model, you can run the growth experiment to go into the South Korea because you know that there is a large number of customers that are based there. So that's something that you can use in order to generate more growth. Sixth point is creating a new industry structure. So think about partnering with Slack and packaging two tools for a reduced price. This could be mutual beneficiary for both for Slack and for Notion. And that's the way you create a new industry structure. And last but not least is opening up new competitive arenas. For example, targeting universities by offering a reduced price to academics and students. And this could encourage the stickiness among the next generation of tech employees because the Notion will be already embedded into their life eventually. So these are seven examples. Again, for the sake of today's conversation, we will be focusing purely on one. And this is moving into new geographies and how localization can help with that. But before I dive into that, I wanted to show you this chart. This is the growth in monthly active users of Facebook. And where you see this big spike, guess what's happened there, right? They started localizing their platform and that resulted in massive growth in terms of their active user base. If we look at some other companies, big digital companies like Digital Ocean, HubSpot, Salesforce and Slack, the numbers that you see on the screen represent the share of growth that is coming from outside of their home market. So this is huge for all of them. And I was looking at one report where CEOs have been asked about the international expansion, whether it was part of their strategic growth planning or not. 44% of them highlighted that new customer acquisition is the main reason for expanding into new geographies. And 41% of them said that it was key part of their strategic growth planning. So it's not a question of if it's a question of when you should start localizing. And if we go back to our growth engine and to our three loops, we can think about how localization can help with all three acquisition, retention and monetization. And in this slide, as you can see, I've kind of put this into three buckets. First one is awareness and consideration when your visitors are still, they don't know yet kind of what your product has to offer. They consider buying it maybe and how you can, for example, localize your marketing content. Think ads, website, landing pages, content, blog, emails, to speak their language and to generate more interest. You can also provide some content to your international sales force who can use this localized content in order to better convert the leads. Second purchase and adoption here, we are speaking about the user experience. So your apps, mobile apps, web apps, whatever the product kind of you have. It's your website. It's, for example, you might be in the game world where the game is consumed by the audience from the different parts of the world. So if you will localize the user experience, then you're able to successfully affect the following metrics such as CSAT scores, NPS, customer loyalty. You can increase the activation and retention. You can also generate some upsell opportunities from within the product. And last, which is engagement. It's so consider basically your product was purchased. The person engages with your product. But I personally, as someone who uses a lot of B2B sales tools, whenever I use the product, whenever I have the product problem, I reach out to their support. I read their documentation in order to figure out how I can solve this problem. And here, think about the customer service localization. So how you can localize your knowledge basis, how you can localize the conversations happening in live chat and or ticket systems, whatever you use, so that your post-sale cycle is also being taken care of from the perspective of localization. And again, that can significantly impact the customer loyalty, the CSAT scores and the retention overall. And now, kind of, once you know all of this, kind of the pretty, I think, fundamental question for a lot of you would be how do I get started? Because I would assume that some of you haven't really thought about how you can localize your product. Even those who did maybe, you know, there were a couple of attempts, but they were not very successful. And before going into the details, I wanted to say that localization falls into kind of the strategic planning horizon of like one to three years' plans in order to make sure that your localization program is successful. But obviously, before that, there are some steps that you need to take in order to make sure that it will have a positive return on investment in the given period of time. So what are the steps that you can take in order to start with the localization program? First, is obviously research. You need to study and pick your markets that you want to go after. And you can start off with speaking to your sales force. You can start by talking to your support colleagues to understand where does the demand coming from. For instance, there might be a lot of prospects coming from specific geographies. There might be a lot of conversations that your support team is having, where users are reaching out in non-English language and support is not able to support them at this point. You can also look into the existing analytics tools. Look at your Google analytics at mixed panel, amplitude, heap and so on and so forth to understand what are the regions and the countries that most of your users are coming from. And that could be to serve as a first point from which you can assess different markets and try to prioritize what are perhaps the languages that you want to localize your products to first. Then divide those into a couple of tiers based on the business potential and the needs coming from this market in order to make a decision. And another tip that I can give here is do not be afraid to experiment with, for example, if you know that there is a lot of demand coming from Italian market, for instance. Do not be afraid to localize a couple of ads and the landing page to Italian language in order to generate some demand from that in order to validate your hypothesis that it will result into higher conversion rates and so on and so forth. Because it's way easier to do than to localize your entire journey. Once you're sure about the markets that you want to go after, define your content scope. Because once you picked your markets and languages that you want to go after, then it's super important to provide this end to end localization journey because that will result in the way more positive user experience and your program will be more successful, if I can say so. And by defining the content scope, I think about, again, you have your product, you have your websites, you might have some landing pages that are used in paid campaigns. You can have the product documentation that I talked about a bit earlier, emails, notifications, some legal documents and some content for your sales force to be working with. And a lot of other things that need to be carefully analyzed in order to understand what we have at our hands that we need to actually be localizing in order to go after a new market. Then form a core team and a workflow and here I cannot stress enough on this point. It's super important to involve a lot of different stakeholders who will have, who will affect your localization program, basically. Think about developers, because if your product is not yet internationalized, then there's something that we need to do and we need to really set the timeline when this can be done. And without them, I've seen so many times the localization program just really didn't take off because this hasn't been carefully thought of. Linguists, your translators, your reviewers, how you will be doing that. And I will talk in a second about the translation agencies and so on. Based on your business model, you can have some country managers who are overseeing a specific country. They need to be heavily involved in the whole process, marketing people so that they can adjust their go-to-market strategies so that they can, again, be involved in the process of localizing their content, like websites, landing pages, blocks, and so on and so forth. Sales executives. So what are this? Do you need to hire a specific sales executives from specific regions? How you change your structure of your team and department right now so that you have sales executives working with specific regions and countries? Legal advisors. So do you need to open a new legal entity in another country, for example? Do you need to know about being tax compliant in specific countries, for instance? And again, there are some nuances that you need to be aware of. So involving your legal people or outsourcing the legal people from the specific markets would be highly desirable. Now, once you have your team form, you understand the scope, it's time to estimate the costs and the timeline to understand how much you would spend on the localization program. And here, you can start off by asking for some rates of translations from different translation agencies and language service providers. And you can ask the rates for the specific language pairs and then you can use, kind of, it's very generic, but you can use a number of 2500 words per translator per day. And you can multiply it by the number of words you have in your content in the scope that you've analyzed. And you can roughly understand how much it will cost you to localize all the content that you want, to the languages that you want to go after. Then you can also think about the additional language services and you can speak with potential candidates for being your LSP in order to understand what are the overheads, like LQA or Linguistic Quality Insurance. If you're working in a heavily regulated industry, that would be super important because your translation quality should be top-notch, otherwise you can have some legal and financial consequences. So think about that, think about the project management overheads. If you're planning to go after like 10 new, 20 new languages, then there will be project managers managing the translators from these languages. So do not forget about that. Technology subscription fees, you will need a technology to be a single source of truth of your localized content. I will talk about it in a second, so you need to account for this cost. Team expansion, again, whether you need to hire someone, for example, localization manager or head of localization who will be overseeing the whole program. And yeah, maybe there are a couple of more things involved, but this is the core of the estimating the costs in this situation. Finding the right technology. You should have a platform that is a single source of truth for your localized content, and you need to make sure that it integrates well with your text stack because if it doesn't, then that's a huge problem. I've seen a number of times when companies were relying on a semi-manual processes, and that slowed down their release cycles, and their development team, their product teams were really frustrated because they were not able to ship new features, new products at the same pace as they used to, because of the localization, because it was just an afterthought. It was not happening in the parallel, and it resulted in a huge delays and eventually became a burden. So think about that. Think about the automation and pre-translation capabilities. So for example, there are a lot of tasks involved in localization that you can just automate, and also you can pre-translate your content using the machine translation engines in order to save some time and maybe some cost so that your linguists work with already pre-translated content. Vendor agnostic, this one is super important. I cannot stress enough on this. Basically, once in the past, you were, companies were going to translation agencies and language service providers, and partnering with them, and they used their own technology, which meant that they have been in charge of your content. And in this case, you want to find a technology where you are controlling your content and partners help working and translating that. And then in case you are going after new languages, new markets, you can go after the vendors who have have a high expertise in these markets, in these languages, but also you can negotiate with the different vendors. You are not locked in with their solution, and then they can increase the cost significantly. Easy to use UI. Localization would be probably something new for your employees, and you want to make sure that the learning curve of learning, the product is quite low. Flexibility and scalability. Again, I've seen a number of times when companies built out something in-house, and then they had to maintain it as they grow, and the amount of content was growing, amount of languages was growing, and their system was not able to cope with that. And it required adding more resources, adding more people, spending more money in order to just maintain it, and it's not scalable. So unless you're Amazon, Facebook, Google, who do have their own proprietary technologies here, I would strongly advise not to go into the in-house solution mode and rather look for a scalable solution that would help you in the long term. Meaning the security requirements, I think this goes without saying, especially if you have highly sensitive content. Last but not least here is finding a proper partner. So make sure you find someone who has enough expertise in your selected regions and languages, something that I mentioned briefly before. Make sure you get some references from the similar customers. Don't be afraid to do that, especially from your niche. For example, if you're working in a fintech, there's a lot of terminology that is very specific to this industry. So try to find a vendor who has some customers from this niche already. It will be easier for them to translate. They will understand the terminology way better. Experience working with modern technologies. It's super important because, again, as I've said, some providers in the past, they have their own technology. They've been using some desktop-based solutions, and so they are not really used to be working with the modern tools and technologies, and that's a no-go. That's a red flag because they won't be able to work with the technologies that would support some points that they made in number five. And then last but not least, just don't be afraid to order the test translations to measure the very quality. Run this past some of your friends, some of your colleagues to really assess whether this is the quality that you are expecting to get from them. I will talk on the high level about how this process looks like. I mentioned a couple of times a single source of truth. So this is the system that you see in the middle. This is your localization software. I use localize in this situation. I'm biased. I work here, but there are a number of other products who solve the same problem. And as you can see, it connects with your translation service providers who can work inside the product, but also outside in their own tools, but it will be integrated with the single source of truth localization platform. Your design and UX teams is super important who work with their Figma, Sketch, Adobe XDS, and so on. And so they will be able to push strings, but also the screenshots to the system to provide the context for the linguists to be able to more efficiently translate your content. Development teams who work with the code, who write the code, and who push it to the code repositories. And again, the single source of truth will be able to speak with the code repositories, or you can also build your own integrations using the API, but you want to make sure that whenever the new files are pushed and they are being picked up by the localization platform and you see new content from your product appearing or the modified content, and your translation teams can easily pick this content up. And then there should be ways to deploy this localized content to different platforms. I actually will show more platforms on the next slide, but to your mobile app over the years so that you can bypass, for example, having to deploy a new version of the app to the app store, but also like your website and the web app. And speaking of the technology, as I kind of mentioned, this is the product that sits in the middle, a single source of truth. And on the left-hand side, we see all the localization translation tools, for example, CAD tools, translation memory, some quality assurance, spelling and grammar, softwares, which do connect with a single source of truth. And again, they make the life of the translators much easier. Either they work inside the tool like localizer, they work outside and this content is synchronized. Content storage, backends, again, source code, repositories, CMS systems, if you're working with a headless CMS or other CMS systems so that you can push and pull the content between the systems, e-commerce, knowledge bases, help desks, and marketing automation for emails and campaigns and stuff like that. And last but not least is translation service providers. So you can work with traditional SPS like RWS or Clara, who work with their own products often and they integrate with a single source of truth. Or you can, for example, in case of localize, we have a mini marketplace to be able to order some translations from crowdsourced spaces like GenGo. And we do also integrate with a machine translation so that you can pre-translate the content. And then once you start working with the localization, you go through different levels of localization maturity model. In the level one, you start with experimenting, right? So you're releasing ad hoc, you're still trying to understand, you know, kind of, it doesn't have like the positive return on investment or not. That's kind of where you start internationally utilizing your product, starting doing some ad hoc localization efforts. In the level two, you already start defining your process. And you start to work with vendors. You start to lay out kind of the whole workflow and the process. You start to automate some routine tasks. And you set some expectations among key stakeholders that I mentioned before. Level three is when you start measuring. So establishing some KPIs to make sure that your localization program really performs and provides the positive ROI. You become more data-driven. Level four is when you start optimizing your process. And you're continuously, really at this point, continuously deploying your localized products or features. And you're improving the process based on the data that you're getting, which kind of you've hopefully nailed during the level three. And level five, five world class, you have nailed everything. And this really becomes your standard business process. And it's very predictable, you know, how to work with it whenever you go after new languages. It's very, by the way, it's kind of, it's abstract, but I hope it provides some hub for you to understand where you're at and what you should be aiming for next. And last but not least, I wanted to showcase a couple of examples of tech companies for whom localization accelerated their growth. First one is withings. So they raised 60 million to relaunch its growth in 2018. And localization was key element of their growth strategy. Right now, HealthMate app is available in 190 countries and 11 languages. Initially, when they've been doing localization, they really struggled kind of with the release cycles. Localization was a burden and was a bottleneck. It slowed down everything. And people were not happy, developers, product manager were not happy with this process. And they accelerated the delivery of new features by 90% using localize. But basically, we find their workflow and they started to use this single source of truth. They connected their design teams, development teams who understood the importance of the single source of truth and agreed on the common workflow. And that accelerated the delivery by 90%. Revolute. I actually personally interviewed the person who from Revolute who said localization was a shortcut to their growth. And what it meant is they used localization as opportunity to predictably grow and they were assessing different opportunities to grow quickly and localization was identified as one key element that they can bring into their growth toolkit and that worked successfully for them. So they started localizing their product in 2017. At that point, their user base was 0.6 million, so 600,000. And right now, five years forward, it's more than 20 million users. They are present in 200 countries and regions. And their translation term around time is 48 hours. So from the moment that you have your new strings, so developer pushes some new code, their new keys that you need to translate, the translation process happened, the revision process happens, and then you deploy it all takes 48 hours. That's really world-class levels. And finally, DocSemi, who went from one to 100 languages in just a few months, they were initially founded in 2014 in the U.S. And now they have more than one million users in 156 countries. The number of the users that are outside of the U.S. is more than 25%. And this share is growing rapidly. And thanks to the, again, this, in this case localized, but like a single source of truth platform, they have been able to save hundreds of hours of work, bring everyone together and really move from one to 100 languages in just a few months. That's a remarkable result. I haven't seen it a lot. So that's how quickly, if you do all the things right, that's how quickly you can scale to multiple languages. And I think that's for today. That's it. I hope it was useful. Thank you very much, everyone. Feel free to connect with me via email Alex at localized.com or via LinkedIn. I have my link posted here. So, yeah, thanks a lot and have a great rest of the day. Bye-bye.