This article could be summed up in one sentence as "Markets are more complicated than a country so saying you are targeting a country or continent as a market is too high level to convey an actionable plan."
Which, yeah, sure, but did anyone ever think there was such thing as a "every person in America" or "every person in Korea" market for anything but the most universal of basic necessities?
I'm not sure what I was expecting when I clicked this link, but what I ended up reading appears to just be AI blogspam.
Author here. That’s a fair reaction, and I agree with part of it.
You’re right that almost no one literally believes “every person in America” is their market. My point isn’t about what people consciously believe, but about how decisions actually get made once a country label enters the discussion.
In practice, phrases like “the U.S. market” or “the Asian market” often function as decision placeholders. They signal progress, but they also delay the harder choices that determine whether an entry works at all: who specifically buys, under what constraints, through which channel, and what is explicitly excluded.
That’s why the argument can sound obvious in hindsight. Before launch, the country label compresses complexity. After failure, teams acknowledge the fragmentation retroactively.
This critique also applies unevenly. For low-involvement, highly standardized goods (mass retail, commodity hardware), broad assumptions can hold longer. The article is aimed much more at B2B and constraint-heavy products where purchasing situations narrow quickly and vary dramatically even within the same country.
So yes, your one-sentence summary isn’t wrong. The issue is that many teams act at that level while believing they’re being more precise. That gap between intent and execution is what the post is calling out.
It’s strange that the article says the white collar worker in nyc and small business owner in suburban Texas are not the same market. To many businesses they are in the same market. McDonald’s Home Depot etc they don’t make different products for those two individuals
Author here. I think this thread is mixing two very different kinds of markets, so let me clarify the scope of the argument.
I agree with the point that markets are often defined by legal and operational systems — how contracts work, how labor is regulated, how payments and compliance function. That’s exactly why country or jurisdiction boundaries sometimes matter a lot.
Where I think we’re talking past each other is the Home Depot / McDonald’s examples.
Those are low-involvement, highly standardized, commodity-style businesses. Their products, pricing logic, and purchasing situations are intentionally broad. In that world, a white-collar worker in NYC and a small business owner in suburban Texas can absolutely be treated as “the same market” for many decisions, because the offer is designed to ignore sharp differences.
The article isn’t arguing against that. It’s explicitly about sharper products — especially startups, B2B tools, workflow software, education, compliance-heavy or behavior-changing products — where the purchasing situation narrows quickly.
In those cases, what matters isn’t whether two people can physically buy the same thing, but whether the same offer survives the same constraints and produces the same outcome. Authority to buy, risk tolerance, institutional expectations, and default alternatives diverge much faster there, even within the same legal system.
So yes, commodity retail is a valid counterexample — but it’s also a special case. The failure pattern the article is pointing at shows up when teams implicitly assume their product behaves like a Big Mac or a box of nails, when in reality it behaves more like a change in how work, learning, or decision-making happens.
That mismatch is where “same country = same market” becomes dangerous
home depot doesn't have lucatations in Mahattan - I don't even need to check that made up fact to believe it. The market in manhattan cannot support home depot as it opperates in the Texas suburb. Even if they do happen to have a store there it would have to be different.
You’re right that concrete case studies would be more interesting if the goal were to teach tactics or prove a specific playbook. This piece wasn’t written to do that. It’s intentionally a framing piece, not a case study collection.
The reason I avoided named cases is that the failure pattern itself is remarkably consistent across industries and regions. Once you anchor on a specific company or outcome, the discussion tends to drift toward “what they did wrong” rather than the earlier decision failure the post is trying to surface: using country names as a substitute for market definition.
As for the consulting angle — I get the skepticism. The intent here wasn’t “hire us because we’re smart,” but “here’s the exact reasoning error we see before expensive expansion failures.” If that error is already obvious or already handled well in your work, then the post won’t add much value.
Case studies are useful once the frame is agreed on. This was written for the moment before that, when teams still believe they’re aligned because they’ve named a geography.
Author here — this is a great example of exactly what I was trying to get at.
What’s interesting in cases like yours is that population density looks like the obvious explanatory variable before launch, but after the fact it turns out to be a proxy for something else entirely: institutional density, learning culture, distribution norms, or even how people discover and legitimize educational products.
San Francisco and certain European capitals often share very specific conditions: higher tolerance for self-directed learning, stronger peer signaling around education, and shorter distance between “interest” and “action.” None of that shows up if you frame the market as “the U.S.” or “Europe,” even though it decisively shapes outcomes.
This is why I argue that markets are defined by purchasing situations, not demographics or geography. You didn’t find a cultural preference so much as a repeatable context where the same offer could travel through similar constraints and still work.
Your experience is a good illustration of how misleading country-level reasoning can be, even for products that seem universal on the surface.
> Teams that start with translation almost always share the same failure pattern: They change the language, without changing the choice.
Obligatory reminder to the utter failure of Walmart to enter the German market a few decades ago [1]: no respect for local labor laws was one thing (most of the competition openly sharted on it just as well), but what really did them in was the greeters, the forced smiles and the chants. Germans don't want to be coddled like Americans, Germans don't want to be treated like a religious cult at work, and the failure of Walmart to see this lost them over a billion dollars.
Author here. This is a really good thread, and the Walmart Germany example is exactly the failure pattern I had in mind.
What went wrong there wasn’t a lack of effort or even a lack of localization budget. It was that the core choices never changed. Language, signage, and surface behavior were adapted, but the underlying assumptions about how work, trust, and retail interaction should function were treated as universal.
That’s why “translation-first” expansion fails so consistently. It preserves the original offer and operating model and only swaps the interface. But markets don’t reject foreignness in general; they reject mismatched constraints. In Germany, Walmart didn’t fail because it was American. It failed because it tried to export a specific social and organizational contract that simply didn’t survive contact with local norms.
The Aldi / Trader Joe’s contrast is also telling. That wasn’t just better localization. It was a deliberate decision to let the local market define what should remain and what should be abandoned, even if that meant the brand looked very different from its origin.
This is the distinction I was trying to surface: changing language is cheap. Changing choices is expensive. Most expansion failures happen because teams do the former and avoid the latter.
I really don't get why large corporations seemingly don't do more homework when trying to get into a new market. Especially if they buy a successful company to do so, without doing any work figuring out why they're successful, nor rocking the boat.
I worked at one of the largest IT companies here in Norway when it got sold to some international corporation. They drove it into the ground in less than 6 months, selling the tattered remains for scraps to our largest competitor.
In my current job I've seen it multiple times with our competitors, where they're just a shadow of themselves after getting acquired by a large multinational.
Good for us of course, we're now dominating our niche.
> I worked at one of the largest IT companies here in Norway when it got sold to some international corporation. They drove it into the ground in less than 6 months, selling the tattered remains for scraps to our largest competitor.
That's intentional, corporate raiding (or by its legal name, leveraged buyouts and similar strategies). Load the purchased company up with debt to finance its own acquisition, take everything that's valuable (e.g. a specific contract, IP, "rockstar" employees - aka acquihire), sell off the husk to the highest bidder or send it off to bankruptcy. All you need is someone braindead (or desperate) enough to lend you money.
When all you're looking at is one single thing of (relatively) stellar value, you don't need to invest in the rest.
> That's intentional, corporate raiding (or by its legal name, leveraged buyouts and similar strategies).
But that's not what they did as far as I know. They just implemented some braindead policies that caused income to grind to a halt overnight, because those policies worked so well in the other countries ther were in.
The good employees jumped ship early. I had a limited contract which didn't get renewed due to hiring freeze.
True. Interesting as well that Aldi Sud did the complete opposite when they entered the US with Trader Joe's - completely adapting the brand to the local market.
Author here. That reaction is fair, and I won’t argue taste.
This wasn’t written as an SEO play or a lead-gen piece, and it’s not meant to be a comprehensive framework. It’s closer to a framing memo I’ve used internally with teams that were about to say “we’re going global” without having made the decisions that phrase quietly skips over.
If you already operate at a level where “global” is never confused with a market, then the post won’t offer much. Where it tends to resonate is with teams who say they know this, but still let country names substitute for concrete choices in planning and execution.
Totally fine if it didn’t land for you — appreciate you reading it seriously enough to react.
This article is so heavily edited by ChatGPT that every single sentence exhibits AI slop smells. It’s so hard to read anything these days without being put off by the repetitive robotic style of AI.
Author here. Fair enough — though for the record, if I were going to offend anyone with AI prose, I’d at least be consistent and say I used Gemini, not ChatGPT.
Jokes aside, I get the fatigue. The post wasn’t trying to win on voice, just to surface a pattern I’ve seen repeatedly in expansion decisions. Totally fine if the style alone is a dealbreaker.
What specifically made it read as AI-written to you?
I’m not asking to dispute the reaction. I’m trying to understand which parts trigger that response now: repetition, structure, tone, or something else. There’s a lot of ambient fatigue around AI-generated text, and I think it’s bleeding into how we read almost everything.
If there’s a concrete signal you noticed, I’d honestly find that useful feedback.
Which, yeah, sure, but did anyone ever think there was such thing as a "every person in America" or "every person in Korea" market for anything but the most universal of basic necessities?
I'm not sure what I was expecting when I clicked this link, but what I ended up reading appears to just be AI blogspam.
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