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Comment by RyanZAG | Hacker News Reader

Wait, what?

Hang on, this should be the number 1 point of your entire blog post. Honestly, if your post was titled the obvious "Don't make mobile apps only for one region" then you'd be getting a lot of comments saying "Well, obviously".

Seriously your problem here is not that you made a mobile app. Your problem is very clearly that you excluded 99% of your user base. Any chance you can explain the reasoning behind this..? I can't even begin to understand it. Outside of government required tax applications, I cannot think of a single successful single-region productivity app ever.

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I am baffled as well. My brain is hurting trying to understand this decision.

It's a decision that may seem obvious for many, many product categories.

But I can assure you that regarding anything finance-wise, it's simply impossible to launch an app that that complies with local laws everywhere at the same time, especially without proper funding. Take Quickbooks, it exists for 5-10 years, and they're still postponing their launch in the French market. We've gone global since then, and we've grown in 10 weeks way faster than we did in 1 year.

One suggestion: Start thinking about details like foreign laws once you actually start to generate significant profit.

Before that no one on earth will even care about your product enough to sue you.

On top of that it's quite expensive to go to France and sue you there as a foreigner.

I'd think they meant the state going after them. Not everyone wants to be a carefree outlaw.

I'm not an outlaw because I am ignorant of the laws and regulations of every single state on this planet. I put an app into the store that mainly follows Google/Apple policies/guidelines and does not break any laws in my country and that is sufficient for the start.

These policies are reasonable and by following them you will rarely get into trouble in Western countries.

Of course some other country might object, then the app might be modified by me for this country or removed.

How many apps or website would exist today if checking every law everywhere would be the standard procedure? Probably around 100 websites and 25 apps in total would exist because only big corps can afford this.

If you choose to sell your app in a particular App Store, you're submitting to the law of the jurisdiction it operates in.

No I don't, Google and Apple do. They are distributing the app and are responsible that the content is compliant with all the countries where they sell apps in.

Aside from that I don't understand what point you are trying to make here.

Are you suggesting that a developer should not release apps without first making sure that the app doesn't comply with any laws of any country?

It's both about local laws and local accounting customs. They are so different depending on countries that you almost have to develop a separate system if you want to enter another country. Or you keep it so simple that the value added is close to none...

Just a question. You say the following is obvious. How is that obvious? "Don't make mobile apps only for one region" then you'd be getting a lot of comments saying "Well, obviously"

"If you want mass adoption, don't build apps with a max penetration of 1% of the global population" seems pretty obvious. Other variations: "If you want mass adoption, don't build apps only usable on Blackberry".

France is a massive homogenous market with high penetration of their target platform, and large comfortable middle class. It's probably easier to pilot in France than it is in most other markets. And launching globally has non-trivial implications for cashflow & risk.

I'm sure there are some strategic advantages. But when a French-only mobile app languishes, the lesson isn't necessarily "don't make a mobile app".

And it's not something you casually forget to mention in your postmortem (ctrl+f for "France" and "French" in the original article).

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