Ask HN:How do you know when it's time to expand into new markets? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN:How do you know when it's time to expand into new markets?

2 pointsmsencenb3 comments

It's been about 2 months since I "launched" my first start up with basically zero advertising budget (being a student means I don't have large savings yet sadly). To give a little background the start up is www.adsreloaded.com and currently it is essentially a CPA advertising platform for iPhone apps that pays users to download apps (this was discussed in another thread so I won't go into too much depth here). In the first two months I have seen some growth... about 120 "regular" users, 5 paying iPhone developers, and have received calls from 3 fairly large iPhone firms who were interested in buying a campaign but I had to turn down because I simply couldn't support the volume they wanted right now.

I think one of the big advantages over my competitors is that I can move faster than them into new platforms (I want to expand into Android, Facebook, and blogs); however my initial plan was to build a fairly large user base on the iPhone platform before expanding horizontally.

My question at its core is: How do you know when you should start expanding?

First question: considering the fact that you have a limited amount of time/resources to allocate, how will moving into Android (for example) effect your efforts on the iPhone platform?

Second question: is there some reason to believe that the growth path on Android (for example) would be significantly better than you've experienced on the iPhone?

Without knowing the answer to those questions, I can only surmise that the fact that you had to turn down 3 large campaigns because you couldn't support the volume required suggests that your number one priority ought to be building up the volume to the required level before diversifying onto other platforms.

According to you initial plan, how did you intend to get traction?

My answer, at its core is: unless you are talking about pivoting (which is different than "expanding into new markets"), the time to consider secondary markets is after you've got momentum in your first.

First Question: Initially it would decrease my efforts on the iPhone. But once it's in place, and my summer job is over, I think I will have time to support 2 platforms.

Second question: Yes and No. In particular for Android I don't think the growth path would be different. If I were to expand I would probably expand into facebook right now. The reason being that an umbrella category like facebook will also include a subset of iPhone users. Supporting a big category like facebook apps will indirectly help the other channel as well.

Those are the answers to your questions... and I generally agree with your core answer. I guess my only issue is that one of my biggest advantages as a small company is my ability to be nimble and it seems like I am throwing this advantage away. That being said I'm not sure how much that argument stands up to the argument of "get significant traction in one area before expanding".

I'm not sure how "nimbleness" helps if it doesn't lead to revenue.

Of course, if a large customer came to you and said, "you know, we'd be willing to spend $X, if only there was an Android version", your nimbleness would be a great thing. But being able to develop money losing apps on five different platforms isn't going to help.

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