Ask HN: Internationalizing your App and facing cultural challenges?
When did you decide to internationalize your app and what led to your decision? Was it a matter of watching analytics and seeing a spike in people coming from new countries that didn't speak English? Or was it more of an effort to reach new markets?
Also, what, if any, cultural challenges did you face beyond adding new language support? For example, I live in Japan and when Twitter was aggressively pursuing the Japanese market, they found that people here didn't use SMS (everyone's phone has email), so they changed things up a bit. And though Facebook is aggressively expanding in the land of the rising sun (recently announced a Mixi--a top Japanese SN--data exporter), their attitude towards privacy might be a big deal breaker amongst a lot of potential Japanese users.
What has been your experience?