Hacker News Reader

Comment by SkyPuncher | Hacker News Reader

How many companies are targeting their primary use case in Bolivia?

So what? With that line of reasoning, very few websites should care about accessibility for people with disabilities.

Well, this line of reasoning is why accessibility is federally required. It's something that most companies explicitly do not care about.

Probably not many, but there are two good counterarguments to that. The first is because that "primary use case" becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If Some Company isn't intentionally targeting places like Bolivia and instead feeds Big Macs to their website, then people in Bolivia could never discover Some Company's website because of its bloat. Because people can't discover it, Some Company never knows that it could target those people. The second is that not all websites are to promote some product or company, but only provide information. Information usually isn't country-specific, so ignoring the 2G demographic leaves them in the dust.

There are 660 million people living in Latin America, roughly twice as many as in the United States. You can bet that there are companies targeting them. I know a couple and I live in Western Europe, so locally I'd expect that number to be just about as high as in any other place where people live.

Hmm... at this point, someone with an entrepreneurial bent should probably be asking him- or herself "Just how much money is lying on the table in places like Bolivia?"

Wikipedia tells me that Bolivia has a GDP (PPP) of $89.018 billion, and there are a bunch of countries like Bolivia.

If Bolivia is like sweet home, that money is concentraded as fuck so either their schtick would have to be ubiquitous for it to be worth it, or they would be selling to the ~10% richest in Bolivia (which probably have decent internet access).

For all that people sometimes go on about untapped market potential in poor countries, it really isn't that easy when >90% of the population lives on less than 350 USD/month.

Sauce: spent the first 1/4 of century of my life living in a third world shithole.

Well, yeah, you're probably not going to sell many Lamborghinis there (other than to the elites you mention).

On the other hand, Coca-Cola has a presence in Bolivia, and apparently controls about 60% of the Bolivian market.

With 11 million people, that's gotta be a nice piece of change.

If what you're selling is closer in price to a Coke than a Lambo, you probably shouldn't write Bolivia off.

> If what you're selling is closer in price to a Coke than a Lambo, you probably shouldn't write Bolivia off.

If what you're selling is BOTH:

a) closer in price to a Coke than a Lambo

and

b) closer in demand to a Coke than a Lambo

Then, sure, you shouldn't write it off.

However, if you're selling stock-trading software, even for the price of a coke, you might not make enough money back to justify supporting Bolivia.

Cokes, even in poor countries, are still purchased by tens of millions of people at least once a month. Selling a similarly priced item that may be purchased by a few hundred people at most is not the same thing as Coke.

If what you are selling has to be 1/20 as ubiquitous as Coke to be viable, you are already killing off approximately all business ideas.

Is that the right question to ask? Shouldn't we rather ask: how many companies care about users in Bolivia at all?

Bolivian companies I guess, duh.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com