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Comment by evli | Hacker News Reader

I am a firm believer Brazilian start ups should focus internally, but be able to be scalable abroad. By being tied to the US market I think we fail to reach the potential our country has.

Instead of simply copying US businesses Brazilians should innovate in markets that make sense for Brazil. Focus on local customers in services that can be expanded worldwide.

To me, simply trying to tie with U.S. businesses will cause Brazil to never develop a strong startup ecosystem as it is seem in countries like India and China.

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I agree with you that startups in Brazil should focus on the internal market first. But Rudi also has a point that for many of the startups here, very few look past Brazil's borders, loosing relevance and being exposed to external competitors once they consolidated their markets outside.

Brazil is rather expensive and an extremely bureaucratic place to start a company in, so there is less competition when starting up. That is the only advantage of starting a business here, so doing one but focusing on the outside market before you validate a business model isn't optimal, you would be better off starting in the US instead.

And if the objective is to make money, and your business is purely virtual (say Github), it makes sense to target the US market instead of Brazil...

> Instead of simply copying US businesses Brazilians should innovate in markets that make sense for Brazil. Focus on local customers in services that can be expanded worldwide.

Interesting point of view. Do you have any example about that in mind?

Brazil is the worlds vice-champion at fiscal complexity (looses only to India). Few things invented here would make sense abroad.

Brazil occupies the shameful 81th spot at the GEDI (Global Entrepreneurship & Development Index). It is behind way poor countries like Bolivia. What Brazil needs is a f*cking genocide, it is unbelievable that a country this blessed by nature can be screwed like this by his people.

By blessed I mean: no hurricanes, no earthquakes, no snow (meaning two crops a year), 80% of the worlds drinkable water, plenty of land, beautiful shores, the list goes on...

Brazil is doomed.

Yet, brazilians have little money to spend, and are amost completely unable to invest (because of too hight cost of life, insecurity, and a thousand other factors).

It's quite hard to get sucessful selling for people that can't buy.

I am sorry, but I think brazilians buys things all the time, even the poor ones. They can buy term.

It is not the reason for startups complaints, I think the scenario is chaotic because they don't have money/mentoring adequate for early stage startups. That is the reason they are always looking for some copy cats.

Another problem is the culture. People are not used to buy things online, but it is changing

Yes, we buy things all the time, even the poor ones.

What poor people don't have is a discritionary budget, they could use to buy stuff that a software startup is tipically able to sell.

And related, Brazil is quite big, so you can grow a company to a huge size only selling to the few richer brazilians. That's just much harder to accomplish than doing the same at a country like the US. That means that the normally 1 in 100 (or is it smaller) odds for a startup there will reduce a few orders of magnitude here.

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