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Get Started Free →refoundai/international-expansion
Help users navigate the complexities of launching in new countries by identifying high potential markets and adapting products to local cultural and economic contexts.
Passed 18 of 22 test cases with the skill, and 10 of 22 without it.
and 13 more in the full report
8 fixed10 passed either way4 still failing0 broke
Tokens, turns and time describe resource use, not a dollar price.
One of 8 test cases the skill fixed. Same model, same prompt, with and without the skill.
We are a US-based consumer marketplace doing $15M ARR and considering expanding into Europe and Latin America next quarter. Can you assess whether our core business is stable enough to expand, and help us prioritize our target countries? Please provide a structured market evaluation framework, a step-by-step country scoring process using organic signals, and a list of operational pitfalls we need to avoid.
| Checked | Without skill | With skill |
|---|---|---|
| Evaluates core market readiness by checking if supply remains self-sustaining without manual hand-holding. | Missed | Passed |
| Incorporates the Two-List Market Prioritization Method or Rover's Activated Markets Strategy to score target countries using organic growth signals. | Missed | Passed |
| Flags the Lite Product Trap and Ignoring Local Fraud Patterns as key operational pitfalls during expansion. | Missed | Passed |
The instructions your model reads when the skill loads.
Scale your product globally by balancing local empathy with operational playbooks.
Help the user with international market expansion using insights from 8 guests and posts across Lenny's Podcast and Newsletter.
Kunal Shah: "No Indian has ever been paid an hourly salary in their entire life."
Successful expansion requires deep empathy for how social trust and economic structures differ from Western models. You must design for risk averse users by prioritizing trust and understanding local concepts of time and compensation.
Ray Cao: "If we do have a ambition to go global, you have to do one more thing is actually take your step into global. Rather than having the machine do the heavy lifting, you have to really understand in local culture."
Purely algorithmic solutions often fail in new markets without local context. Hire talent on the ground to fine tune algorithms and seed content based on regional cultural specificities.
From "Marketplace city expansion strategy": "Expand into a second market as soon as you feel like your first market is working, you have a semblance of a playbook, and the resources to do it. If, however, you’re in an extremely competitive environment (and have a lot of VC money), it may make sense to be more aggressive."
Only expand once your first market demonstrates a self sustaining flywheel where supply stays without manual hand holding. Moving too early can break the operational stability of the core business.
From "Accelerating Growth at Scale 🔥 Phase 2 of Kickstarting and Scaling a Marketplace Business": "For many years a big lever for us was expanding geographically. As we got better at selecting and launching new markets, each new market would reach critical growth milestones faster and faster."
Expansion becomes a powerful growth engine when the process for selecting and activating markets is a repeatable playbook. Monitor organic signals to decide where to flip the switch next.
From "Top 5 most interesting things about Booking.com's early growth strategy – Issue 46": "The localization for our ad copy was done by Google translate, even when we got really big. A lot of team members were upset with our ad copy sometimes, so we asked them to give us better copy, which we A/B tested, and the Google translated copy often won. We would keep what worked regardless of what would be better according to local speakers."
Automated translation tools scale faster than manual efforts but require validation. Always A/B test automated copy against manual translations to ensure performance holds up.
test cases passed, vs 10 / 22 without
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