Korea to Global by Kyum Kim
Warning
Characteristics of the Korean market
Korea is a unique market. One ethnicity, one language, high GDP per capita, high education levels, and people who get technology. Business playbooks from other markets can fail here. Adjust your global strategy to these traits if you want to succeed.
Korean market cap
Korean startups worth trillions of won have one thing in common. Everyone knows them and everyone uses them. The domestic market is small, so it's hard to build a big company without going after the whole nation. In the US, on the other hand, a social network just for medical professionals can go public at over $5B.
The global market lets you go after sub-segments and still reach a much bigger market. In Korea, product planning and development usually run on intuition, because the people making the product are also the ones using it. In other countries, building a successful product can be hard when the people making it aren't the people using it.
Data-driven product planning and development
For global products, you have to collect data to keep makers and users on the same page. Data cuts down on mistakes and leads to better decisions.
A pattern that keeps showing up in Korean startups
Korean startups tend to know the Korean market well but often don't know much about the global market. To win a new market, founders have to admit what they don't know and work to learn it. In Korea, a business has to solve problems for both individuals and companies. Globally, it's more common to pick one sub-segment and solve its problems in depth. To find the right segment and the deep problems, startups need to collect data by talking to customers.
Meet the customers first!
Kyum stresses customer insight in decision-making. Understanding customers means feeling their problems. Data alone (numbers) is not enough to make good decisions. So when you do an early go-to-market in the US, you have to spend time and money finding the market. Meeting customers, noting their feedback, and forming problem hypotheses takes at least 3-6 months. Skip this, and the business can lose direction and waste resources. Kyum Kim recommends the book "The Mom Test" and Y Combinator's "How To Talk To Users" video for learning from customer conversations.
Do not hire until you know what to do.
Good talent won't get hired anyway. Kyum Kim recommends that early-stage startups hire college or MBA graduates as short-term interns who work with the founder to answer the critical questions in the business plan. The learning curve in the global market takes a while to climb, and startups have to focus their resources on the international market to draw the J-curve globally.
"How do Israeli startups approach global expansion?"
An Israeli startup expert told Kyum Kim there is no one-size-fits-all approach to global expansion. That made him rethink whether Korean startups are stuck in the "moderately sized domestic market" and miss the bigger picture.