Should We Expand?

Most expansion decisions get made backwards. A competitor enters a market, a board member asks "why aren't we in France," or a big deal falls in your lap from a country you've never sold in — and suddenly there's momentum behind a market nobody deliberately chose.

Momentum isn't a strategy. Before spending real budget, it's worth answering five questions honestly.

1. What problem is expansion actually solving?

"Growth" isn't specific enough. Is the goal more revenue from existing customers reachable in a new geography, defending against a competitor, following an anchor customer, or accessing talent/cost advantages? Each answer points to a different market, a different entry model, and a different definition of success.

2. Is this market pulling you, or are you pushing into it?

Markets that pull — inbound demand, a partner asking you to show up, existing customers already operating there — de-risk the entry substantially. Markets you have to push into from zero usually take longer and cost more than the first plan assumes.

3. What would have to be true for this to work?

Write down the assumptions explicitly: pricing tolerance, channel availability, a regulatory environment you can operate in, competitive whitespace. Then rank them by how confident you actually are versus how much the plan depends on them. The dangerous assumptions are the ones that are both uncertain and load-bearing.

4. What's the cost of being wrong, and how fast will you know?

A market entry that fails slowly and expensively is worse than one that fails fast and cheaply. Design the first steps so you find out you're wrong (if you are) before you've committed the whole budget — not after.

5. Who is actually going to run this?

Expansion plans without a named, accountable owner on the ground (even a fractional one) tend to stall in "someone should look into this" purgatory. Decide who's driving before you decide where you're going.

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The lesson from iflix's expansion from 3 to 24 markets: the biggest launch blocker is often an assumption headquarters didn't know it was making — a localization requirement, a payment method, a device constraint nobody flagged until the team was already on the ground. Surfacing those assumptions early, on paper, is cheaper than discovering them mid-launch.

If you're not sure whether a market is worth the deeper look, that's what a Market Snapshot is for.