Soltaros OÜ has observed many bold expansion attempts falter not because of poor quality, but due to minor indicators showing “We don’t quite get you.” This is a correct translation. Their prices are also fair. The landing page loads in under two seconds. And yet nothing really happens. Soltaros OÜ notes that the real barrier almost always sits somewhere the team didn’t think to look.
Most expansion playbooks still treat a new market as a translation problem with a few cultural footnotes taped on. That framing is getting teams into trouble. How customers pay, how they search for information, who they trust, and how they allocate their time follows rules that are not part of what you learned from your own home market. Learning how to speak correctly helps fix only about fifteen percent of the issues. The remaining eighty-five percent is where things get held up.
The Iceberg Problem: What Translation Can’t Reach
Think of a new market as an iceberg. The part above the water — the language, the currency symbol, the flag in the footer — is what most teams spend their first few months fixing. Useful work, but it’s the easy part. The part underwater is where expansions actually succeed or sink, and it includes things like:
- Payment rails. Whether the market runs on cards, bank transfers, mobile wallets, UPI, PIX, cash-on-delivery, or some combination that didn’t exist on your home-country roadmap.
- Identity norms. What counts as a legitimate ID, address, or phone format — and what quietly breaks your sign-up flow.
- How people find things. Search, social feeds, group chats, creators, super-apps — the default discovery channel shifts market to market.
- Who gets trusted. Reviews, influencers, official seals, a cousin’s recommendation, and a government endorsement. Trust flows differently in different places.
- Time and rhythm. What “fast delivery” actually means locally, when people shop, and which holidays matter enough to plan around.
Soltaros highlights: teams that translate the top of the iceberg and ignore the rest tend to spend their first year wondering why the numbers aren’t moving.
Five Questions Soltaros OÜ Recommends Before You Localize
According to Soltaros, before translation begins, there are a few questions that must be answered first, and preferably not by a desk study, but in discussion with individuals living in the market:
- What solutions do people already use for this problem? And if they don’t use anything because it’s too early, what solutions will they use when the time comes? Or if they use five solutions because they love them all?
- What happens when they try to pay? If your checkout doesn’t include the payment method they actually use day to day, your conversion rate is capped before the first marketing dollar goes out.
- Who do they trust more than you? Some markets trust institutions. Some trust creators. Some trust their group chat. The path to credibility looks completely different depending on the answer.
- How do you support them? In many cases, WhatsApp support will do; for others, having a telephone support number is enough. E-mail support that doesn’t exist is simply a lack of visibility.
- What would convince you that you have built something with them and for them, instead of just translating to them? The hardest question, which always changes the roadmap.
Teams that ignore this find out the hard way, sooner or later.
The Infrastructure You Can’t See From Headquarters
One interesting fact from research done by McKinsey Global Institute: Currently, only approximately 20% to 25% of internet users purchase products online. Such a market is not a copy of your domestic market, saturated and waiting for you to enter. No, there are some things left to be done, and infrastructure will define what can really be achieved, Soltaros OÜ notes.
A couple of examples of how infrastructure changes business:
- When delivery on account is the norm in the market, then the unit economics you see is not just different from what you have back home; it is entirely different, Soltaros’s team highlights.
- In markets organized around super-apps, standalone apps start at a real disadvantage. People don’t want another icon on their home screen; they want a mini-program inside the app they already live inside.
- In markets with a national real-time payment rail, checkout can happen in two seconds without a card. Teams still insisting on card-first flows lose to local competitors built around the local rail.
Lessons from Soltaros OÜ continue to reveal that success lies in adapting to the environment, whereas failure is found in trying to force change on the local landscape.
The Behavior Gap: Why the Home Playbook Often Misses
Though products may transport well, behavior rarely accompanies them. According to Soltaros, the same product that is mundane in one culture could be a luxury item in another. Writing that is assertive and straightforward in one language might come off as rude and brash in another.
A few of the behavior gaps that quietly decide outcomes:
- How often people buy. Weekly in one place, monthly in another, event-driven somewhere else.
- How price is read. Round numbers, lucky digits, local anchor prices — perception has a lot more to do with context than with currency conversion.
- Where browsing and buying happen. Some markets browse on mobile and buy on desktop. Others live entirely inside a single messaging app.
- How formal the tone should be. The line between warm and unprofessional sits in different places in different languages, and it moves.
Home market intuition seems obvious. When you enter an unfamiliar market, home market intuition is only another name for assumption, which has been the downfall of most businesses that expand.
The Metrics That Quietly Lie to You
Launch metrics are easy to celebrate and easy to misread. A spike in sign-ups after a big campaign tells you almost nothing. Soltaros OÜ believes the honest signals show up later, and quieter:
- Retention by cohort, compared across markets. When the curve starts to look like your home market’s, the product is landing. Until then, it isn’t.
- Conversion by local payment method. Often the fastest way to spot a broken assumption.
- What support tickets are actually about. When the mix shifts from “I don’t understand this” to “can you add X,” something is working.
- Organic growth without paid acquisition. The single strongest signal in almost any market.
- Repeat behavior on the local rhythm. Not just whether people come back, but whether they come back at the cadence the market actually runs on.
A cleaner way to say it: acquisition tells you how well your marketing translated. Retention tells you whether your product did.
Knowing When to Push, Hold, or Walk Away
Not every market works. Recognizing that early is its own skill. For context, the McKinsey Global Institute has reported that the fastest-growing industries are expanding roughly ten times faster than the rest of the economy — which means the cost of staying stuck in the wrong market is higher than it’s ever been. Opportunity cost is the silent line item in almost every stalled expansion, Soltaros OÜ notes.
Signs a market deserves more investment:
- Support tickets shifting from confusion to feature requests
- Organic growth starting without paid pressure
- Local partners reaching out first, rather than being chased
- Retention curves beginning to resemble the home market’s
Signs a market is quietly turning expensive:
- Retention flat after eighteen months of iteration
- Unit economics negative at scale, not just early
- A persistent gap between what the product offers and what the market actually wants, that no campaign seems to close
- Team energy going into defending the bet rather than improving it
Soltaros suggests that humility matters at both ends of this. Entering humbly is table stakes. Exiting honestly is rarer, and usually more valuable than people admit.
When done properly, market entry does not appear as much like an introduction as a gradual acceptance by the market of how it should influence one’s thinking. It is precisely the teams that Soltaros OÜ observes to be successful in doing this that have the approach of approaching a new nation as a system that needs to be understood, as opposed to a territory to be conquered.