EU Startups Going English-only First

A surprising number of startups in Europe are doing their online presence only in English. That does not necessarily mean they are truly international or global.

In February 2016 when I attended the 4 Years From Now (4YFN) conference for startups at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona I was struck by how many European startups’ websites and interfaces are monolingual — in English!

And while preparing an internationalization + localization workshop for Startupbootcamp Barcelona I again noticed that most of the startups in the program have their user interfaces only in English.

Leading with English is good to show international ambitions, and casts the widest net for potential customers across Europe, and worldwide.

But being in English does not mean a company is actually efficiently attracting international customers and sales: aside from super-technical products, most non-native English speakers prefer to do transactions in their native language, and in B2B services most customers prefer to use interfaces in their native language.

And if you attract customers through your English-language marketing, can you serve them in English?

• Do you have staff fluent in English + domain expertise to support customer interactions?
• If your English-speaking customer is in a far-away timezone (ex. USA or SE Asia), can you support them professionally?

This is a business issue, not a technical problem.

Additionally, this trend of monolingual websites in English makes me wonder if the startups have actually internationalized their technology and content management processes on the back-end to handle multiple languages. If not, it may require significant re-working of technology and processes later to move from being monolingual to multilingual.

In his excellent post, Why You Need To Shape Your Startup To Scale Up Globally, Salvatore Giammarresi (AirBnb, Paypal) makes the case very accurately:

“The time required planning technical infrastructure and architecture for a global versus a country-specific project is almost the same, if done properly.”

Startups need to set themselves up from the, well,… start, for multilingual and international business even if they are currently only producing content or interfaces in one language. This will allow them to expand quickly and efficiently in the future.

My recommendations:

From the start, set up your technical systems to handle multiple languages (aka “internationalized”)

Offer languages you can professionally support

• Likely this will be the national language of the country you are starting in
• You should also offer English, but you should be able to professionally support customers in English
• Add languages as you have staff (or partners) who are fluent in them

A related post to this subject is “EU Startups Skipping Europe For US Market”