Build internationally from day one

With my first SaaS I started from Italy, focusing mainly on a market I considered large enough to justify that strategy.

I was already watching what was happening abroad, studying other markets and trying to understand where things were heading.

Time to market

The first problem was time to market.

I often saw interesting opportunities long before my market was mature enough and ready to adopt them. So I could see certain dynamics arriving, but I had to wait years before they became truly interesting in Italy as well.

Too anchored to Italy

The second mistake was building a product too anchored to the logic of the Italian market.

Choices that at the start look perfectly sensible, but when you try to go abroad become complexity, constraints and, essentially, dead weight.

How I look at it today

Today I look at things differently.

Not because Italy has stopped mattering—quite the opposite. I want to keep working here, competing here and contributing to the growth of the Italian companies we work with every day.

But the products I’m building now I try to think through and design internationally from the beginning.

That doesn’t mean opening ten markets at once or chasing every opportunity that shows up on the other side of the world.

It means building products and companies that don’t depend on a single country, while keeping enough flexibility to accelerate when a market shows it’s ready and has traction.

Resilience, without overreaching

For me it’s also a form of resilience.

If one market slows down, another can accelerate. If I see demand elsewhere maturing faster for something I’m building, I want to be in a position to catch it when it happens, without having to rethink product, organisation and strategy from scratch.

Of course without overdoing it and without trying to be everywhere. Because internationalising without focus can be as damaging as staying locked in your own market.

It’s one of the lessons I carry from my first SaaS: it isn’t enough to watch where the market is going. You have to build from the start something ready to follow it when that market accelerates.