We’ve spoken with all sorts of people (entrepreneurs, public sector employees, SMEs, service providers) about their experiences taking businesses to new markets. Among other things, we asked them where they struggled.

Surprisingly to us, the biggest hurdle they mentioned was about getting your hands on the facts you need. Just about everyone had a story that began with those fateful words, “If only I had known…”.

Here are a few snippets from the interview archives:

“There are so many issues you don’t expect, like the complexities of VAT in Spain, or how to get a bank account in France without an address… peer-to-peer advice would have been really helpful.”

“Frustratingly, the HMRC rulebook is unclear [on VAT in European markets]. For software the issue is complicated by specific rulings about ‘downloadable software’. I know that lots of sellers are basically putting their heads under the blankets, and just ignoring VAT. Anyone got any advice?”

“Sorting out ‘tu’ and ‘vous’ in French is just the beginning. Translation is not enough — you have to localise.”

“We wasted a lot of time and money assuming things would be as they were in the UK. Real advice from people who had done it before would have been invaluable.”

“I need to know what I have to do so I can do it and get to market. As an entrepreneur, I have to minimise the cost of failure.”

“Knowing about cultural differences is massively important. You’ve got to understand the etiquette, from how to deal with someone in seniority (do you get straight down to business?) to the dos and don’ts of greeting a lady (do you shake hands?).”

“It’s totally different working with people in Santa Cruz versus in Boston. Knowing the pace the market works at can be a real advantage when it comes to doing business with people there.”

“In US markets the costs of labour are different from state to state. You can do a bit of desktop research, but people on the ground with local knowledge make all the difference.”

“I spent two years trying to convince my Spanish customers to sign contracts before I realised this was just the way the Spanish market worked. Insight from someone who had been there before could have saved me a lot of money.”

What do you think — do any of these resonate with you?

Going Global (Beta) is the story around a project we’re working on at Made by Many.

We’ve joined forces with several industry players including UK Technology and UKTI to solve a problem:

How do you help UK-based SMEs, specifically tech companies, get to international markets faster and with a greater chance of success?

How, indeed…

We took this project on in early October. We began by asking UK-based tech SMEs — the people we hope will use and benefit from the service we build — to tell us about how they internationalise: the steps they take, the challenges they face and, in retrospect, the things they wish they had known.

These discussions have played out in person, over the phone, and in the LinkedIn group we created, UK Technology Global Markets. They have resulted in some really human, unexpected insights into internationalisation (more on those later).

Just over a month in, we’re getting close to the end of our visioning process and we’re confident we’ve got a service candidate that will make a real difference to SMEs.

Doing it the agile way

Now that the vision is just about set (more on that later), the next steps are prototyping, design, development, and of course, a LOT of testing. As we’re working according to agile principles, we need to expect things will change as we go (new ideas, shifts in requirements, Acts of God) and we’ve got to be ready to adapt to these changes.

This blog is a window into how we’re getting on with this project. We’re throwing the shutters wide open with a real-time, insider’s view on this project… every bit of it.

Feeling a little bit naked

Naturally, our blog is open to everyone, but we think or at least *hope* that it might be of particular interest to product managers, designers, planners, developers and agile buffs. It’s an agile experiment, performed in full view of anyone who cares to look.

Why bother? Well, we think that doing this in a really transparent, accountable way will help us deliver a better project.

So welcome to The Story Of, told as honestly as we can tell it. Stay tuned and tell us what you think, and if you want the other side of the story, join our LinkedIn group and listen to what our customers are saying.

We’re also on Twitter @GoingGlobalBeta