I led localization and internationalization at Lyft and Notion among other startups. The two experiences offer a contrast between a company getting international expansion right, and not so right. Both are great companies with great people, but operating internationally is tricky and it’s easy to get wrong.

Notion

Notion has been hugely successful internationally, with over 70% of its users hailing from outside the United States. The company offers a suite of knowledge and project management services as a SaaS offering, and has a rabid following. The company localized its product soon after it saw organic growth in Korea and Japan, so it largely avoided accruing tech debt compared to other companies I worked for.

Among the things Notion did that contributed to its international success:

All of these things reinforced each other, and as a result non-US markets account for a large majority of the company’s revenue. While I can’t share specific numbers, revenue from non-US markets is roughly 100x what we spent on localizing the product and user touchpoints. If we hadn’t invested in adapting the product for international markets, we would not be seeing anywhere near the revenue we received from non US regions.

The only point of frustration there was that we rolled up to marketing, and because of that didn’t have consistent engineering or product support. This led to a lot of functional issues going unaddressed. This is a common issue for localization teams if they are not in a product or engineering team. My advice these days is that it is best for it to roll up to growth engineering or product. This is especially true for AI first services because it doesn’t matter how well your UI is translated if the product itself underperforms in other languages. After I left Notion, they moved localization to growth engineering and rebranded it as international experience (which was a smart move that resulted in the team getting better support from product and engineering).

Lyft

Lyft, on the other hand, was a story of what might have been. I joined the company in 2017, initially to work on their expansion into Canada, and then to roll out support for additional languages. Where Notion experienced rapid growth internationally, Lyft struggled to operate outside of a few Canadian cities, despite the app being localized in a half dozen languages.

Lyft’s biggest mistake was to assume that it’s core product and business model would work outside of US cities. The problem is that ground transportation (taxi service) is heavily regulated in many places, and Lyft’s ride sharing business model was a non-starter in many cities outside the US. In retrospect, Lyft should have borrowed a page from Uber and acted as an agent for existing taxi services. For example, when you request an Uber in Berlin, you get a licensed taxi cab. This is super convenient, especially for travelers. It is also a scalable business model with good profit margins, similar to a travel booking site.

Lyft had a number of other issues besides this “original sin” that held it back. Among them were: