Going Global: Week one

Our journey of international expansion

Timing is everything.

Although to an outsider it may appear like we only entered the Australian market when my chucks hit the dirt here last Monday that’s not really the case. In fact, I made my first trip to Australia to pitch Banqer back in October 2015. So the seeds were being sown around 15 months ago.

So why the wait?

Technically speaking when we launched in New Zealand in February 2015, we were launching to the world. There’s nothing stopping teachers everywhere dialing up our site and signing up, and this did happen. We had teachers from Australia, The States, South Africa, The UK, and Malaysia to name a few find us and start using our platform.

But our growth came in New Zealand. Or, perhaps it’s best to say we intentionally grew our user base in New Zealand.

We initially had a product that is only 10% of what Banqer is today. For the first year we needed a forgiving pool of users who were willing to help craft the future of the Banqer platform. We needed compatible timezones, familiar nuances, and DIY attitudes.

We needed New Zealanders.

But somewhere along the way, amongst the chaos of 2015 that our world grew bigger. The enthusiasm we were seeing from our first users could not be ignored, regardless of their country code. The global potential for Banqer was clear, and after a lot of research we settled on Australia as the first port of call.

Since then we’re been exploring, meeting, testing, visiting, piloting, and all the other ing’s you need for a successful international launch. The key thing for us was working with Australian based educators to ensure our product fit in a different cultural and educational context.

So now, as I sit here facing 36 degree heat I have the luxury of building on all of the hard work to date, not coming in cold (this is anything but cold). Small things like understanding the start-up landscape, being familiar with public transport systems, and having a few influential educators to meet with have made my first week here run extremely smoothly.

With school having started today for most, I’ve already got my visiting shoes on. I‘m loving showcasing Banqer to as many educators as I can over here, regardless of how many trains I need to catch or kilometres I need to walk.

For those of you who have experienced it, you’ll agree there is nothing like your first sale. Personally I still remember the rush when we got our first paying New Zealand user, and to think that I get to do that again this week is worth putting up with all the snakes and spiders in the world.

It’s time to intentionally grow in Australia.