Product Growth in Global Markets with Tinder
In today's global economy growing your product in international markets might seem trivial, but it is not. Mugdha Gogte, Product manager for an international growth at Tinder, shared with us how to create a successful launch of your product on a new market at our recent Product People community event.
Tinder is currently one of the highest-grossing non-gaming app, available in 190 countries and in 40+ languages. Read on for insights from Mugdha Gogte, Product manager for international growth on her experience of adapting the product to the new markets and successfully growing there.
Two sides of the international growth
- Voice of the product — how to communicate the value of the existing product to the new market?
- Modifying the product — do you need to adapt your product to new needs?
Voice of the product
Remember, that people start interacting with your product even before they buy it and start using — through ads or friends. All these interactions should be adapted:
- Address locally-relevant use cases
While in part your international customers will use your product similarly to your base customers, their living conditions, needs, and lives are different and you need to adapt.
2. Brand partnerships — choose carefully with which brands your partner, as it influences the perception of your brand.
Recent success case in partnership — Levi’s partnered with TikTok to leveraged their online sales in COVID-19 epidemics and especially to attract young shoppers.
3. Achieving translation accuracy — important for those who just started using the app.
What helps here— provide context about the products and certain features, not just texts to be translated. Give examples of the tone of the translation (e.g., “explain as to a friend” or more formal).
Modifying the Product
To understand if you need to modify your product for a new market, start with studying the market well. This is what will help you:
- Research Internet Anthropology: go trough local YouTube, Reddit, Quora, Facebook groups, check which apps are popular, what aesthetics people are looking for.
For example, in Mughda’s personal experience with bringing Tinder to the new markers YouTube channel “Dating Beyond Borders” was very helpful.
2. Qualitative Analysis: surveys, user interviews.
3. Quantitative Analysis: compare key metrics between your target market and the base market to discover growth/optimization opportunities.
Case of Tinder: after comparing first day retention on Tinder for the USA and India, the Tinder team discovered that it was much lower in the new markets than in the USA. Qualitative analysis revealed some unexpected discoveries:
- People didn’t fully understand how swiping left and right works or what like and nope mean.
- They didn’t want to pass on someone because to not hurt their feelings — they didn’t know that the other party will not be informed or their decision.To help cover this gap, Tinder team created a tutorial where people can “test swipe” on matches in order to explain how this works and to try things out first before actually starting to select potential matches.
Another interesting finding for Tinder: in some markets people use the app more as a social discovery tool rather than for dating.
Case of Gilette: In the beginning of 2000s Gilette went to India. Even though Gilette developed a special product for India and it played well in user trials with Indian students living in the USA, the sales were lower than what they hoped for. The mistake Gilette team realized after doing user studies in India was that they expected people to have running water, but that wasn’t true for India. So in 2008 they adopted the razor to address this use case and saw an uplift of sales. More on this story.
Closing tips:
- After deciding to modify your product the next step is to understand if this change is only relevant to a certain market or if it can be rolled out to others as well.
- If it’s only relevant for one market — should your product branch out?
Watch the full version of Mugdha’s talk for more insights and tips.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel. And join the next Product People meetup for more inspiring stories from Product Managers from around the world!
