Should I Translate My Product into Other Languages? (And Other Common Mistakes)

I’ve seen founders fall prey to some common siren songs, which I talk about below. With some rare exceptions, heading down the following roads is a distraction at best and a major blunder at worst.

Founders often take one of these paths to solve a real problem: their company isn’t growing fast enough. In most cases, the solution is not to pursue these distractions but to strengthen your product-market fit or improve your marketing and sales efforts.

If your company isn’t growing, you don’t need to chase a siren song. You need to get to the root of the real problem, one that’s not usually fixed by the approaches discussed below.

When a founder comes to me with the plan of translating their product into another language, I advise against it.

The mechanics of translating a web application aren’t complicated. But you’re not just translating the app—or even your knowledge base, documentation, and website. You need to translate your marketing into Spanish or German or French. You need someone on your team who can do email support or live chat in that language. You need to manage your social media presence, maintain an email list, and many other things to support customers in that language.

There has only been one time when a founder told me they were going to translate their app and it turned out to be a good decision. In that case, he wanted to add Spanish as a second language (English being the first).

In this case, the users of his product primarily spoke Spanish, but their managers—his actual customers—mostly spoke English. This founder didn’t have to take on the challenge of handling marketing or customer support in Spanish, but by translating the app itself, he made it more accessible to his customers’ end users.

White labeling is when another company pays you to license your product and present it with its own branding, and the moment you launch a successful product, people will start emailing you with “exciting opportunities” to white label.

For the most part, these conversations are a big waste of time. Usually what you have is someone who wants to start a business but can’t build their own product. They want to pay you per account they add, but they have no audience or distribution. In the end, you’ll spend a bunch of time talking to them, writing up contracts, and taking feature requests—for nothing.

If you’re approached about white labeling by a large player, it’s worth having the conversation. You know they’re not wasting your time because they don’t want to waste their own.

To justify the effort of white labeling, I recommend charging an up-front fee. We’re talking tens of thousands of dollars—$30,000 to $50,000 at a minimum. If someone balks at paying that fee, they’re not willing to
put enough skin in the game to warrant your efforts.

I’m not a fan of white labeling in most situations. It’s a way to serve customers and make money without building a brand. We discussed above how a brand is a moat, and losing that is an unfortunate consequence of white labeling.

Adding other verticals is the easiest siren song for me to justify. Sometimes it makes sense to pivot or expand to other niches. For example, if you have a product that’s working well for wedding photographers, chances are it will also serve wedding videographers.

But unless you’re pivoting your product, you must be extremely careful about adding new markets. For example, if you add wedding coordinators to your wedding photography SaaS, you’re probably dealing with audiences that have different needs—even though they’re in the same industry.

The danger of adding other verticals flippantly is that it can lead to a lot of complexity in your product. Unless you already dominate a particular niche and are moving into another or are making a full-blown pivot into the new space, be careful with this one.

I dig into pricing in the next chapter, but I want to call out what is perhaps the most common mistake I see founders make: listening to the voice in their head telling them that keeping their price low is the key to kickstarting growth. It’s not.

Most of the reasons I see founders pricing too low are psychological, not logistical. You’re afraid of rejection. You’re having trouble seeing value in your product because you built it. You’re comparing your price to cheap competitors rather than seeing how much value you bring to your customers.

Pricing too low holds your business back in two major ways. First, if you’re charging $10 instead of $100 a month, you have to find 10 times as many customers. Second, you’ll have a much harder time finding those customers because you’ll be severely limiting the marketing channels you can afford to use.

Pricing incorrectly can mean the difference between building a $250,000-a-year business and a multimillion-dollar business. We’ll dig into that in the next chapter.