Ask a founder which market they are entering next and the answer usually arrives in under three seconds. The US, because that is where the money is. The UK, because everyone speaks English. Singapore, because a board member knows someone there.
The red flag? Money, language, and knowing someone on the ground aren’t sole reasons to choose a market for expansion. We’re going to share five criteria to help you decipher which markets might be the best to prioritise for market entry.
Why do most international expansions fail?
The common assumption is that expansion fails on execution: the wrong first hire, a slow start on pipeline, a local team that never gelled. Sometimes that is true. More often the decision was already wrong before anyone was hired.
Market selection is usually driven by opportunism. A handful of inbound leads from Germany, a potential partner in Australia, or an investor with a contact in New York. Opportunism is a fine way to open a conversation, but it’s also a poor substitute for a selection framework.
The cost of getting it wrong is not just the burn. It’s also the 12 months of leadership attention and time, the new hires that now don’t make sense in your org, and the internal hit that makes the next expansion harder to fund.
When should you expand internationally?
We’re not avoiding the answer by saying this, it’s the truth: it depends on the company and where your company is based. For example, companies in the US typically tend to expand when they’re much more established whereas Australian companies tend to make the jump much earlier on.
Interestingly, analysis from Bessemer Venture Partners, cited in 2026 SaaS expansion research, found that companies expanding internationally at US$5-10M ARR grew around 1.7x faster over the following two years than comparable domestic-only peers. Below roughly US$5M ARR, the operational overhead of running a second market tends to outweigh the revenue it produces.
We’re hoping that the criteria for scoring a market below will prove that a lot of research is needed just to determine where you’re going.
What are the five criteria for scoring a market?
Score each potential market from 1 to 5 on all five. Do it with data, not instinct, and do it for at least three markets so you have something to compare against.
1. Obtainable market, built bottom-up. Count the companies in each market that match your ICP, apply local pricing norms, and apply a realistic penetration rate given that your brand awareness there starts near zero.
2. Buyer behaviour, not buyer language. Shared language is the most over-weighted variable in market selection. Procurement cycles, budget ownership, and who signs are what determine whether your existing sales motion survives the trip.
3. Regulatory and data-locality friction. For anything touching data, financial services or health, this is often the deciding variable rather than a footnote. It also sets your minimum viable local footprint.
4. Partner and ecosystem density. Can you reach buyers through an existing channel, or do you have to build awareness from scratch? A mid-sized market with a live partner ecosystem usually beats a large market where you are unknown.
5. Cost and speed to first revenue. How many months and how much cash before the first local logo? This is the number that decides whether the board stays patient.
How do you sequence market entry?
Here are three sequencing rules to turn your scored list into a plan.
Deep-dive the first market, screen the rest. Full validation on your primary target, high-level analysis on secondaries, and a force-rank on everything else. You don’t need equal depth across five geographies; you need enough to defend the order.
Sequence by dependency, not by size. If market two is easier to win once you have reference customers from market one, that dependency should drive the order even when market two is larger.
Write down what would change your mind. Name the three signals that would move a market up or down the list, then revisit quarterly. A ranking with no kill criteria is a preference, not a decision.
Market selection in practice with Fujifilm
Fujifilm’s Revoria Cloud Marketing platform needed to prioritise expansion across the US, UK and Australia. Applying consistent criteria across all three - size, growth rate, regulatory landscape, ease of operation - produced a phased entry plan sequencing the 2025/26 roadmap, rather than three simultaneous half-funded launches.
The question to ask this quarter
If you can name your next market but not the three markets you rejected and why, you have a preference, not a strategy. The cheapest expansion mistake is the one you catch on a spreadsheet.
Ready to pressure-test your next market?
Think & Grow’s Market Intelligence engagement gives founders a data-backed comparison of candidate markets on opportunity versus risk, so the sequencing decision is defensible before the budget is committed.
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