The show is over. The founder sits on the hotel bed and counts the cards.
Four hundred, give or take. A dozen promises to call next quarter. Several requests for samples. Everyone said the product was good. Not one conversation with someone who would actually use it.
Who comes to the booth
Importers. Distributors. Consultants. Accountants. Some buy. Others advise on regulation, tax and market entry. None of them uses the product.
The distributor knows what moves off the shelf, what gets returned, where the margins are. The consultant knows the rules. The accountant knows the tax treatment. None of them knows what happens after the product leaves the store: who opens it, at what hour, for what purpose. That was never their job.
So you hear the same sentence at 10 shows in a row. Great. Send samples.
Los Angeles, 1959
Honda opened its first overseas subsidiary in Los Angeles in June 1959, in a storefront on Pico Boulevard with eight employees. By the end of the year it had sold just 170 motorcycles. Americans wanted big motorcycles. Harleys. Triumphs.
Then the 50cc Super Cub started to move. Americans didn’t ride it the way the Japanese did. Some hauled it to campsites and fishing holes. Honda went where they were: direct mail to sporting-goods, boating and fishing shops, ads in general-interest magazines like Life, shelf space where no motorcycle had been sold before.
Monthly sales passed 1,000 in May 1961. By 1962, Honda was selling 40,000 a year in the US.
Honda’s answer wasn’t a bigger motorcycle. It was a different customer.
Nobody at a trade show tells you their customers load this into a pickup. You see it only by being there.
Samsung’s year abroad
In 1990, Lee Kun-hee launched Samsung’s regional-specialist programme. Not an expat posting. One employee, one country, a year or more. Learn the language. Walk the streets. Learn how ordinary people live.
Insiders resisted: the cost, the good people pulled off the line. Lee pushed it through. “We cannot do anything without globalised manpower,” he reportedly said.
Today each specialist costs more than 100 million won (US$68,000) a year on top of salary. Harvard Business Review later called the programme a vital part of Samsung’s globalisation.
Honda learned by selling there. Samsung paid to learn how people lived there. Neither mistook a visit for knowing the market.
The three-day expansion
For many startups, “global” means three days a year. A booth bought with a government subsidy. A conference someone else organised. Then the report home: productive trip. A few dozen meetings. Hundreds of cards.
Trade shows are easy to count. Meetings held. Cards collected. Samples requested. Subsidy spent. But what did the founder learn about the customer? There is no column for that.
The trip fills the CRM. The customer stays a stranger.
The customer never came to the booth. The founder met the people whose job is to explain a country’s market, and they relay a life they don’t live. If your overseas strategy came out of their mouths, it isn’t a strategy. It’s hearsay. The company’s next three years may depend on a second-hand account of the market.
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Why nobody goes
A week on a foreign street is harder to count. It is also uncomfortable. No shared language. Strangers who can’t imagine why they’d need your product. The hotel and the booth are the safest ground a founder has abroad.
But the discomfort is where the questions start. Questions that never come up in a convention hall. You might learn why no one needs your product. Or why they need it for something you never imagined. Either answer is worth more than 400 cards.
Skip it, and everything downstream rests on second-hand knowledge. A country manager hired by someone who has never met a customer. Local pricing set from a distributor’s spreadsheet. Local marketing built on a consultant’s slide. We call it going global.
Four hundred cards, and not one customer’s day understood. That founder didn’t enter a market. He took a business trip, and burned through more of a shrinking runway.
One question
In the country you want to enter, can you walk through one customer’s day, morning to night? What’s their name?
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