As the lock-up lifts: Looking back @Eventbrite

I led Eventbrite’s initial global expansion into 20 markets worldwide. What lessons can we learn looking back on how to launch products globally?

Lesson 1: A strong global mission translates well

The potential global reach of the Eventbrite mission was a primary reason I came on board. In 2011, Eventbrite’s mission was to make events as easy to create, find, and attend as possible. On a human level, this felt universal. People want to connect with communities and attend events. Over time, Eventbrite’s mission evolved to address this fact into “Eventbrite brings the world together with live experiences”

As I negotiated my offer to join Eventbrite from Toronto, I compared the opportunity to my current work as a Global Product Manager at Mint.com. I was leading the international expansion of the personal finance tool, starting with Canada. This was a technically challenging opportunity, and one in which I had expertise after spending the past year conducting user research and launching global personal finance products with Intuit. From this experience, I had developed a deep understanding of personal finance needs; how they were the same, and how they were different, across consumer markets like Canada, US, UK, Australia, and India.

Mint’s mission was to help people understand and utilize their money more effectively. The challenge here was the core problem statement varied across countries. That meant the level of localization and product changes also correspondingly varied. There was also another level of challenge. The technical implementation to build a solution was also largely dependent on the heavily regulated financial and banking industries, which also varied market to market. While Mint did successfully launch into Canada, the longer term roadmap was facing prioritisation against needs for the dominant US market with Intuit.

Being part of the Mint.com team post Intuit acquisition, I saw firsthand the magic that is there in privately held start-ups. I felt this energy, even post acquisition, but I also knew I had missed the spark. That feeling drove me to commit to having my next career move to be joining a smaller start-up with global ambitions.

I also knew from my experience launching products with missions and user needs that varied widely across market, that a product with a more universal appeal would be one that could scale faster and more easily. That is what I saw in the Eventbrite opportunity.

Lesson 2: Build a purposeful roadmap – you need to know where you are going and why

Within my first 30 days at Eventbrite, I had created the first global roadmap. A lot of inputs went into this plan, but we can distill into key lessons across the product, users, and competition.

• Know your product
  • Conduct a product teardown: One of the first things I recommend teams doing when embarking on internationalization is to conduct an end to end analysis of the current product. Go through step by step, document each flow with screenshot and notes, and do so with the eyes of a user not in the US
  • Uncover known items for i18n → this will fuel your technical roadmap. For Eventbrite, some stand-out items were
    • US English only
    • All on .com, no tld/cctld strategy
    • Nothing marked for translation (all strings, embedded graphics)
    • User generated content in both the events & in the help center
      • Speaking of help center…build customer support into other languages and across new time zones to truly serve the needs of global customers
    • Limited global payment options
    • Tax support for larger organizers
• Know your users
  • To build the purposeful roadmap, I conducted remote interview sessions with current and prospective global Eventbrite users. The current users were the ones who were using the Eventbrite product, despite it not being localised. From scuba diver events in Australia to MongoDB meetups in Europe, the needs of the organizers varied.
  • This qualitative input also supported the quantitative driven roadmap of where we should localise first, and why

• Know your competition
  • Build out a competitive matrix of the global landscape (will come in handy later for Lesson 3)
  • Keep an eye on the competition and regulatory update this matrix
  • This helps inform product needs by market, where there is already consumer demand and product market fit and becomes helpful in prioritising launches

Once you have the roadmap, don’t forget about need for local teams and operations. A lot of global expansion was outside of the product and tech stack. This ranged from working with local real estate firms on finding suitable office space to partnering with legal on relocation packages for domestic employees to establish HQ culture in the new office.

But we kept at it, and the growth came in.

Lesson 3: Know when you can go faster with help  

In 2013, with European expansion underway & a global-ready platform, Eventbrite was ready to tackle another region. Latin America made a lot of sense growth-wise, but at this point we also had the benefit of our learnings from Europe.  Event discovery was local, and in order to build the community we would need to have this per region. One way was to build up our own operations from scratch organically. But another way was to seek out the local players and bring them into the family for inorganic growth. A path to acceleration was exploring acquisition.

Since we had the competitive landscape handy, I quickly began due diligence. After a whirlwind tour, our team began the work to bring Eventioz onboard and overtime integrate into the Eventbrite brand, as well as establish payment operations.

In 2017, Eventbrite powered live experiences in 170 countries, continuing to deliver on allowing people to experience the world through events. When I look back, there are countless lessons from the initial global expansion starting with the foundation of a strong global mission, a purposeful roadmap based on user feedback, and the willingness to look at inorganic growth opportunities.