International expansion is a key to tech/SaaS growth

Sammy Abdullah
2 min readOct 30, 2023

If you’re looking for your next leg of growth, look to international markets. Below are examples of software companies and B2C companies that IPO’d since 2021, where international expansion is a key to future growth. Quotes are taken directly from prospectuses of each company.

Klaviyo. “We have seen great success in these international markets, as sales outside of Americas represented 29.3% of our revenue in the year ended December 31, 2022 and 30.7% of our revenue in the six months ended June 30, 2023.”

Samsara. “we have a growing international presence, with approximately 10% of our ARR generated from outside of the United States. Our industry-agnostic approach and the horizontal applicability of our solution have enabled us to deploy our platform to a diverse set of industries”

Hashicorp. “For fiscal 2021 and the nine months ended October 31, 2021, 25% and 27% of our revenue, respectively, was generated by customers outside of the United States.”

UserTesting. “International revenue represented approximately 15% of our total revenue in 2020 and approximately 18% of our total revenue for the nine months ended September 30, 2021.”

Braze. “For each of the fiscal year ended January 31, 2021 and the six months ended July 31, 2021, approximately 40% of our revenue was generated outside of the United States”

Backblaze. “While our sales and marketing efforts have primarily focused on the United States, our existing customer base spans more than 175 countries, with 28% of our revenue originating outside of the United States for the year ended December 31, 2020.”

NerdWallet. “We expanded our guidance to the UK with our recent acquisition of Know Your Money (KYM), we also expanded organically into Canada during the third quarter of 2021, and have further plans to expand internationally.”

Amplitude. “For the year ended December 31, 2020 and six months ended June 30, 2021, 36% of our revenue was generated outside the United States.”

Freshworks. “During the year ended December 31, 2020, 45%, 40%, and 15% of our revenue was derived from customers in North America; Europe, Middle East and Africa; and the rest of the world, respectively. based on our internal data and analysis, we estimate the annual potential market opportunity for our products to be $77 billion.”

Allbirds. “In 2020, 24% of our net revenue came from outside the United States, signaling a strong foundation from which to scale our business globally.”

In summary, international markets matter and may be a nice growth unlock for your existing product.

Thank you for reading. Visit us at blossomstreetventures.com and email me directly at sammy@blossomstreetventures.com.

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