By nkelly@hubspot.com (Nataly Kelly)

I first worked across borders in the mid‑90s, interpreting Spanish calls for AT&T. What struck me then — and what still holds today — is how quickly things break down when people assume their way of working is universal. Fast‑forward nearly three decades, after leading international growth at HubSpot and advising companies from Google to SaaS startups, I’ve seen the strongest domestic strategies fall flat abroad.

Here’s what I see happen over and over again: Teams think they’re being global, but they’re still defaulting to the comfort of their home market. Proximity bias and familiarity creep in quietly, and the playbook that worked so well at home suddenly stops delivering.

At HubSpot, I introduced the idea of going “global-first,” a mantra we repeated often. The idea was straightforward: stop treating international as an afterthought, because the tactics that work in your home market rarely carry you into the next one. The mindset has to evolve from the start.

So, where do teams go wrong with international expansion, and what should they be doing instead? Let’s break it down.

Table of Contents

• The Shared Language Problem That’s Sabotaging Your Global Strategy
• Where Teams Go Wrong with International Expansion
• Building a Global-first Approach That Actually Works

The Shared Language Problem That’s Sabotaging Your Global Strategy

One of the first hurdles I see in global expansion is surprisingly simple. People don’t speak the same language about what they’re trying to do.

Before teams can even talk strategy, they need a shared vocabulary. Too often, people use terms like translation, localization, and globalization interchangeably, as if they mean the same thing. They don’t, and confusing them leads to wasted money and misaligned expectations.

Here’s how I break it down:

• Translation = adapting the message, or ensuring the meaning carries across, even if the words change.
• Localization = adapting the experience, or putting the full customer journey in context and going beyond text on a page.
• Internationalization = adapting the code. Here, infrastructure choices, like hard-coding U.S. dollars, can create barriers.
• Globalization = adapting the strategy or mindset. This is the deepest layer and re quires rethinking strategy for each market rather than applying the same playbook everywhere.

These distinctions matter because what appears to be a simple “localization problem” is often something much deeper. I’ve watched teams waste months trying to fix translation issues. Meanwhile, the real problem was a missing market strategy. Once everyone understands what these terms actually mean, you stop throwing money at the wrong things.

Where Teams Go Wrong with International Expansion

Companies continue to make the same mistakes when they expand internationally. Once you understand the framework above, these become obvious.

Forgetting About Go-to-market Fit

Most leaders understand product-market fit, but few think about go-to-market fit. Just because you see website traffic from another country doesn’t mean there’s a business opportunity there.

I’ve seen multiple companies …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron