The first session in the Founders Across Borders series. Matt and Karen Onuma of GlobalDeal on treating your first market as a hypothesis, not a home, and the decisions that are cheap to get right early and expensive to retrofit: localisation, incorporation, raising across markets, and choosing a second market.
Most founders don't decide to build for one market. It happens by accident. The tools you pick, the product architecture, the entity you incorporate, even the name all quietly bake your first market in, and the bill arrives later as a rebuild.
This is the first session in the Founders Across Borders series. Matt sits down with Karen Onuma, Co-founder and COO of GlobalDeal, to work through what "global from day one" actually means: treating your initial market as a hypothesis, not a home, and making the design decisions that are cheap now and expensive to retrofit later.
It's a candid conversation between two people who work the corridor between markets every day, recorded live with Q&A from founders building in Australia and Japan. Not launching everywhere at once, you still validate in one market first, but designing so the second one is a next step, not a teardown.
Think of this as the thinking behind the work. If it lands, the Sprint is where you do it on your own idea: one on one, me in your corner, turning a vague idea into something clear, proven, and designed to travel.