BERLIN – How many people need to use your product before it’s a success?
That’s a question European tech companies from Dublin to Dubrovnik routinely ask themselves as they look to move beyond their small local markets to reach bigger audiences.
To gain traction, many European tech founders often focus on their individual home markets, where people speak the same language and share similar cultural traits. But unlike American companies like Microsoft and Google, the European companies don’t have hundreds of millions of people in those home markets.
That strategy, however, is starting to change.
Take Prezi, a Hungarian tech company whose online presentation software directly competes with Microsoft’s PowerPoint.
Since its introduction in 2009, Prezi, which employs 160 people in Budapest and 50 people in San Francisco, now has roughly 40 million users worldwide, and has raised money from several blue-chip venture capital firms, including Accel Partners.
For Peter Arvai, one of the company’s co-founders, Prezi’s rapid growth – it had just 18 million users in 2012, and around 60 percent of its users are now based outside the United States – came from taking a global perspective from Day 1.
Though born in Sweden, Mr. Arvai, who has Hungarian roots, moved to the Eastern European country to start his tech company in 2008, but demanded that all work be done in English to ensure the software had international appeal.
He also pushed back at early attempts to localize the product for Hungarian users, and opened an office in San Francisco within Prezi’s first year of operation to gain a beachhead in the all-important American market.
“You can be globally competitive if you think creatively,” said Mr. Arvai, who now spends about two-thirds of his time on the West Coast. “Taking a mental leap of faith to think globally is very important for European tech companies.”
Now the software start-up has expanded into emerging markets (its product is available in eight languages). And users’ yearly subscriptions, which can cost up to $159, have allowed the company to not spend any of the $14 million in venture funding it raised in 2011.
“We haven’t touched a single dollar of the investment,” Mr. Arvai said. “Global markets are becoming increasingly important for us.”
Not every start-up, though, needs tens of millions of users to find success, even if global reach is necessary.
That’s what Ijad Madisch, a co-founder of ResearchGate, a social network for scientists to share and discuss research, discovered when he started his company in 2008.
For Mr. Madisch, who is a German medical doctor and holds a Ph.D., the goal was to connect the world’s scientific community of roughly eight million researchers so they could collaborate and share information.
So far, ResearchGate, which started in Boston but soon moved to Berlin, has signed up roughly half, or four million, people in that community, and is adding about 10,000 users a day, according to the company. Scientists also are adding around two million research publications each month, compared with the 15 months it took ResearchGate to attract its first two million reports, according to Mr. Madisch.
Despite its relatively small size and European roots, ResearchGate – whose main markets remain North America and Europe – has secured the backing of some of the world’s biggest tech names. Last year, Bill Gates, the former Microsoft chief executive, led a consortium of investors that put $35 million into the company.
Instead of appealing to hundreds of millions of users, ResearchGate has centered on giving its small group of scientists exactly what they want.
That includes introducing a tool that allows researchers to use the social network to test other scientists’ experiments. Last month, for example, a Hong Kong-based researcher used the system to debunk a stem cell study in the scientific journal Nature.
Mr. Madisch says the social network is looking at other ways of helping scientists improve how they research, including how data for scientific journals is made accessible to the wider community.
“It’s a small group of scientists with a lot of data,” Mr. Madisch said in ResearchGate’s headquarters in central Berlin, which houses 120 employees. “Big companies can see what people are doing. But by looking at what scientists are working on, we can see where society is going.”