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Lately I had several discussions with many friends on what is the best market for web business firms to target, is it the local market, or the international market?

In any project and in every company during the planning stage, the owners and the creators start by studying the markets and see the benefits of each one in order to decide their target.

Now talking about web business, markets aren’t the same as in other businesses, we have a different kind of globalization in cyberspace, better communication facilities and a much wider audience, which leave us finally to the users judgment, the users who have too many options and choose only what best fits their needs.

Local Market

Local market, which is in my scenario the Middle East in general, and UAE in particular is one of the most fresh online markets right now, a gold mine, a lot of open opportunities, many ideas to be implemented and different kind of problems that have to be solved, but still there are many difficulties that every local web startup is facing, sometimes it’s the monopoly between the big local web firms, and sometimes it’s the misunderstanding of the real needs of the local internet user.

Replicating and Translating

Most of the local web applications currently are either being translated or replicated from another international successful web applications, I could rarely find a really creative competitive idea in here, something that is made for the specific requirements of the local market, not just a replication of what’s out there.

Local startups have this wrong impression that if an idea has worked globally and internationally then it have to and will work here too, but unfortunately this is not the case, if the web application does not support the local language (Arabic for example) or doesn’t have too many users from the local market, it doesn’t mean that it needs to be reimplemented or translated, maybe it means that it’s not made for our needs in the first place.

When we’re talking about the local market we should do something that fit our needs and solve our problems not just follow the hype and see what can be re-done just to simulate the same success story of an international replica.

Lack of Knowledge

One of the problems in the local market is the lack of knowledge of the cyberspace basics, I’m not saying that there is NOBODY who knows about Web2.0 or the new trends for example, but I’m talking about the percentage of those who know to all other local internet users..

How many of those who heard about these trends do really understand the meaning, for example few days ago I received one of these yahoo groups email circulars, that has “Jewels of Knowledge” as its subject and one of these jewels was: “What programming language is GOOGLE developed in?” and at the end of the email the answer was “Google is written in Asynchronous java-script and XML, or its acronym Ajax”. This is just an example of the low level of knowledge circulated and its lack of accuracy.

Maybe it doesn’t matter which programming language Google used, but in the other hand such level of knowledge should be raised, so the local internet users get a better understanding of what’s available and what they can get instead of just recycling what’s made for them and accept anything only because there is no alternatives.

Educating the internet users isn’t easy, and to give the right information is something very crucial, one of the most successful tries I’ve seen so far is Serdal a blog by Abdullah Al-Muhairi who has done a great job, writing and lecturing in Arabic about the new trends, demonstrating and explaining most of the new technologies, we need more of these tries, at least to build a solid knowledge background for the user to let him see what’s available and ask for more, ask for better.

The knowledge of the end user encourages the competition and makes the market more healthier, look at the Japanese market for example, the high level of basic internet knowledge every user have, they are always asking for more, and the competition became really harder, which made their products and services more enhanced and better shaped to give the users better satisfaction and more real solutions.

Low Level of Competition

Competition is the best motive to improve ourselves, you want to be better than your competitors so you start improving your products and skills, the more competition there is in the market the more healthier it is, and the better and competitive products and services will be.

Locally the competition is very low, sometimes it’s due to the outdated skills available and sometimes due to the monopoly of the big companies, those companies that insist on hiding the “lamp” and always trying to convince us that the “candle” is the only available mean of light.

There were and still are many tries to do something new, fighting all the way to deliver the best solutions available, but yet they are very few, few to the level that they are hard to find, I really find these tries very positive and sure they will be the pioneers or the local market and hopefully they will be more soon.

I hope the local market will reach the level of tough competition to have a better and healthier market, which will encourage us to join and compete by trying to deliver a better solutions instead of just being the first to copy these solutions from the international market.

Wider Audience

One of the best advantages of cyberspace now is the wide audience you can speak to and target, normally starting a business is limited to how far you can deliver your product or service to, which was very small circle in the past, but now in cyberspace, this start circle is big already, the easy access for the end users to reach your products and services by simply type the URL of your site to be in your world, your application is deliverable to every plugged user to the net.

Such an advantage should be used wisely, the solution of the problem should be generalized to serve a wider range of users not only for a specific country of city. When a web applications is served in Arabic for example, we are not targeting only a small city or even one country, but we are targeting every internet user who speaks Arabic wherever he/she is.

Why International Then?

So local or international? personally I chose the international market because I found it more beneficial to me than the local market, I’m not saying that the local market is not good, maybe it is a mine of gold, but not a mine of knowledge, at least not for me.

Internationally I find better knowledge and more competition which helps me develop myself and stay up-to-date with the latest technologies, I couldn’t do this while working for the local market.

The tough competition and the variety of solutions available internationally always have motivated me to do more and learn more, not to mention the great opportunity of meeting new people with better knowledge that I can always learn from.

What about you? what do you prefer? working for the international market, or target the local market? and why?