Managing Multiple Pivots While Scaling to $50 Million: MotionPoint CEO Will Fleming (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: When you were describing this localisation thing, I was thinking, “Okay, it’s not just doing a site in another language. Selling in another geography is a whole different ball game.”

Will Fleming: Exactly. Our customers were telling us this and we were thinking, “That’s not our business. We don’t have this capability and for that capability, and you have all of these talented employees. You have all of these agencies, experts, and consultants. Why is it that you are talking to us?” They said, “Unlike us, each of us generally operate one website in one industry in one market. The reality is you operate more multi-lingual websites than anybody else in the world. You operate these websites across different geographies and markets. You’re deep into most industries. You’re the ones who are naturally positioned to solve this riddle.”

They started saying, “Here’s what I want you to figure out. Let’s take the Hispanic market for example. Many of your customers have a Spanish website for US customers. We share some common problems there.” We said, “Like what?” We were thinking of them as being in very different businesses. They said, “We know that we are in very different businesses but what we all want on our Spanish website is Spanish language traffic. We also want to make sure that the Spanish language website is especially engaging to our Spanish language visitors.” It was with those comments that we had real insight into a broadening of our business and the business opportunity.

Whereas, up until that point, we thought of ourselves as a website translation company, we realised that there’s a much broader opportunity to drive business results and help companies penetrate new markets. That was a major move for us. It led to a process that began back then and has continued to this day of, “What does that mean? What does that imply for us both from a strategy standpoint and product development standpoint?”

Sramana Mitra: What have you gone towards? Are you now providing traffic acquisition services all the way from PPC advertising?  Are you offering customer support in Spanish? What basket of services are you going towards?

Will Fleming: This relates to our earlier conversation about productisation. We are going towards investment in the platform so that the globalisation platform combines a few pieces. One is intelligent applications with data and with expert services for the purpose of, not just translating, but further localising, and even optimising for business performance.

When it comes to professional services, those aren’t areas that we are looking to do. Those are areas that we are looking to enable through ecosystem that we want to be putting together. We do them now but not at any level of scale. There are people in the world and nearly every market who already know these things. Perhaps, know better and have a lot of expertise. They will be able to use our tools and make them better for the advancement of our customer.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Managing Multiple Pivots While Scaling to $50 Million: MotionPoint CEO Will Fleming
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