Entering the US Market: 6 Lessons From AB Tasty’s International Expansion

Do you really need to open a physical US office, or send a founder across the Atlantic, to make global expansion work?

Alix de Sagazan answered that question by moving her entire family from Paris to New York to crack the US market for AB Tasty, a platform that helps marketing and product teams test and personalize digital experiences. She’ll be the first to tell you it wasn’t a dream she’d chased: “I was very happy living in Paris with my kids and my family, and I didn’t want to move.”

Alix went anyway, and today she sees it as the best decision ever. She also calls the first year very hard: learning to hire in a country whose cultural codes she didn’t yet know, while still running the European business from afar.

That mix of sacrifice and payoff is the honest version of international business expansion, and exactly what this guide teaches.

Below, we draw on Alix’s firsthand experience and insights from Sandrine Puichaffret, founder of Eagle Eyes Consulting, who helps European B2B tech companies scale in the US.

1. Choose the Biggest Opportunity, Then Narrow Ruthlessly

Pick your first market from where category leadership is decided, then narrow the opportunity enough to validate it properly.

For AB Tasty, the US was the obvious first choice. As Alix puts it, “In our space, if you want to become a global leader, of course, you have to go to the biggest market.”

That said, her ideal sequence isn’t the one she actually ran. AB Tasty opened in the UK, Spain, and Germany before crossing the Atlantic. And given a do-over, she’d flip it.

Alix is clear that this logic suits a company like hers, whose product spreads without regional reengineering. If your product needs significant adaptation per market, your international business expansion strategy may also need a different sequence.

Choosing the US doesn’t mean targeting the whole country at once. Sandrine puts it bluntly: “You don’t go to the US. That’s what I say. Never ever.” Her advice instead is to keep refining: “You do have to think about your vertical and go narrow to it.”

In one of her examples, retail was still too broad, so the company focused on beauty and fashion, then on New York, and then on a specific company size. From there, validate that segment in the field instead of assuming the ICP that worked at home will transfer.

Luckily for your budget, you don’t need to commit serious headcount or relocate a founder to learn whether a market is real. AB Tasty tested the US before Alix moved there. Her co-founder, Rémi Aubert, joined a 3-month Business France Impact program, and within about 6 months, the team had landed its first couple of customers. A small local team of 3 then grew that to roughly 10 to 12 customers and around $200K in ARR before Alix relocated.

2. Put Experienced People Close to the Market

Once you’re ready to relocate a leader, choose by function fit and experience, ensuring the market’s decision-maker(s) have enough US context to interpret what they see.

Sandrine warns against making market entry a junior assignment: “It’s not a junior who can do the analysis.” Without someone who knows the country well, research can give you a “true false signal”, and you may not realize it.

AB Tasty’s original plan had co-founder Rémi moving to New York. He wanted to go, and Alix didn’t. The problem: Rémi runs tech and product, and launching in a new country is a go-to-market job. Alix owned GTM, so she went instead.

Alix found the real value wasn’t closing customers. It was internal:

“At the end of the day, you can travel to see customers. But I think it’s most important to have the founder on the ground with the team, to create this culture and this spirit.”

That principle scales below founder level. When AB Tasty opened its APAC office, 2 experienced employees relocated from Paris to Singapore. One now leads the entire region and has been with AB Tasty for more than 10 years.

As Alix puts it, sending people directly from HQ is best, as they carry the culture with them.

Be honest about the cost on anyone moving, though. “I felt like I was in a washing machine”, Alix says of that first year. “I arrived and had to hire like 25 people. I didn’t know how to hire in the US.” Anticipate your own version of that. Plan for it. And if things go more smoothly, all the better.

3. Hire Marketing Before Sales (Even if It Feels Counterintuitive)

Build the pipeline before you recruit the people meant to close it.

For AB Tasty, that meant reversing the usual playbook. Alix had learned that US salespeople focus on closing, not outbound, so she needed strong inbound first. “That’s why I started with marketing and then salespeople.”

That said, what worked for AB Tasty may not necessarily apply to you. If your model relies more heavily on outbound, expect the sequence to look a little different.

Her hiring order:

1. A recruiter (HR) first, to help hire everyone who came after.
2. A VP of Marketing to fuel the pipeline.
3. Salespeople, once there was a demand for them to close.

The early payoff backed her up: after a slow start, “we were crushing our numbers in the 4th quarter”.

Then, plan to retool. AB Tasty’s strong early traction eventually slowed, and Alix had to rework the go-to-market.

Sandrine recommends making that ongoing reassessment part of the broader operating rhythm: test different routes to the audience, feed sales and support feedback back into the plan, and revisit what’s working in roughly 90-day cycles. Iterate your global expansion strategy, in other words.

4. Use Partnerships to Build Trust in a New Market

Borrow trust from the relationships that already reach your buyer.

Start with existing relationships, if you have them. Sandrine suggests using existing European customers with US subsidiaries for warm introductions, then getting an early US logo as proof of market fit.

AB Tasty took the same principle further. It landed in the US without local recognition or a big budget, so Alix borrowed both through partnerships. “We were like, let’s work with the big names on the market. Let’s sponsor their events. Let’s do dinners with their customers, lunch and learns.”

The key was sponsoring large technology companies that served the same buyers and had the budget to run big events.

The payoff was measurable. AB Tasty’s overall conversion rate sits around 25%, Alix says, “but from the partner channel it’s closer to 50%, because it’s much more qualified”.

While the right move for every company will vary, the underlying principle holds: qualified introductions convert better than cold channels. And they’re cheaper.

“Weglot is a working example of how far partnerships can go. We have a third of our revenue coming from the US, and we have nobody there. It’s thanks mainly to partners. They know the market. They know the buyers. They have their trust.” – Eugène, CMO @ Weglot

One caveat: partnerships need dedicated owners – a partnerships manager plus someone in marketing focused on partners, because the channel takes real work and energy.

5. Keep Your Identity, Adapt How You Operate

Resist the pressure to “become American” in your storytelling or culture, while adapting the customer-facing surface. Keep what makes your company distinctively yours.

Alix was repeatedly advised to play down her French identity:

“Everybody was telling me, when you go to the US, you have to forget about yourself, be super American.”

She tried it, and it didn’t work.

So she adapted the language she used and the way the team showed up in the market. Sandrine’s starting advice here is practical: “deconstruct your belief” and test what you think you know about the US, from relationship-building to responsiveness.

Specifically, Alix leaned into small, honest signals: Apéro on the first Thursday of the month. Croissant breakfasts. Little French touches, deliberately added, while building a broader international culture.

That retained identity also became a hiring filter: “The people who are going to join us are the ones who feel aligned with it. And the people who are too bullish, they’re not going to come.”

If you’re agonizing over how “local” to seem, you’re probably overthinking it. In Alix’s experience, US buyers cared far more about the offer than where the company came from: “The American buyer is very pragmatic – if they see a good product with good support, good quality, good price, they are going to sign and become a customer.”

What those buyers will notice is whether your product and website feel clear and relevant to them. That’s where localization matters.

6. Give It Time, but Move Fast and Hire Well

Set realistic time horizons and build patience into the plan and budget so you don’t cut a market right before it turns.

Patience only works if you’ve given the market a fair chance. Sandrine describes US expansion as a whole-company project, with investment across HR, legal, and the wider team. Under-resource the effort, and you risk mistaking weak execution for a bad market.

Even with the right backing, traction can take time, and the temptation in any slow market is to pull the plug. Alix nearly did, in the UK of all places.

“After 3 years, I was like, we are going to stop the UK market, it’s too complicated. And then something happened.”

The turning point was having the right people in place.

Asked later which market surprised her most, she named the UK again: “I was a bit desperate, and then it became my biggest source of hope and happiness.”

In the US, AB Tasty started opportunistically in the mid-market. Then, around the 2-year mark, it brought in a VP of Sales with enterprise experience, and the average contract value rose.

Define “the right people” concretely: match leadership experience to your next go-to-market need.

And don’t confuse patience with sticking to the first plan. Give the market time, but keep testing channels, reallocating spend, and making quick decisions as new information comes in.

Your Next Market Starts With Meeting Customers Where They Are

Strip these lessons down, and they’re essentially the same instruction: show up on the customer’s terms.

Alix’s quickfire advice makes a clean international expansion strategy checklist to pin above your desk:

• Don’t hire too fast or hire too many people.
• Don’t open too many offices at the same time.
• Take culture and relationships seriously, even in a market you assume is transactional.
• Above all, “Hire the right people.”

Sandrine’s final advice is simpler: “Be humble.” Trust the people who understand the market, and be willing to change the plan when their evidence tells you to.

The most literal way to meet customers where they are is to show up in their language. That can be your first step toward building market relevance before you commit heavy local resources.

Your website can already be speaking to that market in its own words, helping the right people discover you and giving early prospects an experience that feels relevant.

Weglot lets you launch that localized version, support multilingual SEO, and learn from a new audience while the wider go-to-market plan is still taking shape. Start your 14-day free trial.