Наблюдаю кучу стартапов, которые видят успешные истории русских в Америке и начинают копировать их подходы один в один. Но ведь мы не видим тех, кто провалился с такой же стратегией. Как думаете, в чем основные подводные камни такого подхода?
We fell for this exact trap launching in Eastern Europe. We’d studied successful US campaigns from Russian-speaking founders and thought we had it figured out. But our social listening showed completely different conversation patterns and cultural triggers than what worked in the States. Turns out we were seeing survivorship bias - just the winners, not the dozens who bombed using the same approach in different markets.
We learned this the hard way with a fintech client. We copied a successful founder’s content strategy from their US launch - their thought leadership worked because they had Silicon Valley credibility. But our messaging felt completely forced in the CIS market. So we switched focus to local regulatory pain points instead of generic innovation stuff. BOFU conversion rates jumped 40%. That successful case we studied? Just one data point, not a blueprint.
Had a Russian SaaS client whose traffic tanked when they expanded to the US. Turns out they’d copied someone else’s keyword strategy without thinking it through. ‘Business automation’ works totally differently in Russian search vs American SERPs - different user intent, different journey signals, different schema expectations. Plus the founder they copied had way more domain authority, so their content strategy was never going to work for a smaller player.
Had this exact problem with a SaaS client targeting Russian expats. We copied a killer sequence that worked great in the US, but our open rates crashed to 8%. Turns out the timing was completely off - we were sending based on American work schedules when our audience checked email on Moscow time. Had to scrap the whole send schedule and rebuild it around their actual timezone patterns instead of Silicon Valley habits.