What EdTech founders get wrong about global scale
Scaling an education product globally sounds like a distribution problem. Build a good product, translate it, find local partners, launch. Most founders discover the flaw in that logic only after they’ve already paid for it.
Education touches what families believe about childhood, authority, and the future. What counts as learning, who has the standing to teach, what role technology should play in a child’s life – none of these have universal answers. A product that treats them as solved questions will not earn the trust it needs to enter new markets.
The assumption that breaks everything
The default expansion playbook borrows from software: abstract the product, distribute widely, localise the interface. That works when the core experience is culturally thin, a spreadsheet tool, a messaging app. Education is not.
Translating the interface changes the language while leaving everything underneath it untouched. Local adaptation is not a communications problem in which better framing leads to adoption. The framing belongs to the community being entered. Understanding it comes before the product does.
What cultural context requires
In Malaysia and Indonesia, we met directly with parents and showed them what their children were doing in our programme. For the parents of seven- and eight-year-olds, that meant seeing their child choose a game genre, design the mechanics, build a concept, and work out how to bring it to market. Watching this changed how they saw the programme. Their children were coming up with their own ideas, planning them, working alongside other kids, and carrying the project through to the end.
The work in those conversations is finding where a product’s value intersects with what a community already cares about. If that intersection does not exist, no amount of clever framing saves the initiative.
The state’s role in the industry
A market is shaped by more than its families and communities. In many countries, governments are building industries that founders hope to enter, and their strategies deserve close attention. In Malaysia and Saudi Arabia, government support and state programmes drove the growth of the gaming industry. Both governments treated games as part of the digital economy, with the capacity to create jobs, generate intellectual property, and form a significant share of GDP, and both put substantial funding behind that view. How each government pursued it looked very different.
Malaysia spent years as an outsourcing hub for AAA development, where local studios-built games for large international developers, and their teams grew highly skilled in the process. The government is now restructuring the industry so that games are produced entirely in Malaysia, and the intellectual property remains Malaysian. It also offers very generous terms to international companies that open offices in the country and station staff there. Saudi Arabia is an expensive place to operate, with summers that make it harder to attract people, and the government has invested in a different approach. It brings international experts into local companies and develops local talent through education programs and numerous grants. It has also acquired well-known studios that already own established games and has directed much of its effort toward esports. A company arriving in either country is entering a sector the government has already committed to and has its own plans for, which shapes the kind of partner it seeks.
What governments want from a partnership
EdTech founders often treat a government partnership as a way into the broader education system, something that adds credibility and speeds up procurement. The governments they approach operate under different priorities.
Regional governments generally partner with large, established organisations and enter into these agreements to advance their long-term plans. When a government works with an education provider, it is usually trying to strengthen the local workforce, support the regional economy, and, in some cases, reinforce national identity. It wants to know whether the work will create jobs in the region, whether the knowledge and intellectual property developed along the way will remain there as the project matures, and whether what is built will continue to serve the area once the company’s commercial attention has moved elsewhere.
A company tends to do well here when it offers solutions to the problems a regional government is facing and supports the goals the government is working toward. The stronger position belongs to the company that comes prepared to talk about what the region needs to develop over the coming years and how education can support that, rather than the one presenting a product to sell. Conversations of that sort tend to attract grant funding and a closer level of access than a sales pitch does.
The purpose of a programme shapes its aims, funding, and operations. A programme built mainly to drive a company’s own growth will differ in those respects from one created to build lasting capability within the region. When a government weighs a proposal, that difference usually shows in how the programme is funded and governed, well before any agreement is reached.
The questions that don’t get asked early enough
Before entering a new market, EdTech teams typically ask whether there is demand, whether there is internet access, and whether someone will pay. Those questions have their place, but they come after the ones that determine whether the product can operate at all.
Who has permission to educate here, and who does not? In some markets, foreign companies face real resistance to teaching certain subjects regardless of product quality. That resistance rarely shows up in market research. It shows up six months in, when a partnership stalls and no one will say why directly.
What does success look like to the community, not to the metrics dashboard? Completion rates mean little if the credential is not recognised locally or by the industry. A qualification that employers do not accept leaves graduates unable to find work, and one without official standing may be entirely invalid. Engagement numbers mean nothing if parents do not trust the format.
What already exists, and what does it tell you? Every market has education infrastructure, however informal, tutoring networks, religious instruction, and community learning structures that predate any platform. Founders who study what is already there understand what they are complementing and where friction will come from. Those who arrive assuming a gap will be filled tend to find out otherwise at considerable expense.
The founders who build something durable in new markets are rarely those with the best product. They are the ones who understood that trust takes longer to earn than any launch timeline allows for, and who planned accordingly.
Before we localise a product for a new territory, we research it in depth. The work goes well past market size, the competition, and how much customers can afford to pay. A larger part of it is understanding the people we are building for, their culture, their religious practices, the ethnic makeup of the population, and the values and heritage they carry. We study how users in different countries respond to the same interface, and the differences within Europe alone are considerable. A German user experiences an interface differently from a Spanish or French one, even though all three are often grouped together as a single European audience. Chinese and American users differ more sharply than before, to the point that a product that suits one can feel foreign to the other. A company that wants to succeed in a new market must budget time and money for this kind of localisation, particularly when the product is an educational one.
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