Ask YC: Are Americans forgetting the rest of the world?

Oversight

The US is itself a huge market with relatively uniformity (you mention the address information as one example, the currency is another). I don't see anything wrong with a US company deciding that US customers are reasonable target. Yes, they are missing out on business, but they are also missing out on hassles with deal with the RotW.

So my take is that for many US companies the answer is "Why bother? We have a big market here".

Oversight and pragmatism. You have to start somewhere - and it's usually quite sensible to start with the biggest market, and then expand to the smaller ones.

Look at it as an opportunity to get into other markets first, as an entrepreneur:-) There are lots of "copycat" sites making good money in their home countries.

Uh...AOL = America OnLine.

Point taken, but AOL isn't a great example - it started when Americans really were (practically speaking) the only netizens (and overseas connections were expensive).

There is still quite a bit of friction at the borders. As a company that ships equipment both into and out of America, we still find it difficult/expensive to get goods and money into and out of this country. Actually difficult to the point that a profitable product in US is not profitable outside because the profit margin is more than absorbed by the cost of getting the goods out of the country and getting the payment back in.

Instead we've had to set up a rather convoluted system where our hardware is sourced and assembled outside of the US. It was so much of a pain that I can easily see why some people might just decide its not worth the hassle. The economy may be global now, but if you're not in Asia or eastern Europe, your country didn't get the memo.

You are doing the same thing here in this post. America and US are two different things.

<slightly off topic>

The thing that gets me is that there are a lot of US companies that expect people to use credit cards. I'm guessing that this is because (AFAIK) most US citizens have credit cards. However, over here in the UK (rest of Europe too? I don't know) credit cards aren't so prolific. I wish people would start allowing more international forms of payment, such as PayPal. I REALLY want to start using the paid versions of some of 37 Signals stuff as well as some of the Amazon Web Services, but I can't because they don't accept Paypal (or something similar). The thing that gets me is that I can buy something online via Amazon, but can't use their web services. </rant>

This seems pretty obvious to me (as a european resident). The amount of stuff you have to figure out to reach the US market is a lot less than the amount of stuff you have to figure out to reach the european market. That's a lot of the impetus for tighter european economic integration. If the cost of reaching the US market is a fraction of the cost of reaching the combined european market, it doesn't matter if there are a few more people in the EU. You also can't really measure online market size by GDP or pure head count. Some corners of the EU (Bulgaria, for instance) are less developed than Mexico.

Maybe in the case of AOL they offer those free email accounts to Americans only so they can guarantee a more homogeneous audience to their advertisers.

It's a problem mainly of ignorance. Both with regards to requiring zip and state and also with the whole liability problem.

The liability issue is only a problem for a few types of businesses, in particularly financial.

You may offend or break laws (such as EU privacy laws), but it really doesn't matter if you're a US company without offices in an EU jurisdiction as they don't have jurisdiction over you, no matter what they say.

It is very easy to make a signup form internationally compliant. You just have to do zip/postalcode, state/province/region. Also don't make any of the address fields required unless you need them for shipping purposes.

I think there is something more insidious at work here. Well, perhaps not Insidious, but it's not about companies trying to exclude people, at least not in large. In honesty I think there are two culprits.

1) Stupid Developers. There are lots of developers out there who are lazy and stupid in the bad way. They just go with what they know and don't even begin to consider a larger audience. Think of all the uber-limited lists of job field boxes, of the limited gender-identity options on sites, of the idiocy of requiring an address for registration to a newspapers comments in the first place!

2) Ignorant or unthinking management. People who make the developers require all that stupid information in the first place. They do it because they don't really understand that they're actively deterring business. It's a problem with business models all over. Business leaders often don't realize that they're making it hard for their customers, and that makes their customers unlikely to be customers for long. If someone would sit them down and explain to them the horrors of interface friction, and truly make them understand, I think things could get better quickly.

There's definitely a level of premature optimisation, although it is becoming less common. I've lost count of the times that I've encountered forms that only accept five digit postal codes or 10 digit telephone numbers.

Take your business elsewhere and the problem will fix itself.