“The problem is not that regulation 1 or 100 is too much. The problem is that every country has different regulations, creating a mess of complexity if you want to act across a larger consumer market”
If you’re building the next Uber sure, this might be a problem.
But this is also a HUGE advantage if you’re not though. If you’re building the Workday for Estonia, or the LinkedIn for Germany (ie Xing) you have a huge advantage over any other big company that wants to steal your market share. Because there’s a bunch of local regulations, customs and ways of doing things that they simply can’t “port” over.
So yes, it’s a barrier if you’re building the next huge consumer startup, but at the same time it creates all these long tail opportunities for a LOT more startups that want to conquer a local market. And that probably helps a LOT more European entrepeneurs
You re just building 27 different companies that are all reinventing the same wheel in their country, and they are all destined to never grow, until some US company localizes their offering and shuts them all down. Microsoft has done exactly that 100 times
It's amusing that you used Uber as an example as Bolt is a direct competitor to Uber that is founded and operated in Estonia, but other than that, your purported advantage is pretty meager.
Assuming you build a product custom tailored to Estonia's unique regulatory requirements that is targeting primarily business users, then you are targeting a maximum market of 324,000 businesses. It's realistic to assume, given Estonia's population of 1.32M people, that most of those businesses are sole proprietorships or small businesses that will not have any IT or service department to support them. Building a successful, competitive product in this fashion requires protectionist policies that favor a local product, and those policies will often run afoul of public tendering rules. At least with Germany, you are dealing with a much larger scale (~84M people, and ~5.3M businesses).
It is certainly possible to build and operate a service that would target Estonian, or other small countries, specific regulatory requirements, but the size of the potential market is extremely small, and the path forward to build a competitive service is to abstract away Estonia specific regulations so that you can build country/regional specific versions.
All that said, assuming you are successful in building a business that accomplishes an "X" product for "Y" market model, the entire success of the business is predicated on a market that is created by differentiation in regulation, and your product benefits from lobbying for eliminating those differentiation.
Optimizing for small, local markets is definitely a path to success for some businesses but it's not an easy one, and it doesn't seem like a reasonable investment for growth oriented startups that seek to compete in a global marketplace.
> it doesn't seem like a reasonable investment for growth oriented startups that seek to compete in a global marketplace
This last thing you said is worth pondering more on. Many places are happy not growing, doing what they love, in a way that suits their workers lifestyles. They can afford to stay small and protected, at the cost of needing to be locally focused, and they love it.
A lot of these local businesses have been taken over by large companies, though not all obviously. Turns out having a fucktillion monetary units does a lot to get through friction.
If you’re building the next Uber sure, this might be a problem.
But this is also a HUGE advantage if you’re not though. If you’re building the Workday for Estonia, or the LinkedIn for Germany (ie Xing) you have a huge advantage over any other big company that wants to steal your market share. Because there’s a bunch of local regulations, customs and ways of doing things that they simply can’t “port” over.
So yes, it’s a barrier if you’re building the next huge consumer startup, but at the same time it creates all these long tail opportunities for a LOT more startups that want to conquer a local market. And that probably helps a LOT more European entrepeneurs