SEF.Growth Event with Innosuisse

Swiss Start-Ups Going Global: Typewise’s Path to Smart Expansion

When Swiss start-ups want to scale, they need to go international – but how? For Typewise, pivoting, strategic market selection, and lessons from YCombinator paved the way. Discover the key moves behind their international journey and learn about how Innosuisse and Switzerland Global Enterprise accompany start-ups like yours on this leap.

"50% of start-ups said in our survey that they want to go international within one year", shares Maria Anselmi, Head of Start-ups and Next-Generation Innovators Division at Innosuisse, in an opening remark. This number shows that many start-ups have the ambition to expand into other markets quickly but may not know what it takes to eventually do it.

That's where Innosuisse and Switzerland Global Enterprise have the start-ups back. With instruments like the validation camp, the market entry camp, and an exchange program, Innosuisse accompanies start-ups on their journey into new markets. Switzerland Global Enterprise is at hand anytime a Swiss company needs support in their export activities and building an international network.

Introducing Typewise and its Founding Story

Typewise, a B2B SaaS start-up, co-founded by David Eberle, also had ambitions for early internationalisation. However, the innovation journey of Typewise teaches more than just how to go about an expansion strategy. In David's Keynote, we learned a lot from his steps, from founding Typewise to pivoting into what Typewise is today, and eventually about building a sales team and choosing suitable markets to go international.

But first, let's briefly describe what Typewise does. Typewise, founded in 2020, is a software company that helps customer service teams reply faster and more accurately. With their function "Magic Reply," companies can reduce customer handling time by up to 50 %.

From first product to pivoting to a customer service efficiency tool

The first product was the Typewise keyboard, a B2C app that helps people type faster on their smartphones. It was pretty successful, having two million downloads. But it proved to be challenging to build a large company out of that. Even though the software worked better than the one from Apple and Google, the product was not the right one to bring to the market. Also: "The consumer market is very unpredictable; nobody knows what will work and what won't. B2B is more predictable, and that's one more reason why we did the pivot", says David. So, Typewise was thinking about options in the B2B sector. One idea was to use the technology to build a customer service AI solution. "We felt an immediate need in the need and signed our first client, end of 2021."

Learnings from the Pivot and YCombinator Programme

Doing this pivot and being accepted into YCombinator, the most successful VC fund globally, David has collected some outstanding advice:

• Obsessively talk to customers and make sure you fully understand your needs.
• Get a good growth rate (more than 10%).
• Don't overhire. Why? You most likely have to pivot, and if you have too many people on the payroll while having to figure it out and going through a pivot, that's wasted talent and wasted money.
• Avoid distractions. Focus on the important things.
• Do things that don't scale. Example: Observe how the client uses the product, and do personal onboarding with clients to learn how to improve product-market fit and message-market fit.
• Focus on one growth channel: Find one thing that works and double down on that.
• Keep your sales founder-led up to 50'000 USD ARR/month. Use that time to find out which messaging and value proposition works. Then, you can build your sales team and pass on your process and sales pitch to them.

Choosing markets for internationalisation

"The US market is the ambition of most Swiss start-ups. But many go there to get a sense of it and then decide not to enter the US market because they understood that it's not the right decision", says Maria, sharing the observations from Innosuisse's perspective. Felicitas Gartmann, Consultant for Starters at Switzerland Global Enterprise, doubles down on that: "Choosing the right market is crucial. While the US market seems attractive because it is huge and homogenous, it's rarely the first go-to-market for Swiss start-ups. Rather than size, aspects like legal ground, competition, financial solvency, and market needs must be considered."

David's thought process for choosing the international markets did that exemplarily: "We understand that Europe is big enough to get to the next level and we just keep an opportunistic approach in the US. Within Europe, we found that our business case is not as compelling in Eastern Europe because the wages are lower, and our tool for cost-efficiency can't make a big enough difference to be a no-brainer. We are therefore focusing on Middle and Western Europe. We would even consider offering our product in Latin America by our Spanish team members and entering Singapore rather than entering the US."