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Question
Localised tools/pricing - good idea or uphill battle?
Context: I'm in South Africa. The ZAR/USD exchange rate has shot from ~R16/$ to R20/$ in about 2 years.
One "theme" of project idea I've had lately is to make essentially similar tools to ones often used by SaaS builders, but with localised pricing and branding.
Forex fluctuations alongside inflation in the last few years have made even a $10/month subscription a hard sell to some founders, as even without a price change the effective cost has risen by a good 20-30%.
Some tools offer purchasing power parity discounts, but not many. I mostly see this for one-off products like info products.
Thus, the overall need I'm trying to address here is providing more affordable tools to other builders in my community, and especially in their own currency.
The usual advice given is to just charge in USD or EUR globally for everyone and call it a day, but I think that by taking this angle it also opens a wider range of ideas one can build. For example, building yet another link-in-bio type tool is meh, but building it specifically for creators in my country might be interesting.
What I'm concerned about is becoming the cheap option or otherwise turning it into a race to the bottom in a market that's already price-sensitive.
I'm also kind of hoping that by building in this way, I can help grow the indie hacker community within South Africa too.
What do you think?
One "theme" of project idea I've had lately is to make essentially similar tools to ones often used by SaaS builders, but with localised pricing and branding.
Forex fluctuations alongside inflation in the last few years have made even a $10/month subscription a hard sell to some founders, as even without a price change the effective cost has risen by a good 20-30%.
Some tools offer purchasing power parity discounts, but not many. I mostly see this for one-off products like info products.
Thus, the overall need I'm trying to address here is providing more affordable tools to other builders in my community, and especially in their own currency.
The usual advice given is to just charge in USD or EUR globally for everyone and call it a day, but I think that by taking this angle it also opens a wider range of ideas one can build. For example, building yet another link-in-bio type tool is meh, but building it specifically for creators in my country might be interesting.
What I'm concerned about is becoming the cheap option or otherwise turning it into a race to the bottom in a market that's already price-sensitive.
I'm also kind of hoping that by building in this way, I can help grow the indie hacker community within South Africa too.
What do you think?
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I think local tools are a good idea if the idea has a market in your country, but the best local apps have some unique features to differentiate them from non-local apps
e.g. Amazon in the US and Lazada in Thailand both deliver similar goods. Amazon has better logistics and routing, but Lazada differentiates itself by being a "fun" app with minigames to get you discounts.
I like this note too - Ben's right that Lazado and Shoppee and Flipkart (I think these are the three really big ones in the region) all provide some localized specifics... also marketing gets to be more fun / localized.
@nikspyratos you might also like the Rest of World newsletters. It's one of my favorites and covers tech outside of a us/western euro perspective. It's really great if you're not already across it! restofworld.org/
Thank you, will check it out!
They are PP deals in SaaS for sure. I get a whole different page going to basecamp.com with the a big text welcome from Philippines. But doing completely localized tool of something expensive is a great thing to do I think.
Localised is the way I guess. Until the global competitor starts to deliver a better customer experience.
I'm a big fan of this from an ethical perspective alone (and things like price parity and sliding scale pricing based on revenue/income are things I really would want to see more of). I've worked in cambodia a lot of my life and there are so many things not possible or deeply skewed because it's all in a pricing that's relative to rich countries.
I think in terms of your question for becoming the cheap option or race to the bottom - if you mean folks outside of south africa (or other countries of your choice) you could potentially add an identifier i.e. business or residential address or business number or something that would exclude everyone in the netherlands choosing your specific local product for example. Just a thought off the top of my head if that's possible (in cambodia this would be a nightmare because of lack of addresses and business numbers but there might be another way!).
I like it too from a 'support your local folks' perspective.
Indeed, PPP was a thought here too, and would perhaps be the better play overall so as to not exclude first world markets.
But, the positioning advantage is a bit lost then too, potentially.
Going to still give it a go this year :)