Expanding internationally into market openings with Kameleoon's Jean-René Boidron
This week on How to Win: Jean-René Boidron, President and CEO at Kameleoon, an A/B testing, full-stack, and personalization platform that provides fast, secure solutions to help enterprise teams maximize customer engagement and conversion. Founded out of France in 2012, Kameleoon is now a global company with a team of over 185 employees, serving over 500 brands worldwide. In this episode, Jean-René walks us through the decision to focus on non-English speaking market openings before expanding globally, and why Kameleoon has chosen to raise brand awareness via prioritizing product quality, betting that a high quality product will generate more word of mouth. I share my thoughts on making the most of market openings, why being more local can be a strong competitive strategy, and why product differentiation is important, but no longer enough on its own.
Key Points:
- Jean-René explains how Kameleoon got its start (01:07)
- How Kameleoon got an advantage by establishing itself outside of the dominant North American market (02:40)
- My thoughts on finding market openings and targeting a specific set of customers (05:34)
- Why Kameleoon keeps its core strategy the same globally, which some localized differences (07:00)
- I explain the advantages of being more local with a quote from Prof. Richard Lynch (09:06)
- Jean-René explains the market verticals Kameleoon is focused on (13:22)
- Why word of mouth is a pillar of Kameleoon's marketing strategy (15:27)
- I explain why building mental availability is essential to generating more word of mouth (16:42)
- Why Kameleoon prefers to go "slow in the right direction" over "fast in the wrong one" (18:04)
- My thoughts on why product differentiation is important, but not enough to win you the game, with a quote from Gong's Chris Orlob (19:16)
- Jean-René explains why smaller markets don't see as much commoditization as large ones (21:43)
- Why Kameleoon was hesitant to rely on lots of VC funding in the early days (24:46)
- My thoughts on the challenges of over-funding startups with a quote from Jason Calacanis (26:23)
- Wrap up (28:57)
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