FAQ

How Do You Expand a Digital Product to a New Country?

Multi-Vertical Scaling

Key Takeaways
  • According to a 2023 McKinsey Digital report on international product launches, companies typically spend 6 to 12 months and $50,000 to $250,000 adapting a digital product for a new market.
  • Stealth Labz operated an insurance quoting platform in South Africa -- processing leads, generating revenue, running on its own infrastructure.
  • One operator now manages two countries with no regional teams, no local offices, and no regional managers.

You expand a digital product to a new country by redeploying the geography-agnostic parts of your existing system (roughly 80% of it) and rebuilding only the pieces that are country-specific: currency handling, local vendor integrations, and regulatory compliance rules. When the core architecture is built to separate business logic from geography-dependent configuration, international expansion becomes a deployment task rather than a rebuild.

What the industry expects

According to a 2023 McKinsey Digital report on international product launches, companies typically spend 6 to 12 months and $50,000 to $250,000 adapting a digital product for a new market. Most of that time goes to re-engineering infrastructure that was never designed to travel: hardcoded currency formats, region-locked payment processors, and compliance logic tangled into the core application.

The conventional playbook involves hiring local development teams, engaging regional consultants, and often starting significant portions of the build from scratch. For solo operators or small teams, this cost structure makes geographic expansion appear out of reach entirely.

What happened when we did it

Stealth Labz operated an insurance quoting platform in South Africa -- processing leads, generating revenue, running on its own infrastructure. The goal was to deploy the same product in the United States.

The US version shipped in 16 active development days at approximately $330 in external support costs.

Only three things required geography-specific development:

  • Currency handling -- ZAR to USD
  • Carrier integrations -- South African insurers to US insurers
  • Compliance rules -- South African regulatory to US regulatory

Everything else -- lead capture flows, quoting logic, admin interfaces, analytics, database patterns, and the deployment pipeline -- transferred directly. The US version produced 2.9x the daily output of the original South African build (2,484 units per day vs. 850) in fewer calendar days. That inversion (more output, less time) happened because the foundation was already deep.

The result

One operator now manages two countries with no regional teams, no local offices, and no regional managers. The combined infrastructure spans 31 databases, 42 managed accounts, and 149,068 transaction logs across 3.7 million database rows -- all maintained by a single person.

The $330 total cost for a full market entry is only possible when multiple prior builds feed forward simultaneously. Same-vertical patterns from South Africa and same-geography patterns from prior US work compound into near-zero marginal cost for geographic expansion.

Related: How much does it cost to enter a new vertical with existing software infrastructure?

References

  1. McKinsey & Company (2023). "Tech-forward: Achieving digital-led growth." Industry benchmarks for international product launch costs and timelines.
  2. Keating, M.G. (2026). "Case Study: Same Product, New Country." Stealth Labz. Read case study
  3. Keating, M.G. (2026). "The Compounding Execution Method: Complete Technical Documentation." Stealth Labz. Browse papers