How do you decide which international market to enter?

The US is a really exciting place for them. They've been distributed in California for the last 12 months and are really focused on Northern California. Andy observes that the US is such a huge market that a lot of people get "stars in their eyes" when they consider entering and go a little bit too hard too quickly — so they're trying to learn from those mistakes and from the advice of others who've come before them.

The geographic focus has allowed them to go really deep culturally in California — the Bay Area, Northern California and Oakland. As an example, they partnered with the Mosswood Meltdown Music Festival, a community based and community run music festival headlined by Devo this year, which helped start to ingrain Heaps Normal with the local community over there.

Brian explains they broke customers "into different data segments" by brand and retail sub-segments — consumer packaged goods, fast moving goods, fashion, grocery, pharmacy — and categorized that across the world. Then they studied "how much is an SMS, how much is an email, how much is it push notifications in each region" and "fed that into an algorithm" to flag a strong region where "Google and Apple Wallet is available there and there are like users in the region already." They also asked practical network questions — "do we know people there? Do we have shop for agency connections?" — and copied what worked in Australia "as much as possible, taking into account like different things like price, sales cycles, buying habits of these enterprise customers."