Hubdub founder Nigel Eccles (we profiled them back in February) made some interesting notes on how to run a site for the US while staying in the UK.
Photo by Carbon NYC on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
First off, that has to clearly be your target from very early in the development of your startup. Eccles says Hubdub spent $18,500 to launch their business at DEMO, one of a handful of specialised conferences for the tech industry. "It was expensive, but worth it," he wrote on TechCrunch - and then endorsed TechCrunch 50, of course. "We got a huge amount of exposure also probably pulled forward our launch date by two months - which stopped us from developing a bunch of features out users would never have used."
Eccles says the site is written in US English (the shame!), has built a board of US advisors (very sensible) and regularly travel to the US.
He adds that you should be able to build a virtual team form your most local US users, track your competitors using web-based tools and - a big one - apply for your US Visa early: "Most UK based entrepreneurs want to stay in the UK and help build the start-up community here, but if geography is becoming a serious issue then move to the US, successfully sell to AOL for $850 million and then invest in some UK start-ups."
Controversially, Eccles recommends using a PR company. As he says, there's a debate among startups about whether you need to do this. I don't think everyone does; if you're involved weight the community and so are the journalists, they should already be in your network. Nobody knows your product better than you, and if you're confident in articulating what you're trying to do it should be natural to go to journalists directly. If not, then ask around for recommendations.
Eccles recommends using your network for help and that's probably the first place to start: "Nearly every successful entrepreneur I have met is happy to help entrepreneurs starting out."
