Build for the World

Seventy-four percent of the world’s internet users don’t speak English as their first language.

Read that again.

If you’re building something right now, in English, for English speakers, you’ve already decided that three out of four people on the internet don’t matter.

And here’s the part that should keep you up at night: you’re not just leaving opportunity on the table. You’re building a trap for yourself.

What you’re leaving on the table

Seventy-six percent of consumers prefer buying in their native language. Forty percent will never buy from a site that doesn’t speak to them. That’s not a preference. That’s a wall.

Global e-commerce will hit $6.4 trillion this year. Emerging markets are growing three times faster than the U.S. and Europe. Latin America is up 12% year over year. Southeast Asia even faster.

The growth is happening in places most American founders have never thought about. And almost nobody is building for them.

Here’s what changes when you do:

You reach three quarters of the internet instead of one quarter. You rank in Google across multiple markets because each language gets indexed separately. A site in twelve languages doesn’t just reach more people. It multiplies your visibility. And customers stick around longer when you speak their language. Seventy-five percent say they’re more likely to buy again if support is in their native tongue.

The infrastructure exists. The tools exist. Building for multiple languages from day one is not some massive undertaking. It’s a few decisions made early.

The trap

Every line of code you write makes assumptions. About language. About currency. About how dates work, how names work, how text flows on a page.

Right now, somewhere in your codebase, there’s a hardcoded string. A date format that only makes sense in America. A layout that breaks the moment someone writes in Arabic. You probably don’t even know where they are. But they’re there. And they’re multiplying.

These assumptions become architecture. Architecture becomes constraint. And research from NASA and USC found that fixing architectural choices after launch costs 100 to 1,000 times more than getting them right at the start.

eBay learned this the hard way. They entered China with 85% market share. Three years later, they had nothing. Nine months to implement a change. Nine weeks to update a single word. Their architecture was built for San Jose, not Shanghai. By the time they tried to fix it, Alibaba had already won.

The founders who got it right

Canva’s founder got rejected by over 100 Silicon Valley investors. Perth was too far away to take seriously. So she built for everyone else. Spanish in 2016, then 20 more languages, then 100 more. Today, 80% of Canva’s usage is in a language other than English. 220 million users. 190 countries. $40 billion valuation.

Duolingo’s founder grew up in Guatemala and had to fly to another country just to take an English test. He never forgot what it felt like to be excluded. He built Duolingo to be global from day one. Now 80% of his 116 million users are outside the United States.

They didn’t bolt on international later. They built for the world from the start. And the world noticed.

What we do

At Gravitas Grove, we made the same decision: everything we build will work for a global audience from day one.

Our website and blog are available in twelve languages. We’re seeing visitors from four continents before spending a dollar on marketing.

We’re also building something new. I’m not going to say much, except this: over 20 languages from the start, and it’s going to change how people understand each other. We’re building bridges.

We bring this thinking to our clients. Websites that work across languages and cultures. Apps architected for global reach before the first user signs up. Communications that land whether the reader is in Chicago, São Paulo, or Tokyo.

If you’re building something and you’ve never thought about who you’re leaving out, we should talk.

The world is a big place.

Build for it.

---

Let’s talk.