The conventional advice for MENA startups is to “solve for your local market first.” This sounds reasonable, but it often leads to products that work well locally but can’t expand globally. You end up with solutions that are perfectly adapted to local constraints but don’t translate to markets with different constraints. The better approach is to solve problems that are particularly acute in your market but exist everywhere. Infrastructure limitations in MENA teach you to build efficient, lightweight products that work better for everyone. Regulatory complexity teaches you to build modular, configurable systems that can adapt to different requirements. Think about some of the most successful global companies that started in emerging markets. WhatsApp was designed for markets with expensive data plans and unreliable connections, which made it superior to SMS globally. Grab started as a taxi-hailing app in Southeast Asia but evolved into a super-app because of local market needs.

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The Global-First Mindset

Instead of building for your local market and hoping to expand later, build solutions that happen to work especially well in your local market but are designed for global applicability from day one. This means thinking about problems differently. Rather than building “accounting software for small businesses in Egypt,” build “accounting software for cash-heavy businesses with complex regulatory requirements.” The first positioning limits you to one market; the second applies to small businesses in dozens of countries. This approach also helps with fundraising from international investors. Instead of asking them to understand your local market, you’re showing them a global opportunity that you happen to understand better than anyone else because of your local expertise.