We were so focused on growing our SaaS internationally that we almost overlooked the customers in our own country.

When we started building our SaaS, we had one thing in mind: going global. We're based in Slovenia, a country with roughly 2 million people, and from the beginning, we wanted to build something that could compete internationally. So naturally, most of our marketing efforts were focused outside our home market. We ran Google and Meta Ads targeting international audiences, worked with UGC creators from around the world, and tried different approaches to acquire users. We spent thousands of euros in the process. The results? Lots of impressions, plenty of views, some signups, but very few paying customers. Meanwhile, something interesting was happening back home. A handful of Slovenian businesses were actually using and paying for our product. For context, we're building Picmim, an AI-powered social media management platform that helps small businesses automate their content creation and scheduling. At the time, we were making around €200–300 MRR, mostly from local companies testing the platform. Nothing crazy, but they were real businesses paying real money. **Then two things happened.** We won third place in a regional innovation competition, which gave us some recognition locally. And around the same period, our MRR doubled. It made us reconsider our approach. We'd been so obsessed with building an international SaaS that we weren't giving enough attention to the people who were already willing to pay us. And honestly, selling locally had some pretty obvious advantages we'd overlooked. We could speak directly with business owners, better understand their problems, get feedback in our native language, and build relationships that are much harder to establish through a random Facebook ad. We also started getting customers from more established Slovenian businesses, which was encouraging for a small startup like ours. **So did we abandon our international ambitions?** Not at all. We still want to build a global company. But we realized that starting small geographically doesn't necessarily mean thinking small. Your home market can be an excellent place to validate your product, improve it with real customers, and build credibility before trying to scale everywhere. We've since improved our positioning, rebuilt onboarding, and started seeing better results from our international Meta campaigns as well. We recently crossed $1K MRR on Stripe, alongside the customers paying through other arrangements. We're still very early, and I'm definitely not claiming we've figured out distribution. But one of the biggest lessons so far has been that **the best early customers aren't necessarily in the biggest market. Sometimes they're the ones you can actually reach, understand, and learn from.** I'm curious how other founders approach this. If you're building a SaaS outside the US, did you start by targeting your home market, or did you go international from day one? And looking back, would you make the same decision?