Episode 20 — The cheapest new market isn't a country

Episode description

You hear “international expansion” and you picture a founder leaning over a map of Europe, picking a country. Tomasz pictured it that way too — until he sat down and did the sums. What came out was not what he expected: the cheapest new market for mojApteczka isn’t a country at all.

An important caveat up front: these are plans and analyses, not a shipped state. The episode announces entry into no market whatsoever. What is actually shipped: four interface languages (Polish, English, Ukrainian, Russian), work with the Polish medicines database, and the English version of this podcast on its own channel. Everything else is a spreadsheet with numbers in it.

What we cover:

A new market is the same people, just somewhere else. Around 984,000 Poles live in the UK. Ireland — 93,000 citizens, but 124,000 people there speak Polish. The Netherlands 128,000, Norway 80,000, Sweden with Denmark and Iceland 170,000. Together with nearly a million Ukrainians living in Poland, that comes to roughly 2.5 million people — without translating a single line of text.
Why no translation is needed. Because those people also buy medicines in Polish pharmacies, and carry them home in a suitcase after visiting their parents. The Polish medicines register is still “their” database. You don’t need an integration with a foreign health service for the app to make sense to them.
Five variables, not one. “Ease of entry” broken into: interface language, medicines database, legal regime, availability of pharmacy data, and competition. A market is cheap when you land on “cheap” in at least three of the five. Write it out, and intuition stops working.
The Czech Republic costs more than it looks. The seemingly obvious neighbour: close by, similar language. But the similarity of the language is an illusion — a Czech won’t install an app that’s in Polish, so a full translation is needed. On top of that, the medicines data there isn’t open. Estimate: 40,000–60,000 euros.
Germany is not an empty market. The leader across Germany, Austria and Switzerland is MyTherapy, out of Munich. There’s also an app called, literally, “digital home medicine cabinet”. Alongside them runs the state’s e-prescription infrastructure. Turning up with the message “we’ve got a medicine cabinet on your phone” will surprise nobody there.
Estonia as the first real country. 1.3 million inhabitants is the only minus. Russian covers roughly one person in five, English is widely used, health data is open and well organised. Entry estimate: 15,000–25,000 euros — less than the Czech Republic on its own.

The takeaway. Being close on the map has nothing to do with the cost of entry. A small country with open data can be cheaper than a big country without it. And the most valuable thing this analysis produced wasn’t a list of countries — it was an order in which each step pays for the next.

Links:

mojApteczka: mojapteczka.pl — the app is free, and your medicine cabinet is there offline too
Polish version of this podcast: “mojApteczka. Solo.”
Contact: kontakt@mojapteczka.pl

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About AI in this episode. The dialogue was written by Tomasz Szuster. The voices you hear are AI-generated synthetic voices — not recordings of the hosts. Full details are in the show description and in the episode outro. We say so plainly, because we think it should be the standard for any podcast made this way.

0:00Cold open: expansion isn't a map of Europe

0:32The cheapest new market isn't a country

1:05The numbers: 2.5 million people, no translation

2:05What people bring back in the suitcase

2:22Ukrainians in Poland: the same mechanism

3:54Five variables, not one

4:57The Czech Republic: the neighbour that costs more

5:47Germany is not an empty market

7:06To be precise: plans, not an announcement

7:35Estonia — the first real country

9:02Are we already doing this? No.

10:05What the analysis gave: an order

11:17Family scattered across Europe

11:44Outro, CTA and AI disclosure

Episode description

Persons