I’m writing an article about the challenges we face being a tiny global business. At Perch our stats are currently around:
50% UK
20% EU not UK
30% Rest of world
I wondered if that was similar for other people? If anyone has any thoughts on what they find difficult with regards to export, selling and supporting people in other countries that would be interesting.
Pretty much all of it. Every time we land an Irish sale it’s a WTF moment. An Irish person? Buying software online?
Our figures run to:
67% US
12% UK
6% Canada
5% OZ
And the rest comes from everywhere else, with a few spikes from smaller countries such as Norway and Denmark. Non first world countries are very rare, but do happen now and then.
About 99%. I’m in Australia, 90% of my customers are US, 5% Canada and GB, 4% others, and 1% Aussies.
HelpSpot (US based) is roughly:
61% - US
9% - UK
7% - Australia
4% - Canada
3% - Germany
3% - Switzerland
3% - France
2% - Sweden
8% - Everyone else
I completely ignore everything about other countries tax laws currently 
The US ones alone are enough to make me crazy.
PerfectTablePlan sold in 81 countries this year. US and UK account for 70% (by number of transactions). Australia, Canada and Europe account for most of the rest. But >10 sales each to Mexico, South Africa and Brazil.
BrowseEmAll (Based in Germany) is as following:
55% - US
7% - Canada
6% - UK
5% - Australia
4% - Germany
3% - Netherlands
We sell using Fastspring so we don’t need to fight the tax laws ourself. Also we only sell the software in english (actually I’m not sure why) and support mostly in english as well.
Our US-based company has:
US - about 50%
UK, Australia, Netherlands, Germany, Canada - 35% (strong English skills)
rest of world - 15%
Team Password Manager (based in Spain) stats are:
32% US
46% Germany, UK, Netherlands, Canada, Australia
22% Rest of the world (about 30 countries)
Our own country (Spain) sales are about 2% of the total, I suppose because our site is only in English.
We’re based in Germany:
60% USA
20% UK
20% EU (Germany ~3%)
Other regions are not really present
I’m hungarian. I sold my niche Windows utility to 50 countries so far, including exotic targets like Iraq, China, Egypt, Philippines and Japan. Japan indeed is a hard nut to crack. About 99.6% of my customers are from foreign countries.
61% US
8% UK
6% Canada
5% Australia
2% Israel
2% Denmark
2% Germany
14% other.
Denmark is probably overrepresented. Something happened there last fall and I attracted tons of customers, quickly raising my danish customer count by about 600%.
Due to stupid EU VAT changes in effect since yesterday I switched from PayPal to FastSpring. All the tax laws are handled by them. So my biggest challenge regarding internationality is not sounding foreign to my prospects. That would cost me money.
My WordPress plugin, SeedProd is:
US 50 %
UK 12 %
Australia 9%
Canada 6%
Germany 3 %
Other 20%
In total I’ve sold to 103 countries.
Just pulled this from our KPI system:
http://imgur.com/itFzSaO (I wanted to upload the screenshot direct but not allowed).
Bottom line is 60/40 split UK/Rest of the world. With the US being the highest number of customers outside of UK.
Our software sales are roughly:
50% US
35% Germany, Netherlands, UK, France, Switzerland, Australia combined
15% Rest of world
Virtually no sales to China. And no real sales to 3rd-world countries.
I’m from Belgium and live in Vietnam. 100% of my customers are outside either country.
Very roughly:
About 70% in America.
Rest mostly in Europe (including UK, where I’m based), and a handful from Asia, mainly east Asia, like Singapore etc.
In my not so enlightened opinion, the majority of internet users (and specifically users who pay for stuff) are in America, so unless you are American, most of your customers will be outside your country. Which is why most businesses price their products in dollars, even if they are based elsewhere.