Ask a New Zealand founder where they want to take their product, and the answer is almost always the same: the United States. It's the biggest market on earth, so it must be the biggest prize. That instinct is exactly what sinks a lot of first expansions - because the biggest market and the best first market are rarely the same place.
I've spent 20 years in this. I built Emendo from a New Zealand start-up to an exit to McKesson, then the 14th-largest company on the Fortune 500, and since then I've helped other NZ tech founders work out where to go next. And the reality is, a lot of the damage is done before a single sales call - in the choice of market itself. Somewhere between 60 and 70% of international expansion attempts fail, and picking the wrong first market is one of the quiet reasons why.
The biggest market is the wrong first market
Size seduces. The US has roughly 64 times New Zealand's population and about 118 times its economy. On a slide, that looks like pure opportunity. On the ground, it means the most competitors, the most noise, the highest cost to be heard, and a buyer who has never heard of you and already has ten other options. You don't land in the US market. You get lost in it.
Here's the part founders underrate: your first market is the hardest and most expensive one you'll ever enter, because you're learning how to sell offshore at the same time as trying to win. Choosing the largest, most crowded market to learn in is the definition of doing it the hard way.
Pick the market you can win in, not the one you can dream about
The job of your first market isn't to be huge. It's to get you four things quickly and cheaply: real revenue, reference customers a buyer actually believes, a way of selling you've proven travels, and the confidence and cash to go again.
The best first market is simply the one where you can get those four things with the least time and money at risk. Reframe it that way and the question changes completely. Not "where's the biggest prize?" but "where can I win first?"
Score your shortlist on five things
When I help a founder choose, we don't argue about opinions - we score two or three candidate markets on the same five things. This is the core of the Market Entry Selector we run inside the Global Growth OS, and you can do a rough version of it on the back of an envelope.
1. Reachability. How hard is it to actually sell there - distance, time zone, language, regulation, the way buyers buy? A market you can service inside your own working day is worth more than a bigger one you can only reach at 2am.
2. Real pull. Where do you already have a signal - inbound leads, an existing customer, a partner, warm introductions? Demand you can already feel beats a market you'd have to create from cold.
3. Winnability. How crowded is it, and how sharp is your wedge there? A narrow, painful problem you solve better than anyone beats a big market where you're one of twenty "me too" options.
4. Cost and time to first revenue. What will it take, in cash and months, to land the first handful of deals? Your first market should be the one that pays you back fastest, not the one that burns the most runway before anything lands.
5. The prize you can actually reach. Not the total market size - the slice you can realistically serve in the next 18 months. A reachable $20m beats a theoretical $2bn you'll never touch.
So where does that leave most NZ tech companies?
For most, Australia is the sensible first move - same time zone, same language, roughly five times the population and seven times the economy, and the lowest cost to enter of any serious market. It scores well on nearly every line above. It's the default first step for good reason, not just out of habit.
But not always. If you've got real pull in a specific vertical in the US or the UK - a few inbound leads, a design partner, a niche nobody local serves - a sharp, narrow play there can beat a generic Australian one. The point isn't "always pick Australia". It's choose on the evidence, not on the size of the flag.
The US isn't off the table - it's just rarely first
None of this means never go to America. The US is where plenty of NZ tech companies should absolutely end up. It just shouldn't be where they start. Win somewhere you can win, bank the proof and the cash, sharpen the way you sell - then take a battle-tested engine into the big market instead of a hopeful one.
Simply put: your first market's real job is to earn you the right to the next one.
Not sure which market to back?
My free International Readiness Scorecard - about 20 minutes, self-scored, instant - tells you whether your commercial foundations are ready to travel, before you pick a market and commit budget to it.
Take the free scorecard → Or map your options with the Foundation Diagnostic →Market-size figures (2025, countryeconomy.com): United States population approximately 340 million and GDP approximately US$30.8 trillion; United Kingdom approximately 69.6 million and US$4.0 trillion; Australia approximately 27.7 million and US$1.87 trillion; New Zealand approximately 5.3 million and US$261 billion. US-to-NZ multiples: 339,989,000 ÷ 5,324,000 ≈ 64x population; 30,769,700 ÷ 261,496 ≈ 118x economy. Australia-to-NZ: ≈ 5x population and ≈ 7x economy. The 60-70% expansion-failure range is a widely cited industry estimate consistent with my own experience (see Harvard Business Review, "Few Companies Actually Succeed at Going Global", 2015).