When I saw Mistral launch in France, I couldn't help wondering: why France — when Brazil is right there?
Brazil is huge, young, mobile-native, and it actually adopts new digital tools fast. France is one market. Brazil is one language covering 215 million people.
The European fragmentation trap
Europe takes 8–12 languages just to unlock a sliver of ROI. You're not entering one market. You're entering dozens of regulatory environments, payment systems, and cultural contexts — each requiring its own localization, its own support, its own compliance overhead.
LATAM? Just two languages:
Spanish (LATAM) → 400M+ potential users
Portuguese (Brazil) → 215M
That's 600 million people. Two languages. One coherent region.
Add one East Asian market
Add one East Asian language — Japanese or Korean — and the picture changes again. These are markets where English UI kills adoption. Not slows it. Kills it. But when you get the localization right, users stay. LTV is high. Word spreads.
LATAM + East Asia gives you scale, adoption velocity, and retention in two moves. Europe gives you fragmentation and a compliance headache.
The math
If you need to start small: LATAM + East Asia beats Europe. Every. Single. Time.
Not because Europe doesn't matter. Because sequence matters. And the markets that reward early, focused localization most are the ones where language actually moves adoption.