Published 2026-03-15 18:15 EDT
Stop Visiting the U.S. Market. Start Living In It.
Published 2026-03-15 | By Pankaj Jain
Many founders from other countries often mention building for the U.S. market, which is fantastic! However, it's worth noting that their understanding of the U.S. market might not be as deep as it could be.
And let's define what the market is.
The "market" is more than just the customer, their needs, and their purchases. It also involves a significant cultural dimension. It's a crucial aspect that most people inadvertently overlook.
American culture has been exported all over the world through Hollywood, pop music, technology and there's a much better understanding of American culture than there was a few decades ago. However, there's a lot of cultural nuances that one can only understand if there's deep and continuous immersion. This is true anywhere. When you live there, you gain a certain level of understanding of daily life and its implications, as well as the challenges that people face and how they deal with them. These learnings can be translated directly to challenges your users or customers might be having.
Therefore, it's incredibly important for founders to make the effort to spend most of their time in their primary market, even if they can't live there permanently.
I've seen this play out firsthand. A startup I invested in back in 2013 had one founder in the US at all times. The three of them would take turns coming and going. They spent time, effort and money building local relationships with their customers, partners and investors. As a young startup, they were so successful in getting an understanding of the market and building relationships that most of their customers and investors never realized that they didn't live here — and that the whole team was based in India.
Contrast that with a company I invested in back in 2012. They didn't listen to my advice to get on a plane and go to NYC. They spent years growing very, very slowly in India. After a lot more prodding, they hired a senior VP in the US to focus on sales and BD and started seeing revenue growing much faster. Eventually, one of the founders moved to the US and started spending significant time in NYC where most of their customer interest was coming from. The first few years after moving, their revenue continued growing very well. The company is more than break even and might even be turning a profit now. But those early years? They didn't have to be that hard.
In my experience, living someplace and just walking out to get the groceries, you can develop real insights. For example, in some places people need to get groceries every day but most of these people also work five days a week.
In the US, most people don't go grocery shopping every day. Since people work five days a week, it's tough to go every day, so the only time they get to actually go grocery shopping is on the weekend. Now, things have changed a bit, and, whether it's Fresh Direct, Instacart, Uber Eats or whomever, people are starting to get their groceries delivered. However, most people still don't order groceries on a daily basis.
Experiencing something like that and comparing it to your local market can help you understand the challenges faced by people in your primary market. Maybe this can translate into implementing a hyperlocal, BlinkIt-type of experience in modestly dense cities in the U.S.
This kind of insight can't be read about. It has to be experienced. And this is especially true for B2C and Enterprise software companies that need a deep understanding of the market, the opportunity, and the problems their customers are actually facing. Remote-first is fine for pure development, maybe even for utilitarian software built for small businesses. But founder-led sales — which is what's going to get you from zero to one — is entirely dependent on the kind of insight that only comes from being there.
Even if you're building for the U.S., there are significant differences across regions within the country. How people live and shop in San Francisco versus Kansas City versus Houston versus Atlanta versus Mobile, Alabama versus New York is very different. You can read about this. You can study census data and consumer reports. But you won't really get it until you've been there.
Even if you look at some sort of normalizing factor like "we're going to focus on people making at least $100,000 a year, a family of three or four" — even if you filter for that, you'll see that how people live in a lot of these places is somewhat different. No amount of Zoom calls or market research is going to give you that felt sense of how a family in Houston spends their weekend versus one in San Francisco.
Understanding those nuances can help you determine what are some of the real problems that your customers might be facing — and how you can solve them, or how you can show them that your product or your service will radically improve their quality of life, or add value to them, or help them make more money, or whatever it is that you're solving for. But only if you've actually been there to see it firsthand.
Many founders talk about how expensive it could be and whether they can really afford it or not. And I get it — when you're coming from a relatively low cost market and your cost basis is very low, it really could come as quite a bit of sticker shock when you find out that renting an apartment in New York City is going to cost you $5000 a month. Fortunately, you don't need to do that. In fact, you probably couldn't even rent an apartment if you don't have a valid visa or a Social Security Number. If you have the required documentation, there are plenty of well-connected places you can rent for a fraction of that, and many times you can find roommates. Other times, you can go through your network and find a friend, a relative, a friend of a friend, or a college buddy who might be willing to rent you a room for some time. It's not as hard as one might think. It does require some time and a little bit of planning — but it's definitely doable, and incredibly useful in getting a jumpstart on your GTM.
Immigration and visa regulations can sometimes make it hard for founders, but they can get business visas and stay as long as the visa allows. Generally, it's a good idea to leave a few weeks before the visa maximum — just in case. Come back after a few weeks and start the whole process again for as long as you need to. As soon as it's possible to apply for longer-term visas and work permits, apply. Don't wait.
As a rough benchmark — and I feel pretty strongly about this — founders should be targeting at least six months a year in their primary market. Anything less and you're not really immersed, you're just visiting.
If you don't want to move permanently, that's perfectly fine. But if you have a founding team of two or three people, figure out a rotation so that your founders are constantly in your primary market. This is important because you get some cognitive drift if only one founder is ever there — the founder in-market is experiencing things, understanding the culture, understanding the day-to-day problems of the customer, and then has to translate all of that to their cofounder. But the cofounder just won't have the context. So it's important that all founders do this on a regular basis — not two-week business trips, but a month and a half, two months, three months at a time, really immersing themselves into the lives of the people they're trying to sell to.
I had to fight with one founder to get him to agree to come to the Bay Area for three months to be part of our accelerator program. One of his co-founders joined him for part of it. Almost immediately, they started spending more time with customers and investors. No one quite knew what was going on, but they pivoted their product. They raised a Series A from a Bay Area investor fairly soon after the program. They started hiring and building their teams in the US, and eventually one of the founders was able to move full-time. They are now a unicorn, primarily based in the US. Three months. That's what it took to change the trajectory of the company.
So, what I like to ask founders is: if you're building for the U.S., how much time did you spend here in the last 12 months? What's your plan to move here? When are you moving? How are you moving? What's it going to cost you in legal fees, immigration, and visas? How are you going to run an effective GTM strategy while fully disconnected from the market? Have you done the homework? Have you thought about it? Who's going to move?
These aren't gotcha questions. They're the ones worth sitting with.