July 30, 2025
This year, we ran one of our craziest experiments yet; testing 10 international markets at once without building full products for any of them.
Here's the full breakdown of how we did it (and what we learned along the way).
We didn't just guess. We created a scoring system to rank countries based on a few key things:
It wasn't perfect; there was still some subjectivity, but it gave us a focused list of 10 countries to test.
Before launching anything, we prepped simple study resources for each market. Cheat sheets, landing pages, and a few free materials to see if anyone even cared.
Our content lead Eszter led this part and focused on creating tailored content for each country. The idea was to use these free resources to measure actual demand.
We needed local voices who could talk to students in their own language and style. We called them "faces of the brand" (FOBs).
Finding them wasn't easy.
We messaged hundreds of people, on TikTok, Upwork, Facebook, anywhere we could. Most didn't reply, but eventually we found 1–2 great people per country. They gave us feedback, corrected the study materials, and helped us understand what works locally.
Once everything was ready, we launched on TikTok and Instagram.
Every country had its own content calendar. Zoja, our Project Manager, reviewed each video idea, tracked performance, and ran weekly check-ins with the creators.
We watched what worked and what didn't. Some trends were easy to reuse across markets (like voiceovers on past exam questions). Others flopped when copied. Local context mattered A LOT.
We moved each market through three phases, based on performance:
We tracked views, followers, and most importantly how many students registered for free content.
Once we crossed 500–1000 registrations in a market, we doubled down by adding more downloadable content and study guides.
Only after that did we build low-ticket paid offers. These were focused exam prep bundles, created by local tutors for 3 key subjects per country.
We did this in Greece, Albania, and Bulgaria — our top-performing markets.
In just a few weeks, we gathered real, comparable data from 8 of the 10 markets we tested.
Across TikTok and Instagram, we generated over 14 million views, built up engaged local audiences, and tracked thousands of registrations through our landing pages.
The outcome was quite clear: we were able to identify 3–4 markets with the strongest early traction, and just as importantly, we learned which ones not to invest in.
That clarity alone saved us months of time and budget, and gave us a repeatable way to prioritize expansion going forward.
This whole thing came together fast. We didn't have all the answers but we had a clear plan, moved closely as a team, and figured things out as we went.
We followed the signal and scaled what worked.