What I’m always excited to share in these sessions is that because we’re from Vietnam, we’ve worked with exporters for a long time and understand how hard it is to go overseas with limited resources. It’s challenging, but you want to do it because there’s a dream you’re chasing for your business. What we always urge clients to do, if you’re considering the US market — or any other market — as the right one, is to weigh four factors.

Number one: is it a growing market? Is your product category’s demand growing there? If you’re selling something for kids — snacks, baby products — but your target market has an ageing population, that doesn’t work no matter how large that market is overall.

Number two: familiar culture. The US as a whole is a huge market, but it’s made up of many subcultures — it’s a genuine melting pot. If you’re targeting the US, can you target a specific community first, one you’re already familiar with, rather than the mass market from day one? Indian-American households, for example, are among the highest-income households in the US, which is worth knowing if that’s a community you understand.

Number three: distribution channels. Are you familiar with B2B, B2C, online? When you consider a new market, look at whether it has the kind of channels you already know how to work. If you’re used to marketplaces and online strategy but the market you’re eyeing has low internet penetration, your usual playbook won’t translate as effectively.

And last but not least, cost structure. There are high-barrier products and low-barrier products, and it comes down to the investment of time and money needed to meet the required safety standards and licensing. It’s also worth checking whether any trade agreements or duty benefits apply. For the US specifically: if you sell through online channels, shipments under $800 in value can qualify for duty-free importation under Section 321 — and since a typical individual order runs well under that, this is something high-volume online sellers have used for a long time to keep their landed cost down.

Now let’s talk strategy. If you’re more comfortable with B2B and wholesale, my one tip is: network as much as possible, get in front of potential buyers and distributors. Trade shows are one of the best ways to do that — over two or three days you can easily meet a few hundred interested contacts if your product has real demand. Beyond trade shows, email outreach and LinkedIn are the other two channels — LinkedIn especially, since you can find and reach people specifically in purchasing roles at retailers and wholesalers.

The typical B2B sales cycle runs like this: find buyers, build the relationship, send samples once they’re interested, and once quality and paperwork check out, they start ordering in bulk. That whole cycle usually takes six months to a year minimum — so if you’re pursuing this strategy, make sure you have the runway, or other revenue channels, to sustain the business while that cycle plays out. It really comes down to relationships — how well you connect and network with these people and organisations.

The second strategy is direct-to-consumer. Online, brand-direct e-commerce is such a large and growing part of the US market that the real question is: can your product skip retailers and wholesalers entirely and go straight to the consumer? Is it something that works on TikTok, Instagram, Meta? If it fits, building your own DTC brand is a real asset — not just for direct sales, but for visibility to B2B buyers too. I’ve seen sellers at meaningful revenue scale on marketplaces who also get approached by B2B buyers wanting to purchase directly from them and become wholesale clients off the back of that visibility.

There’s also an opportunity in white-label and drop-shipping — serving the entrepreneurs, influencers and content creators who understand a market’s consumers deeply but don’t know how to manufacture a product themselves. Can you lower your minimum order quantity to serve them — ten units instead of five hundred? If you capture these smaller partners early, that relationship compounds as their business grows.

Here’s what the DTC side typically looks like in practice: set up a website, list your products, decide your minimum order size — and consider whether you’re willing to let individuals buy just one or two items and ship directly to them. Smaller minimums can actually mean better margins per unit, not worse.

Here’s the real question: what if you could gain more margin, get retailers approaching you instead of chasing them for years, diversify your revenue across channels instead of depending on one or two B2B buyers, and test a market cheaply before committing serious investment — even launch in multiple markets at once? If that’s what you want, my suggestion is a strategy I call Online plus Offline, or O+O — combining both approaches into one funnel.

Here’s how it works: you set up your website and start taking direct orders, while simultaneously pursuing B2B buyers offline. Because you already know how to fulfil small quantities — and may already have stock positioned in-market — when a wholesale buyer asks for a sample, you can ship it in days instead of the usual 30 to 45. That speed alone creates an impression against slower competitors. As you continue negotiating with wholesale buyers, you’re still selling and serving consumers online in parallel — and because you have real sales data showing what’s moving in that market, you can show prospective retailers proof that your product sells before they ever take on the risk of stocking it. Put together, this is how you build a durable, long-term position in a market rather than a fragile one dependent on a single relationship.

Let me show you how this played out for one company. Xiaomi began international expansion in Singapore and India in 2014 with zero retail presence. Their first batch of 10,000 phones sold out in two seconds in India, with 500,000 people left on a waitlist. It wasn’t until 2017 — three years later, once they were already selling 100,000 phones a week — that they opened their first physical store, alongside a local e-commerce launch. They skipped distributors entirely and went straight to consumer before retailers even believed in them; their first store was put in the basement because the retailer didn’t expect anyone to show up. Ten thousand people did, on opening day.

What a lot of people don’t realise is how Xiaomi actually kick-started this: they partnered with Flipkart for promotional flash sales online, built three years of strong online numbers, and only then moved into retail — and retailers still doubted them enough to put the first store in a basement. Using this online-plus-offline approach, within that same three-year window Xiaomi didn’t just enter India, they expanded into 70 countries simultaneously, testing broadly and doubling down only where they saw real traction.

The one thing I want you to take from today is that having the right strategy in place is the key to export success. I hope this gave you an overview of the opportunity and the strategies available to you. As a gift for staying to the end: this is my scoring card, the 4-Step Market Finder, so you can score and evaluate as many potential markets as you’re considering against these same four factors. Feel free to save it or look it up. Thank you so much for listening.