Instead of taking a dip first in the home market to test the waters - as other start-ups usually do - muvee Technologies jumped straight into the deep end of the ocean when it first launched its products.
'We ventured abroad the day our key patents were filed - pretty much from Day 1,' says Terence Swee, founder and chief executive of the homegrown software firm which claims to be the creator of 'the world's first fully automatic video editing'.
Small though the company might be, muvee think big from the start - going for the biggest market, the United States.
A bold move, but it also made a lot of sense for the company which produces software that enables lay-users to spontaneously create music videos using their digital photos and home videos.
'When you target the USA, you only need to speak on language - and Singaporeans are more familiar with US culture than we are with Chinese, Indonesian, Thai, or Vietnamese pop culture,' says Mr Swee.
'The simple test is: Can you name a famous singer from China, Vietnam and Germany that most Singaporeans will know of? Do you know Madonna and Michael Jackson?'
The US is not only a more homogenous market, but a huge one, he points out. 'This better leverages your marketing resources.'
Some six years have passed since muvee made the move into the US. And it appears to have paid off.
'The US is our biggest market, with the rest split between Japan, Korea and Europe,' Mr Swee says.
'The US accounts for over 65 per cent of our revenues - our non-Singapore sales totals 99 per cent.'
Apart from Singapore, muvee has offices in Seoul, Tokyo, Silicon Valley and New York. What were the challenges muvee faced in venturing overseas?
'The long sales cycles, especially with Japanese and Korean partners,' Mr Swee says. 'Being a small company, you need to ration your resources and figure out which projects to pursue, and which to walk away from.'
Being able to scale up fast with limited funding is always a challenge for any start-up, he points out.
'Your products are not yet mature, your team is young but you have interest from big companies which may be planning over a two-year horizon but, as a start-up, you need to be equally aware of next month's revenue opportunity versus the next three years,' Mr Swee says.
He says he had overcome the problem of balancing the longer-term needs of potential clients and its own immediate requirements by hiring 'the best talent possible' - and putting in place 'a very open culture where a team of myriad backgrounds examines each challenge and openly discuss ways to overcome them'.
After the US, muvee turned to the huge markets of Japan and Germany but Mr Swee says: 'We do not really look at countries, but rather the world.
The countries are merely physical places we need to travel to because the decision makers are there.' Still, he says each market has its own mobile networks, own culture and social norm which 'requires a global sensitivity and empathy' to deal with.
'Our staff never say the 'Jap' version of our software,' Mr Swee says. 'It's always the 'Japanese' version. But it's ok to says the 'US' version rather than the 'American' version. Subtleties like these count a lot in global business.'
To get its staff attune to such subtleties, muvee encourages them to extend their business trips and take vacations, if their schedules allow, to explore the world and get to know their global customers.
'We also encourage staff to take annual leave in stretches so that they can travel, rather than piecemeal long weekends to Phuket and Bali, which are not our key markets,' Mr Swee says.
For a software developer, he says the right time to venture abroad 'is always yesterday'.
And 'the pros of an SME (small and medium enterprise) expanding overseas are that you get to pit yourself against the best in the world very early on, your staff train the hard way, learning and working with the best and, of course, accessing a far larger market'.
To overcome the handicap of being small, Mr Swee says SMEs have to 'run as fast as you can, thinking harder as you run' when they tackle the global market.
muvee has over 70 employees on its payroll, but Mr Swee declines to reveal sales figures. He says the company is making money: 'muvee turned profitable in its third year of operation and had three profitable years since then.'
The company has steadily expanded its portfolio of products and platforms it supports, but it has stayed true to its roots - its core expertise in automatic video creation.
The company is a spin-off from the precursor to the Institute for Infocomm Research in 2002.
'A bunch of engineers were doing research in video analysis, signal processing and other fun stuff,' Mr Swee recalls. 'We then put it all together to create muvee autoProducer 1.0, the world's first fully automatic video editing. We have about six families of patents covering the ideas and technology in our products.'
The company has three divisions - PC software; software for devices; and services for the Internet. 'In each platform, we are currently working with the leaders in every space,' Mr Swee says.
'This includes HP, Dell and Founder of PCs; (and) Nokia, LG and Samsung for software embedded in mobile phones.'
muvee's software is also bundled with Sony, Nikon and Olympus cameras.
Its online editing services power the video editing platforms for Taiwan's most popular blog, wretch.cc - now part of Yahoo! - and South Korea's dominant social networking site, Cyworld.
This article was first published in The Business Times on 3 July 2008.
