#391 – Testing the World Waters
Friday Ship #391 | April 5th, 2024
This week, we published a guide in Spanish on how to start using Parabol.
In our continuous journey to make better meetings accessible to teams around the globe, we faced a fun challenge that particularly resonated with us as a multilingual team:
How do we reach non-English-speaking markets without heavy upfront development investment, given their potential is unclear to us?
Our Research
We started by looking into where Agile is growing around the world and how this matches up with what’s happening in Parabol.
Here’s what we found:
- Industry reports indicate a high global developer presence in regions like India, Germany, and Latin America.
- There seems to be interest in Agile outside of English-speaking groups, shown by the many non-English Agile conferences and communities.
- Looking at our own data, we discovered that more than 10 languages had over 100 custom templates in Parabol, despite the platform being English-based. The top ones being German, Spanish, and Portuguese.
- German and Spanish were the most used languages among our website visitors, but these users were not signing up as much as English speakers.
Our Test
Excited with this data, we decided to launch an experiment. We picked German and Spanish as our test languages and created versions of our main page in these languages. Then, we ran some search ads to see how they’d perform compared to our English page.
Here’s what happened:
- German-speaking users preferred the English page, signing up there more than on the German version.
- The Spanish version, however, did really well. It got more signups than the English version and became one of our top pages for signups, bringing in 25% of our paid signups.
What We’re Doing Now
Seeing the success of the Spanish page, we’re now looking at ways to add more value to our Spanish-speaking users. This week, we launched a guide in Spanish on how to start using Parabol. We plan to keep adding to this guide, filling it with even more useful information about Parabol to ensure everyone’s experience is easy and accessible.
Our tool is still in English, but this experiment marks a significant step toward supporting our users in enhancing their meeting experiences with Parabol, no matter what language they speak.
We’re excited to keep trying new things and reaching out to new users.
Metrics
Given the holiday for many around the world, it is not a surprise to see a drop in our metrics for this week. We will watch for a healthy rebound as people return to a regular cadence next week.
This week we…
…released v7.24.1 to production
…booked the location for our next Product Team Retreat.
Next week we’ll
…complete week 5 of 6 of our first Shape Up cycle.
