I’d done work that looked good in a bio line, with a few names most people would recognize, and every prospect cited reasons they tied to something else. If anything, the names invited doubt. One person even sat on a call with me and attempted to poked at the claims, like they were waiting for the story to fall apart.
So I half-believed the credibility markers were just decoration. Then one of them reached across the gap on its own. I’d done some work with National Geographic at SXSW, and months later a director there showed up as an inbound lead. He mentioned he’d seen the work, and he hired me for a sizable strategy project.
Here’s what stuck with me. That director sat completely outside my reach. To find him, score him, or time my outreach to the week he was ready to buy all sat beyond me. A relevant reference point did the reaching for me, and it worked once, by luck.
How do you activate a buyer who sits outside your direct reach, in a market where you arrive as a stranger? That’s the question behind every conversation I have about international marketing strategies.
Most of the founders I work with are building cutting-edge data and AI products far from Silicon Valley, and they need to reach a west coast investor audience from across the country. The marketing for AI GTM tools tempt you to believe distance is solved, that you can research any geography and draft outreach to anyone. The reaching part, the part that earns a stranger’s trust, is harder than the tooling makes it look. So I sat down with someone who has turned that lucky inbound into a repeatable system, building international marketing strategies that work across four countries where his brand arrived as a stranger.
Meet Stefan Iggo
Stefan is the co-founder and CEO of LOIS Leasing, a lease accounting and compliance SaaS platform. For roughly a decade, LOIS lived as a product inside a larger finance company in New Zealand. In October 2025, Stefan and his team spun it out as a standalone company, and within six months they were activating audiences in South Africa, Ireland, the UK, and Dubai, arriving as an unknown brand in most of those markets and carrying the load with a lean team.
What makes Stefan’s story awesome is its specificity. He’s running international marketing strategies in real time, with a handful of experienced salespeople and a HubSpot stack he’s been compounding for over a decade.
Here’s what I pulled from our conversation.
Why the spin-out was really a positioning fix
On its face, the LOIS story looks engineered. A standalone company, launched right as compliance enforcement was tightening in the UK. The timing looks deliberate. The real trigger was messier and more useful.
The product had strong brand recognition in-market. Clients knew LOIS and referred to it by name. The problem was that LOIS sat inside a finance company, so prospects would search for the product and land on an entity that read as a finance company rather than a specialist SaaS company. Because of this, the buyer journey got confused. As Stefan put it, “you want to make it as simple as possible for clients to understand what they’re actually getting.”
For any founder considering a similar move, there’s a second layer that’s important to understand. The team building the product shared goals with a much larger organization that had different priorities. The spin-out let Stefan pull the core team, the developers and consultants, into a focused unit with a single go-to-market story.
The lesson here is one I see constantly with data and AI founders. Under the hood, a confusing corporate structure or a muddled positioning statement taxes every deal. You pay for it in longer cycles and lost trust, and you rarely see the invoice. If your buyers struggle to tell in five seconds who you are and what you sell, that’s a systems problem that should be fixed before you scale spend.
The international marketing strategies behind a successful brand that arrives as a stranger
This is the part I wanted most, because it answers the question my National Geographic story left open. How do you reach the right buyer on purpose, instead of waiting for one to find you?
Stefan’s international marketing strategies come down to three moving parts that work together rather than in sequence.
First, partner credibility on the ground. The first market LOIS entered was South Africa, and they did it by forming an alliance with Deloitte for in-market representation. That partnership gave them recognition and warmer introductions in a place where their brand arrived unknown. A partner who already has the trust transfers some of it to you.
Second, intent-fed outbound through LinkedIn and HubSpot. LOIS runs founder-led thought leadership on LinkedIn, then uses LinkedIn outreach to connect with the right buyer personas. Once someone engages with the content and lands on the HubSpot site, the scoring begins.
Here’s the clever part for a compliance product. HubSpot’s prospecting tools also trigger off company-level events like a capital raise, an audit, or a financial filing. Any financial event is a strong signal for a compliance tool, so LOIS can reach out at the moment a buyer actually has a problem they own.
Third, founder-led content that builds credibility before the human shows up. Stefan publishes technical content on compliance and commercials, mixed with AI topics that touch everyone right now. The goal is simple. By the time a salesperson gets in front of a prospect, that prospect has already seen credible content and thinks, this person knows what they’re talking about. That alone changes the conversation.
The signals that say a buyer is actually in-market
Many early-stage startups tend to guess about “who’s in-market”. Stefan treats it as a data question with a clear answer.
The sequence runs like this.
- Connect on LinkedIn so the prospect starts seeing the thought leadership.
- If they engage, that pulls them back to the HubSpot site, where behavior gets scored.
- Layer on company-level triggers from HubSpot’s newer prospecting tools, things like a capital raise or an audit appearing against a connected domain. For a compliance product, those financial events are the buying triggers. The result is a list built on evidence rather than hope.
- A human reaches out at the point of highest relevance, when the signal says the problem is live.
BORROW THIS: If you’re a data or AI founder who’s shaping your own international marketing strategies, here’s the steal-this version. You can build this with your own stack. You need:
- A way to connect the content a prospect consumes to the behavioral and
- Company-level signals that say they’re ready.
The technology to do this is more accessible than it’s ever been. The discipline to actually wire it together is what distinguishes a pipeline from a wish list.
Where AI stops and humans start
Stefan made a strong claim in our conversation. The days of stacking SDRs to brute-force a new market are over, because AI lets a small team enter geographies that used to require serious headcount. He’s right about the advantage there. He’s also clear-eyed about the limits.
AI increases the volume of outreach you can run and collapses the research and personalization that used to eat a salesperson’s day. Where it hands off is the enterprise sale that’s fundamentally about trust and credibility. People extend trust to a human long before they extend it to AI outreach on its own. So the trick is to get a volume of credible material in front of buyers, then have a human take over at the right moment.
When I asked Stefan what he’d tell a founder building go-to-market from scratch in a new geography, his answer cut against the borderless promise of AI. Go in-market physically. Build real, in-person contacts. As he said it, “you can research a market and decide it looks like a good fit, but for enterprise sales, establishing relationships and understanding how the market actually works is what builds credibility. AI compresses the work, but the trust must still be earned in person.”
Why the right logo does the reaching for you
Stefan handed me the answer to my own SXSW puzzle. Every region LOIS enters, the early clients and recognizable names help establish credibility. He named a familiar pattern. A small New Zealand company that arrives unknown to most of the world becomes credible elsewhere because it can point to brands that people recognize… big logistics names, global airlines, beverage brands that everyone knows.
The names themselves matter less than their relevance to the prospect. That’s the piece I’d missed. My National Geographic director set aside the IBM work entirely. He only cared about National Geographic. A reference point only attracts a prospect when it maps directly to the specific person you’re trying to activate.
How to build your own international marketing strategies
Here’s the through-line for founders who are building international marketing strategies. to reach an audience that sits beyond physical reach.
Get your positioning clean enough that a stranger understands you in five seconds. Build partner relationships that lend you credibility on the ground. Wire your content to the intent signals that say a buyer is in-market. Publish founder-led material so trust forms before the first human touch. And resist the fantasy that AI has somehow erased the need to show up.
I’ll be honest about what’s at stake here, because this is where many startups get hurt. If you’re executing on the wrong growth strategies, or executing poorly on the right ones, you’re falling behind in the market. The cost of that runs way past the wasted spend alone. It’s the months of compounding growth that you lose to a competitor who wired their system correctly from the get-go.
I watched a version of this play out with a data and AI consultancy I advised. They had the technical depth to solve enterprise problems that were worth millions, and their buyers remained unaware they existed. They were invisible online, ran with a missing demand capture system, and were positioned as technicians rather than advisors.
We refined the positioning to lead with outcomes instead of credentials, built a founder-led visibility system where enterprise conversations actually happen, and designed a performance-based pricing model tied to client results. They closed a $750K contract in four and a half months, structured so they earned 30% of the savings they delivered. The work itself took two weeks, and the system that got them in the room took the engagement.
That’s the difference between a market entry that compounds and one that stalls, and the deciding factor was the GTM system underneath it, rather than the tooling.
If you’re building international marketing strategies for a geography or an audience that’s beyond your physical reach, and you’re weighing whether the strategy is the right one and whether you’re executing it well, we should discuss together. You can book a 30-minute conversation with me here.
P.S. I keep thinking about that National Geographic director. For years I’d treated my logos as decoration, even argued myself into believing they sat there inert. One relevant reference point, in front of one right buyer, turned into a substantial strategy project for my firm.
The logos held up their end all along. My read on the buyer they’d attract was the real gap. Stefan’s whole playbook is built on that exact insight, applied across continents, and, IMHO, it’s worth replicating.
