u/firdo_dev

I posted here a few weeks back about building a game and software company from Tirana, and what a small ecosystem does to hiring and momentum. This is the follow-up, because the constraint turned into the thing we're now building.

I make video content in Albanian. Every captioning tool I've paid for either doesn't support the language, or supports it badly and mangles the diacritics. So the real workflow becomes: upload a large file, wait in a render queue, get captions back with the accents wrecked, then fix them by hand. For a five minute video that's most of an afternoon.

Nobody was going to fix that. Albanian is around 7 million speakers and no large company is prioritising it. Which is exactly the kind of problem worth a small company's time and not worth a big one's.

So that became the product. Three things I've learned that might be useful to someone else here:

1. In a small market, the problems you personally have are usually unserved ones. I spent years reading my location as a disadvantage when it was the only proprietary market research I had.

2. Building the thing was the easy half. Selling software into a country without an established SaaS buying habit is the hard half, and I'm in the middle of that now with no clean answer.

3. Charging early, even a small amount, is the only feedback that isn't polite. Free users tell you it's great. A card on file tells you the truth.

The question I actually came back to ask: for those of you who sold software into a market that didn't have the buying habit yet, what moved first? Did you educate the local market, or go international and let the local one catch up later?

I’m building a game/software company called UnyoCorp from Tirana, Albania, and one of the biggest challenges has been building in an environment where the game-development ecosystem is still very small.

That affects almost everything: finding experienced people, building a team, getting people to take gaming seriously as an industry, finding opportunities, and creating something sustainable long term.

At the same time, I think being in a smaller market creates an interesting opportunity. Instead of entering an already crowded ecosystem, we have a chance to help build one.

A few things I’ve learned so far:

Talent exists everywhere, but experienced talent is much harder to find.
Building a company and building a community sometimes have to happen at the same time.
Your location can make things harder, but it can also give you a story and perspective that bigger markets don’t have.
Showing the failures and messy parts has been more valuable than pretending everything is going perfectly.

I’m still very early in this journey, so I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has built a company from a smaller country or emerging market.

What was the biggest disadvantage you faced, and did it eventually become an advantage?

I’m also documenting the journey, projects, failures and people behind what we’re building on Instagram: @firdo.dev.

Not necessarily your favorite game ever.

I'm thinking specifically about games where discovering the world, mechanics or story for the first time was a huge part of what made it special.

What's yours, and what made that first playthrough so memorable?