The Movo Guide to Product-Market Fit: Why Starting in Emerging Markets Accelerated Their Growth

Most startups reflexively launch in Silicon Valley or New York. But what if the path to product-market fit lies in markets everyone else ignores? In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Jason Radisson shared how starting in emerging markets accelerated both 99 Taxis and Movo’s growth trajectories.

The Emerging Market Advantage

The insight first emerged at 99 Taxis. “Product market fit is certainly not a static thing, and it’s a two sided thing, meaning one thing is what you’re doing with the product. The other thing is the markets that you choose,” Jason explains. This led to a surprising discovery: “The best product market fit, really, in the world. Ride sharing was in Latin America in particular in secondary cities.”

Perfect Storm of Conditions

These secondary cities created ideal conditions for rapid scaling: “You’ve got a really ready pool labor, you’ve got a ton of underemployed folks all around the city and in the surroundings, and you’ve got a really sort of snarled infrastructure and lack of infrastructure and terrible traffic and other inconveniences. Then you’ve got an emerging middle class, upper middle class folks with not a lot of time, but plenty of disposable income to spend on services.”

Applying Lessons to Movo

At Movo, they applied this emerging market insight to workforce management. “Having gone abroad as early as we did, that allowed us to get hundreds of thousands of additional workers on our platform, which was just so helpful in terms of rounding out the tech, training our models, getting a very robust system across a number of dimensions.”

Crisis as Opportunity

The pandemic validated their approach. “Throughout the pandemic, really our main value out there and the impact were able to have was in providing access to jobs and making sure that food manufacturing, a number of logistics, and last mile logistics companies and companies like that, some medical device manufacturing and others, were all able to kind of keep the trains on time.”

Evolution of the Platform

This real-world stress testing transformed their platform. What started as a hiring solution evolved into “a workforce platform that’s on your device, it’s on your supervisor’s device, it’s in head office, and the whole company is using it to make sure that everybody’s deployed in the right way, in the right role at the right time, managing tasks, managing schedules, doing all of these things automatically.”

Focus on Fundamental Value

The emerging market experience taught them to focus on core value creation. “If you want to come up with win situations for workers and employers, the bottom line is you got to help people be more productive,” Jason emphasizes. This proved especially relevant given current market conditions.

Growth Through Strategic Selection

Rather than pursuing broad market penetration, they focus on companies ready for transformation. “Not every company is set up for the change management that running your workforce in a real time way involves,” Jason notes. They target organizations “who are early adopters or earlier on the technology curve, who may also just be in that moment in time when they’re looking at workforce management tools.”

Results of the Approach

The strategy is working. Six months into commercial rollout, their “paid user counts on the software deployment are increasing about 100% a month,” demonstrating how their emerging market experience accelerated product development and market fit.

Lessons for Founders

For B2B founders, Movo’s approach to product-market fit offers crucial insights:

• Look beyond obvious markets to find perfect conditions
• Use emerging markets to accelerate product development
• Focus on fundamental value creation rather than features
• Let real-world challenges shape platform evolution
• Target companies ready for transformation

The key lesson? Sometimes the fastest path to product-market fit lies in the markets everyone else ignores. As Jason’s experience shows, the right market conditions can accelerate both product development and growth, creating advantages that persist even when expanding into more established markets.