Taking a Middle East SaaS company into the US: the first 12 months

Months 1 to 3: get the basics right before you sell

US buyers will judge you on your website before they ever talk to you. Make sure it reads like it was written for them: US spelling, pricing in dollars, case studies they'll recognise, and a clear way to start a trial or book a demo. If your product is hosted in the Gulf, decide now how you'll answer security questions, because they'll come up in your first serious deal.

At the same time, pick one ideal customer profile. Not "US companies" but something like "50 to 500 person B2B software companies on the East Coast that already use HubSpot." The narrower you start, the faster you learn.

Months 3 to 6: founder-led selling

The founder or a senior person from home should run the first deals personally. You're not just trying to close them. You're learning what US buyers object to, which competitors come up, what they'll pay and who signs. Record every call and write down what you hear. That becomes your first playbook.

The key is volume of conversations. I'd suggest blocking a few late afternoons and evenings each week for East Coast calls and treating them as non-negotiable.

Months 6 to 9: make it repeatable

By now you should be able to answer a few questions with real data: how long the sales cycle is, what the average deal size is, which lead sources work, and what your win rate looks like. If you can't answer those yet, you're not ready to hire.

If you can, write it down. A simple playbook with your ICP, discovery questions, demo flow, pricing guidance and common objections is enough. It doesn't need to be pretty, it needs to be usable by someone who wasn't in the room for the first deals.

Months 9 to 12: the first US hire

Your first US salesperson should be someone who's comfortable building from very little. They won't have a big brand behind them or a full marketing team feeding them leads. I'd look for someone curious, who asks good questions and can run a deal end to end without waiting on approvals from another time zone.

Give them the playbook, the call recordings and your best accounts, and set clear 90-day goals for pipeline and activity before you judge them on closed revenue.

The mistakes I see most

The most common one is hiring too early, before the founder has closed enough deals to know what works. The second is spreading across the whole country instead of focusing on one region and one customer type. The third is underfunding it, so the experiment ends before it has a real chance.