"We don't need other worlds. We need mirrors." — Stanisław Lem, Solaris
The listicle of the ten questions before exporting has been circulating online for almost fifteen years. You find it on institutional sites, in chamber-of-commerce manuals, on consulting blogs. It has become a genre of its own. The questions are almost always the same: objectives, target markets, barriers, production capacity, logistics, price, product adaptation, marketing, payments, ROI. They're the right questions — there's nothing wrong with the list. The problem is another.
When an entrepreneur sits down to answer those ten questions, they've already implicitly answered yes to an invisible question that wasn't on the list. They've already decided that exporting is a good idea for their company. They're looking for the how, no longer the whether. And the ten questions work only if the answer to that invisible question really is yes, in an informed way and not merely a wishful one. Often it isn't.
There's a line from Lem in Solaris that describes with precision what happens to many companies that decide to internationalize. We don't seek other worlds, he says. We seek mirrors. Companies go abroad almost always with the implicit hope that the new market is a version of the home market — bigger, perhaps richer, but recognizable. When they discover that it isn't a mirror but a truly other world, they call it "a market not yet ready" and turn back. The problem isn't the market. The problem is what they were looking for.
Before the ten classic questions, then, there are three that should be posed, and posed in this order.
Question zero: are you looking for a market or a mirror?
The difference isn't linguistic. Looking for a market means having the mental availability to discover that your product, in the new context, is a thing different from what it is in the home market. Maybe it has a different meaning, a different positioning, a different usefulness. The Italian winery that sells premium wine in Italy can discover, exporting to China, that its product is a corporate gift and not a table product. The same wine, the same glass — another trade.
Looking for a mirror means wanting the product to work abroad for the same reasons it works in the home market. The companies that look for mirrors are recognized immediately: they talk about their product to the foreign client as they would talk about it to a home-market client, they translate the commercial materials without repositioning them, and when the market doesn't respond they conclude that the market is less sophisticated than expected.
The question to ask yourself is simple and brutal: am I willing, if necessary, to reposition my product in a foreign market even if this obliges me to tell a story about myself different from the one I tell at home? If the answer is no, exporting probably won't work — or it'll work only in the neighboring and similar markets, where the mirror holds.
Question minus one: are you willing to lose well for twenty-four or thirty-six months?
Almost no internationalization project produces a net return before two years. Many require three. Some — the most ambitious, in culturally distant markets — even five. This fact is known to anyone who has read two lines on the subject, and yet most export plans foresee break-even within twelve or eighteen months. The discrepancy isn't optimism: it's a form of self-deception necessary to unlock the investment.
The problem isn't the wrong forecast. The problem is that, when break-even doesn't arrive in the foreseen times, the entrepreneur finds themselves before an unplanned choice — continuing to burn capital or withdrawing before having really verified the hypothesis. The majority withdraw. Not out of bad strategy, but out of the absence of a holding plan.
Losing well doesn't mean losing a lot. It means having built in advance a declared learning budget, separate from the operational budget, that covers the first 24-36 months and that isn't revised at the first negative quarter. The companies that really export have this item on the balance sheet, mental before accounting. The others are still looking for a mirror that pays back within the year.
Question minus two: who in the company is authorized to contradict you when the field says something different from headquarters?
The third question is organizational, and it's the one on which everything generally hinges. When the sales manager you sent to Poland, to Vietnam, to the Emirates tells you "here things work differently from how we think at headquarters," what happens? Do you listen to them? Can you modify the strategy? Or do you perceive them as someone looking for excuses for not selling enough?
The honest answer to this question is one of the best predictors of the success or failure of an export project. The companies in which the feedback from the field can't rise or can't modify the headquarters decisions are companies that export worse than they could, even with excellent products and promising markets. The hierarchy that works at home becomes the main obstacle abroad, because it prevents the company from learning from the market in real time.
It isn't a question of good will. It's a question of process: is there a monthly meeting in which the person responsible for abroad has a free agenda to bring the contradictions with the plan to headquarters? Does that person report directly to a decision-making figure, or to an intermediate level that will filter the feedback before it reaches the top? When an element of the strategy had to be changed because the market required it, was it done within three months or within a year? The answer to these questions says much more than any SWOT.
The ten classic questions, in true order
Once the three questions above have been posed honestly, the ten classic ones become useful again — but they must be put back in an order that reflects their real chain of dependency. When a guide presents them in arbitrary order, it seems you can answer one without having answered the others. It isn't so.
1. Do you have the production capacity, today and in the next three years, to serve an additional market without compromising the existing one? If the answer is no, every other question is premature. The export that damages the domestic revenue to saturate production on a new market that then doesn't consolidate is the fastest way to lose both.
2. Have you identified a target market with specific data and not with impressions? Not "we want to enter Germany." But "we want to enter segment X of the German market, where the specific demand is quantifiable in Y units a year, the main players are Z, and our plausible differentiation is W." The difference between the two formulations is everything.
3. Do you know the entry barriers in an operational way, not a generic one? Specific tariffs for your customs code, required certifications with real times and costs, labeling regulations, constraints on the product's composition, mandatory local representation requirements in some countries. The level of detail required is the one that allows you to build a Gantt, not the one that allows you to fill a slide.
4. Have you estimated the real costs of adapting the product to the target market? Packaging, language, any technical modifications, regulatory compliance, commercial materials. They aren't accessory expenses: in some sectors and markets they reach 15-25% of the total entry cost.
5. Do you have a pricing that takes into account tariffs, logistics, currency, distributor, and target margin, and that's still competitive compared to the local players in the destination market? The three components most often underestimated are the cost of the local distributor (often 25-40% of the final price), the currency risk if you sell in a currency other than the euro, and the financial costs of long commercial credit.
6. Do you have a logistics plan that includes scenarios for managing exceptions? What happens if a container is stopped at customs for checks? If a client refuses a shipment? If the chosen incoterm proves unsuited to a specific event? International logistics works until it stops working, and when it stops working it does so in ways that domestic logistics doesn't know.
7. Do you have a payment strategy that manages both the collection and the insolvency risk? Tools like Wise, Revolut Business, Stripe Global Payments, Mercury have made accessible to SMEs a level of international-payment management that ten years ago was reserved for medium and large companies. For credit insurance, SACE remains the main Italian reference, but there are today specialized private alternatives for export toward specific markets. Not having evaluated them is a choice, not a default option.
8. Do you have an international marketing plan that distinguishes between brand building and demand generation? They're two different trades. Brand building abroad requires time and prolonged investment, and the return is structural. Demand generation is tactical, measurable, and gives results in the following months. A strategy that confuses them produces hybrid campaigns that do both things badly.
9. Have you considered the total entry costs, including the invisible ones? Certifications and regulatory adjustments, legal costs for international contracts, any local representation costs, trips and commercial missions in the first 18 months, training of the team. The sum of these costs is almost always double what companies budget at the start.
10. What's your principal objective, and does it change the way you answer the other nine? Increasing revenue, diversifying country risk, strengthening the brand, validating a product for a second market — they're different objectives that require different plans. The most common error is not choosing, and finding yourself chasing them all with insufficient resources for any.
This last question is at the bottom of the list for a reason: without having answered the nine above operationally, choosing the objective is a declaration of intent. It becomes a real choice only when you see what it costs.
What AI has changed about this list
Three of the ten questions today are answered in a radically different way compared to three years ago, thanks to generative AI tools.
The identification of the target market no longer requires months of primary research for small companies. A good day with Perplexity, Claude, or ChatGPT with web access produces a base analysis sufficient to discard the implausible options and to select two or three priority markets to deepen. Google Market Finder, which ten years ago was the reference tool, is today one of the sources — no longer the only one, nor even the main one.
The analysis of entry barriers has changed pace in the same way. Industry regulations, required certifications, labeling requirements, tariffs for a specific HS code — they're information that today a well-instructed AI system retrieves in minutes. The work that remains human is verifying the sources and updating the most volatile information (tariffs, recently introduced regulations), because the speed of regulatory change of 2025-2026 is higher than the one the models are trained on.
The adaptation of commercial materials is the most visible transformation. The localization of brochures, site, presentations, sales materials toward a target market — which required specialized agencies and weeks of work — is today a pipeline that combines neural translation (DeepL), AI review for cultural consistency, and final human review by a native speaker of the sector. Time: about ten days instead of two or three months. Cost: a fraction.
The other seven questions — production capacity, pricing, logistics, payments, marketing, total costs, objectives — remain substantially human questions. AI can accelerate the research of the input data, but the decisions that follow from it are still a responsibility that no tool can take in place of whoever leads the company.
The ten classic questions aren't wrong. They're incomplete. Without the three that come first, they remain a consultant's task — complete, detailed, and almost always useless. With the three that come first, they become the operational planning tool they were born to be.
What changes is who poses the questions. If at the helm there's someone who really seeks a market and not a mirror, someone willing to lose well for three years and to listen to whoever is in the field, then the ten operational questions make sense. Otherwise they become the activity you take refuge in to avoid facing the three real ones.