Paul Bennett, chief executive of Context Travel, was concerned that his 400 highly qualified tour guides — including professors and architects — were spending too much time on scheduling logistics. He wanted them focused instead on making customers happy, offering erudite tours in 24 countries.
This month, the company introduced software it created to automate the scheduling process. Now, when an order for a tour comes into the company’s website, a text is sent automatically to a guide asking if he or she can take the assignment. If the guide accepts, the system confirms it and reminders are sent out closer to the date. If the guide rejects the assignment, it is sent to another tour leader.
The new system, Mr. Bennett said, keeps guides from “getting bogged down in the mechanics of the assignment” and “also lets our sales people spend more time on the phone with customers answering questions, rather than emailing back and forth with staff on logistics.” The software, which obviated the need for a $20,000-a-year employee and has led to increased sales around the world, cost just $5,000 to create.
Only about 5.3 percent of American small businesses with at least one employee sell to customers overseas, according to the Office of International Trade, a division of the Small Business Administration. The main barriers to exporting include a lack of information and the overall cost and time involved, according to a recent survey from the Small Business Export Association and the National Small Business Association.
“Of course, the U.S. market itself is pretty big,” said Zev Siegl, a small business consultant in Seattle, “so many companies don’t feel the need to export.”
The number of small companies exporting has been increasing, though, and the Obama administration recently announced a new program it says will streamline export reporting requirements, provide more information about foreign markets and make it easier to borrow money to finance foreign expansion. In the meantime, companies like Context Travel are using technology to take matters into their own hands.
After brainstorming how to automate scheduling with a friend who created a prototype program, Mr. Bennett handed the project to his own developers. The team wrote the software in about two weeks to work with Twilio, which provides the ability to send and receive phone calls and text messages from within a software program. “We tried this years ago before the advent of Twilio and other services, and it didn’t work,” he said.
Many companies manage to find off-the-shelf technology that helps them increase international sales. One example is Andrew Short’s one-person company in Bellevue, Wash., Jungle Education, which creates educational apps for the iPad that help children learn basics like telling time, simple fractions, coin math and geometry.
Mr. Short wanted to expand and considered creating a new English-language app, which he expected to take four months. On the other hand, he reasoned, it might take only two weeks to adapt an existing app for a foreign-language market using translation services. To do so, Mr. Short would have to translate both the words that appear on the screen and those spoken aloud.
To translate the screen text, Mr. Short chose ICanLocalize, which connects him with freelance translators abroad. He posts his job, and reads the résumés and reviews of interested providers. He hires one and sends his text. Generally paying 9 cents a word, Mr. Short ends up spending less than $100 to translate a typical version of a children’s app.
For the spoken word, Mr. Short used to work with local foreign-language speakers, volunteers to whom he gave gift certificates. It worked, but the process required recruiting talent and spending hours in recording sessions and editing. “It was tedious and time-consuming,” he said.
Researching on the web, Mr. Short discovered a text-to-speech service,Acapelabox, which lets users type words or sentences and then listen to the way they sound when spoken by a variety of voices: male, female, happy, sad, young and in various languages. The speed of speech, the tone and the pronunciation of words can be modified with controls on the website.
Mr. Short now uses Acapelabox to create sound files that he can use royalty-free in his app. “The computer-generated voices aren’t quite as good as humans, but they are close,” he said, “and they are easier to work with than humans.” Because each app has only about 500 words to translate, the cost is around $15 per app.
Mr. Short started with German and French versions of his products, assuming that countries with large populations would generate the most sales. Because the translations were so inexpensive, however, he commissioned additional languages. In all, he spent $405 on Acapelabox for 27 translated versions.
Those versions, he said, increased his sales last year to $175,000 from $120,000. And it turned out that Dutch and Swedish were his most popular foreign versions, selling 20,000 copies for Dutch and 12,000 copies in Swedish. “If I hadn’t had the opportunity to do all those translations so economically,” he said, “I wouldn’t have found my largest foreign markets.”
Applerouth Tutoring Services, a 13-year-old company in Atlanta, initially offered its services only in the United States. But the number of foreign students applying to American colleges and looking for help with entrance exams like the SAT is increasing, said Natalie Henderson, Applerouth’s chief operating officer. “They were finding us on the Internet,” she said, “and we wanted an effective way to work with them.”
But as a new company, Applerouth wanted to focus time and resources on tutoring rather than on physically expanding its footprint. “Rent alone for a single office space can range anywhere from $2,000 to $3,000 a month,” Ms. Henderson said. “Tack on the costs of recruiting, hiring, training and managing tutors in an area, and it would easily be cost prohibitive for us to operate in almost any of the overseas markets in which we currently do business.”
Applerouth has not advertised for business overseas, but it did not want to turn away the foreign students who found it through online searches or referrals. As an alternative, the company wanted to start offering online tutoring sessions through virtual meeting software products like Skype, Join.Me, Fuze or Zoom.
Ultimately, it picked two products geared to education, WebEx and WizIQ. The products are similar, but Applerouth uses both in case one goes down. They cost a combined $6,000 a year, based on Applerouth’s current student load, and offer the company’s tutors and students the ability to see and talk to each other as they review test questions and concepts on a shared virtual whiteboard.
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The technology, Ms. Henderson said, “allows us to pre-open new markets so we can save resources until we know an area is large enough to justify a physical presence.” It also lets Applerouth match tutors and students according to their academic needs and personalities, Ms. Henderson said, rather than placing the students with the one or two tutors they might be able to hire in a city.
Sometimes, the most common technology tools can prove valuable to a small business that wants to operate overseas. Frederick Fine created software for his 15-person company, SmartFolks, that delivers short quizzes to hotel employees’ phones or other devices, as a way to train them without pulling them off their jobs and into a classroom. The software is cloud-based and uses responsive web design to automatically display properly on any device.
Last month, Mr. Fine spent $463 to identify 163,000 people with the title “hotel general manager” on LinkedIn and placed an ad for his training software on their profile pages with a link to a demonstration copy of the product. More than 200 prospects clicked on the link. “We’d have to pay a marketing firm $5,000 to $10,000 just to establish a beginning marketing campaign,” he said, let alone to find interested prospects. The company is now working with 18 major hotel brands, including Marriott. The new technologies and services, Mr. Fine said, “really let a small company get into the game and compete.”
Correction: May 28, 2014
An earlier version of this article misstated how long Applerouth Tutoring Services has been in business. It has been around 13, not 3, years.
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