Go West? What our startups teach us about going international
For a lot of Belgian startups, "should we go international?" is a question that answers itself. Build for a niche, and Belgium runs out of customers fast. The harder questions come next: where do you go first, and how close do you need to be to your customers once you're there?
I asked Aline Muylaert, co-founder of Go Vocal, how they handled it. Her story, read next to a few others from our community, shows how different Europe and the US really are.
Europe: you can do it from Belgium
Go Vocal, called CitizenLab until 2024, has been around for just over ten years. From day one it focused on a niche: citizen participation for local governments. The founders knew Belgium would be too small, so they thought and sold internationally from the start, with the Netherlands, France and the UK first.
That order was a deliberate choice. Governments in neighbouring countries work in fairly similar ways, so the public sector travels better across nearby borders than across an ocean. Every country still has its own barrier to entry. But once you land a first reference and crack that nut, the rest of the market opens up much more easily.
What stood out to me is how much of that you can do from home. Same company, same invoicing, customers a train ride away. You share a lot culturally, and you can simply show up in person. For a Belgian startup, Europe isn't a leap. It's an extension.
The US: it finds you, then you have to go there
The US came during Covid, about five years ago. Go Vocal had marketed in English from the very beginning, and American governments started finding it on their own. The market is enormous, and inbound demand opened the door.
Walking through that door turned out to be another story. The US is not one market. Go Vocal had to pick specific states, start from its first cities and build a community of neighbouring municipalities around them. Projects like St. Louis, where more than 15,000 residents helped decide how to spend $250 million in settlement funds, became anchors for the next conversations.
And that couldn't be done from Brussels. Over the past four to five years, Aline and her co-founder have spent long stretches in the US to really understand how it works.
"We'd done a lot of marketing in English from the start, so American governments simply began finding us. But the US isn't one market. You need a strategy around specific states: who are your first customers, which cities do you work with first, and how do you build a community of neighbouring municipalities around them? My co-founder and I have spent long periods over there to really understand it. That's a big investment in time and money. But once you're there, the market potential is so much bigger." — Aline Muylaert, co-founder of Go Vocal
Conveo: same conclusion, at a different speed
Conveo, founded in Antwerp in 2024, got there much faster. It runs AI-moderated video interviews for market research, and its buyers are marketing teams at large consumer brands, many of them American. It joined Y Combinator in its first year, and in September 2026 it raised a $50 million Series A, with offices in New York, San Francisco and London.
Co-founder Hendrik Van Hove moved from Brussels to Manhattan. In New York, he told Fortune, he can meet a brand CEO, Fortune 500 CMOs and a top pharma agency owner in a single day. From Belgium, one such meeting takes a flight and two weeks of planning. The core team, meanwhile, stays in Europe.
What their stories have in common
Two very different companies, one selling to city councils and one to Fortune 500 marketers, ended up in the same place: with founders physically in the US. Not for an address on the pitch deck, but because that's where the understanding comes from.
The exceptions prove the rule. Salesflare, a self-serve CRM from Antwerp, counts the US as its biggest market without ever moving. When a customer signs up with a credit card, distance barely matters. When the customer is a city council or a CMO, it does.
So, go West?
For Belgian founders, going international is rarely the real question. Europe is a natural next step you can take from home, often unlocked by a single good reference. The US is a different decision: a far bigger prize, but one that asks for your own time, money and presence.
So before you book the flight, ask yourself how your buyer buys, and how close you need to be to them. That's a conversation worth having with your Start it @KBC coach.