The next billion internet users will not arrive via broadband connections and flagship smartphones. They will come online through mid-range Android devices, often on 3G or patchy 4G networks, navigating interfaces that were not designed with them in mind. For founders building in this space, the opportunity is enormous. So is the risk of getting the design fundamentals wrong.
Over the past year, we sat down with eight founders in our portfolio who are building specifically for users in South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. What we learned was both humbling and instructive. Inclusive design in emerging markets is not simply a matter of translating English content or reducing image sizes. It requires rethinking the entire product interaction model from the ground up.
Start With the Constraint, Not the Feature
The most successful founders we spoke with shared one counterintuitive habit: they began every new feature by asking what the user cannot do, rather than what they want to do. Connectivity is unreliable. Storage is limited. Literacy levels vary. Data is expensive. Battery life is precious. Each of these constraints shapes the product in ways that cannot be papered over with a polished UI.
Myriad Health, for example, redesigned its diagnostic intake flow three times before landing on an approach that worked for patients in rural Maharashtra. The first version required a text-heavy questionnaire that assumed a high level of health literacy. The second version used icons, but the icons meant different things to users from different regional backgrounds. The third version used short voice prompts paired with simple binary choices, and completion rates jumped by over 60 percent.
"Every time we thought we had made it simple enough, we went back to the field and realized we had not. The humility to keep going back is what makes the difference."
The lesson here is not that emerging market users are unsophisticated. On the contrary, they are highly resourceful navigators of constrained environments. The lesson is that design assumptions built in San Francisco do not travel without deliberate translation work.
Language is Not the Same as Localization
Many founders treat localization as a translation problem. Translate the interface into Swahili or Hindi or Portuguese and you have localized the product. This is almost always insufficient. True localization requires understanding how users in a given market communicate, what vocabulary they use to describe the problem your product solves, and what mental models they bring to software interfaces.
Civic Link, which builds civic engagement tools for immigrant communities, discovered this the hard way. Their initial product used bureaucratic terminology drawn directly from government websites, because that was the vocabulary their founding team associated with civic participation. But the communities they were trying to serve did not talk that way. They used colloquial terms, often mixing languages. When Civic Link revised their interface to reflect this, adoption in their target markets doubled within a quarter.
Offline-First is Not Optional
For builders targeting markets with unreliable connectivity, offline-first architecture is not a nice-to-have. It is a prerequisite for retention. Users who open your app during a connectivity gap and find it non-functional will not give you a second chance. They will switch to a competitor, or to the paper-based alternative, and they will not come back.
Bridgepoint Commerce built their entire merchant-facing flow with an offline-first approach from day one, specifically because their merchant base operates in areas where mobile internet connectivity drops out unpredictably. Transactions are queued locally and synced when connectivity returns. The result is a product that feels reliable even in an unreliable environment, which is exactly what builds the kind of trust that drives word-of-mouth adoption.
Design for the Community, Not Just the Individual
Consumer behavior in many emerging markets is significantly more communal than the individualistic model that most Western product design assumes. Decisions are made collectively. Recommendations come through tight social networks. Devices are frequently shared between family members or neighbors.
Founders who design for this reality, rather than against it, create natural viral loops that are far more powerful than anything an app store algorithm can provide. Sova Education found that when they added a family visibility feature, allowing parents and siblings to see a student's progress, weekly engagement rates among their student cohort increased by 40 percent. The feature cost two weeks of engineering time. The return on that investment has compounded for over a year.
The Competitive Moat is the Insight Itself
There is a reason why most venture-backed consumer products fail in emerging markets despite adequate funding and competent teams: they are built by people who have never lived the constraint they are designing for. The founders who succeed are the ones who bring authentic, lived knowledge of the user's experience. That knowledge is not something a consulting firm can synthesize or a user research report can fully capture.
This is why we believe so strongly in backing founders from the communities they are building for. The insight that generates a defensible product in these markets comes from proximity, not analysis. When a founder has lived the friction, they know which constraints are real and which are assumed, which workarounds users have already built, and which solutions will feel native rather than imported.
The billion users who are coming online over the next decade represent the largest single growth opportunity in consumer software. The founders who will capture that opportunity are already out there. They just need capital and conviction. That is precisely why we exist.
