Better title would be "How Uber's Failure in Japan Can Help Multinational Corporate Expansions Everywhere". It's a bit of a stretch to still call Uber a startup, and even if you grant that, these lessons are not for startups.
I happen to have co-founded a multi-national startup. The best advice I have for going multi-national as a startup is don't.
> If the start-up core product isn't something that bypasses laws, why would it be bad?
This seams like a pretty naive rhetorical question.
Regulatory burden is different in each country. Look at github problems with Russia in the past. Or Google and EU's "right to be forgotten," worse yet, local politicians that make your business model illegal.
Also, culture / sales process is different in every country. VP of sales for North America is not going is going to have a hard time making a dent in Asia. The sales culture in Japan is very different from the one in China.
Some places have a culture of bribery to get anything done. And you know what the SEC/FTC can go after you in the US because the money goes through a bank in the US.
Now if you happen to have employees in that market place (and in some cases you're require to sell locally) you have to follow local labor which vary tremendously from country to country. Then you have local taxation laws, then you have your home countries taxation laws that deal with foreign sales.
If you multiply these headaches by say 10 or 20 markets. That's something very difficult for most startups (or even mid-size companies) to tackle.
> Was dropbox not a startup when it went to become available outside the US? Their expansion plans didn't require offices in each country
Dropbox being a self service product over the web is not a great example. Sure that can be a replicated by some segment of SaaS companies... but there's a lot more segments out there then SasS.
I think it also depends on where you are starting your company. If you are a US-based startup, you are already present in a massive market, and it may well make sense to focus on the US market only initially and only worry about selling to other countries later. Conversely, if you are based in a smaller country, then the small size of the country implies a small market which means limited domestic opportunities so the need to expand internationally early (even if just to a handful of larger markets such as the US) is much greater.
Every situation is different, I don't mean to preach like I know what is best for all startups, so take it with a grain of salt. MUBI definitely has a licensing burden, but it goes beyond that, even to very vanilla SaaS.
My thesis is this: if you can't get traction in one country, then acquiring customers in other countries is not going to make the difference which pushes you over the top. It may be the case that the country which you can gain traction in is not your own country, which will bring its own challenges but still doable. However, if there is not one single country which can offer you a sufficient market then I suspect that trying to piece together a customer base from many countries will drown you in overhead. You can make qualifications like English-only, USD-only, EST-business-hours-support-only, etc, etc, but at the end of the day each country has its own culture and you end up diluting your effort. This is to say nothing of regulatory or billing issues (note that accepting and clearing payments in other countries is a lot more involved than just looking at Stripe's supported countries list). My experience is that the human mind, especially the software engineer's mind, is very susceptible to building a mental model where going global appears to be a small marginal effort. You can even design your business plan that way and it still looks relatively tidy, but then once you get into the weeds you find a never-ending stream of details you overlooked. I guess this happens in all companies, but if you are serving multiple countries it's just more compromises you don't want to choose between: do I do something that sort of works globally, or something that really works locally? Companies that have some kind of physicality like Uber or Airbnb obviously have to think even more locally to individual cities, but for the average SaaS my instinct is country is the right granularity.
I happen to have co-founded a multi-national startup. The best advice I have for going multi-national as a startup is don't.