The default advice, why it’s often wrong, and the four questions that tell you whether to go wide or go deep.

Expanding into new markets is the reflex answer to “how do we grow?” It’s also one of the hardest and most expensive things a company can attempt, and often the wrong first move.

We asked Zimi CEO Michael Maas, who deliberately chose to go deeper into South Africa rather than across borders, how founders should weigh it up…

Founders reach for expansion before they’ve exhausted the market on their doorstep. Michael’s check is to look honestly at how much of the local opportunity is genuinely captured, and in his case the answer was almost none of it.

South Africa has only around 5,000 to 6,000 EVs in a fleet of roughly 12 million vehicles, which is a market barely off the starting line, not one you’ve outgrown.

Before you look outward, put a real number on how much of your local market you’ve won. Founders wildly overestimate this, mistaking early traction for saturation. If you’re holding a fraction of a per cent of the addressable market at home, expansion isn’t growth; it’s a distraction from the growth sitting right in front of you.

Expansion looks like more customers; it behaves like starting a second company. Michael’s list of what a new market actually demands is sobering: local compliance codes, different market dynamics, physically shipping units, and installation partners on the ground. Every one of those is a cost and a risk that doesn’t exist in the market you already understand. Price the whole thing before you fall for the top-line opportunity.

There’s a hidden return to going deeper: every month in one market compounds your expertise in it. Zimi keeps building SA-specific knowledge that a competitor arriving later can’t easily match, and that depth becomes its own moat. Spreading thin across borders resets that clock in each new place, so you’re a beginner several times over instead of the clear expert once.

Going deeper was right for Michael partly because hardware makes expansion brutally hard. The opposite case exists and was argued at the same event: Orca Fraud’s Thalia Pillay deliberately scaled into several countries to de-risk the business and build a more compelling investor story, on the logic that you’d rather capture 10% of a large market than 10% of a micro one. Software reuses across borders in a way hardware never will. The honest question is which kind of business you’re actually running, not which story sounds more ambitious.

Run the check, and you stop expanding out of insecurity and start choosing deliberately. For some businesses that means going global early; for many SA founders it means realising the market at home is barely touched, and that going deeper is both cheaper and more defensible than the border everyone told them to cross.

Michael’s full talk from Founder Collab Live is available to members inside the Founder Collab, where he goes further than we could cover here:

You’ll also get access to 40+ masterclasses from SA founders and operators on sales, fundraising, UX, paid media and more inside The Founder Collab.

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