How localization accelerates growth at three industry-leading tech companies

The world’s top 10 SaaS companies localize their platforms into 17 different languages on average. Companies that invest in new languages grow. And companies that grow invest in new languages:

• Businesses that use localization services earn 1.5 times more than companies that do not.
• According to a global study, 56.2% of consumers say the ability to obtain information in their own language is more important than price.

Making your app and content available in your customers’ own languages is no longer “nice to have”— it’s fundamental to your organization’s growth. And choosing an agile, scalable, translation management system is a key driver for success.

In this edition of our Growth Heroes series, we hear from decision-makers at three of the world’s fastest-growing scale-ups who are prime examples of successful localization:

• Revolut: The global fintech company that has become a household name, with over 12 million customers and counting.
• LumApps: The social, collaborative, employee experience platform used by enterprises around the world and widely recognized as the best intranet platform on the market.
• Ding: The popular mobile phone top-up service that covers over 500 operators and platforms in more than 140 countries worldwide.

They tell us how an efficient, flexible, developer-friendly localization process with Lokalise enables them to reach their international expansion goals. 

Equipped to reach new markets

“We wouldn’t be able to reach global markets without translating the application,” says Elie Mélois, co-founder and CTO at LumApps, summarizing the importance of translation keys to his company’s growth.

Before switching to Lokalise, LumApps managed its translations manually; sharing spreadsheets between translators, project managers, and the DevOps team. The process was slow, error-prone, and frustrating for developers and translators alike.

Realizing that fast, high-quality localization is essential to scaling their product, LumApps switched to Lokalise. Since then, they’ve rolled out their employee experience platform in 18 new languages.

Localization is key to entering new markets. Lokalise has helped us to streamline the process of translating our product into 18 languages.

Elie Mélois, co-founder and CTO at LumApps

Like LumApps, the development team at Ding struggled to achieve the quality and speed of localization required to go live in a new market. Because they serve over 140 countries and continue to expand, they soon realized that their old spreadsheet-based localization process was standing in the way.

Dieter Garbrecht, Mobile Product Manager at Ding, says his team has vastly improved the quality and speed of their localizations since switching to Lokalise.

With Lokalise, I can state with certainty that we have reduced our development cycle by at least one or two days for every release.

Dieter Garbrecht, Mobile Product Manager at Ding

Revolut has had a similar experience. As the company rapidly grows, the ability to quickly roll out in new languages has become increasingly important. According to Edward Cooper, Head of Mobile at Revolut, working with Lokalise has enabled his team to roll out 30 new languages, each with a turnaround time of just 48 hours. These new language options have already allowed Revolut to reach 8 million new users.

Without Lokalise, Revolut’s growth would be slower.

Edward Cooper, Head of Mobile at Revolut

Greater efficiency equals greater agility

With their old localization methods, LumApps, Ding, and Revolut all ran into a comparable challenge: their translation process was out of sync with the speed and agility of their development process.

Lokalise has enabled all three companies to fully align their localization examples with their development process. It gives them a one-stop solution for: 

• Keeping all project contributors on the same page with streamlined user management
• Seamless integration with the tools they already use, like Slack, GitHub, and the Android and iOS SDKs
• Live updates with an over-the-air localization SDK for Android and iOS

It probably takes longer for Apple to review the app than for us to roll out a new language with Lokalise.

Edward Cooper, Head of Mobile at Revolut

Revolut’s 48-hour localization process using Lokalise is a perfect example of this agile way of working: the team assigns the translatable content to its localization agency, which delivers the translated version within two days. After that, it takes just a few hours to do a final in-house “sanity check”, and then, with a click of a button in Lokalise, the new language is ready to launch.

Elie Mélois from LumApps says his team has improved its external translation workflow by up to 50%. With Lokalise, they now handle twice the number of translation keys as they used to in the same amount of time. Onboarding new people, especially technical writers, is also quick and easy.

The results have been similar at Ding, where Dieter Garbrecht says Lokalise has enabled his development team to streamline the localization process and align it with the development workflow. Now, they manage translations in a single place, with no lost keys and no contextual errors. As a result, translation quality has improved dramatically, even as the process has greatly accelerated.

Dieter says he has been particularly impressed with the live updates that the Lokalise SDK offers. In the past, all the translations had to be in place before his team could complete the QA stage. Now, with real-time updates in the Lokalise SDK, localized content goes live straight away without having to wait for the next release.

Choose a tool your team will want to use

As localization becomes a bigger priority for tech companies, it’s more important than ever to select localization tools that are built by developers, for developers. This is why Lokalise has become the preferred localization management platform among the developers at Revolut, LumApps, Ding, and many other fast-scaling tech companies.

Dieter Garbrecht at Ding says working with Lokalise saves his developers lots of time and hassle. By automating and optimizing the translation workflow, Lokalise frees up the team to devote their creativity to other important tasks. 

At LumApps, Elie Mélois says his developers chose Lokalise because his Android and iOS engineers were looking for the most streamlined solution. They benchmarked the market for translation management systems and found that Lokalise was the ideal solution for their needs.

With Lokalise, we could upload all our files, upload the images, and quickly check and fix everything. We could also quickly write scripts so that our developers could easily upload and download the latest files without even having to necessarily log into the tool.

Edward Cooper, Head of Mobile at Revolut

“Lokalise has turned a task we were dreading into an absolute pleasure,” says Edward Cooper at Revolut. His developers are impressed with the platform’s intuitive UX and powerful API. 

“The automatic text recognition for screenshots has been a lifesaver, and over-the-air updates are the icing on the cake,” he says.

Agile localization is a growth accelerator

The international success of Revolut, LumApps, and Ding is a powerful reminder of how agile localization opens up new markets for your company’s products. When using outdated translation processes, localization is often seen as a necessary burden, or even as an obstacle that slows down growth. But as these three companies prove, that it doesn’t have to be.

Are you interested in learning more about how efficient localization management can accelerate your organization’s international growth?

Take a look at Global-ready Growth: The Lokalise guide to unlocking international revenue. It’s filled with inspiration and advice on transforming your localization process into an agile growth accelerator.