Brazil should almost never be a company's first international market. I have been telling founders this for fifteen years and it still surprises them, usually because they have just read how big it is.
It is big. Two hundred million people, a digital economy on its way to being one of the largest anywhere, a payment system that moved most of the country onto instant transfers in about three years. None of that is the problem. The problem is reading the size as an invitation. It is closer to an exam, and the exam has very little to do with your product.
Let me go through what the exam covers, roughly in the order newcomers fail it.
They arrive with a Latin America plan. It was written in Spanish, or at least in a Spanish frame of mind, and the largest market in the region speaks Portuguese, runs a different legal system and has spent two hundred years looking at the Atlantic rather than at its neighbours. The Mexican playbook does not translate. The Argentine one translates in ways that will embarrass you. There is a further wrinkle. Founders in Buenos Aires or Santiago learn early to think past the border because the border is close. Founders in São Paulo rarely bother, because the home market is large enough that most of them never need to. So you, the newcomer, will be competing against local companies that have never once taken their eyes off the customer you want.
They treat the regulator as an obstacle. When I was building Skype's business here the product sat in a category the rules had not anticipated, and the temptation, then as now in technology companies, was to treat the gap as permission. The better reading was to treat it as a conversation. The partnerships that worked were the ones where the regulated operators could see what they gained and were willing to say so in public. Brazil has a long memory for companies that arrived announcing that the rules did not apply to them, and a surprisingly warm one for companies that arrived asking how things were done.
They cannot hear the no. This is the most expensive lesson for Northern Europeans and Americans, and I have watched very good teams fail it. A Brazilian executive will almost never tell you he is not interested. He will tell you it is interesting, that you should talk again after the holidays, that he wants to connect you with a colleague. Every one of those can be true. Every one can also be a polite way of closing the door. Anyone from here hears the difference. Almost nobody from elsewhere does. I have seen teams spend two quarters on a pipeline that had been empty since the first meeting.
They plan a dinner. Everyone has heard that relationships come before business in Brazil, and the dinner is fine, but the dinner is not what is being tested. What is being tested is whether you will still be here in a year, whether your name can safely be attached to theirs, and whether, when the first thing goes wrong, you will call rather than send a lawyer. Trust here gets extended slowly and withdrawn fast, and it gets extended to a person before it gets extended to a company. "Who is your person in Brazil" is a more important question than "what is your Brazil strategy", and the people asking it know that.
They pace themselves wrong. The cliché is that things are slow. The truth is that things are slow and then suddenly very fast, and the fast part starts when the right people have decided, usually in a room you were not in. Teams that pace themselves for steady progress lose heart in the slow stretch and are unprepared when the window opens. The useful discipline is to spend the slow months building the relationships that will carry you when the window opens, because it will not stay open while you hire.
They bring their pessimism with them. Niklas once said, after a week of meetings here in 2012, that Brazilians were more optimistic about the future than Europeans. He meant it as an observation. I pass it on as advice. Pessimism reads here as a lack of commitment. You do not have to share the optimism, but your counterpart is making decisions inside it, and a plan built entirely around downside protection will find nobody on this side of the table willing to match it.
People ask me what fluency looks like once a company has it. The honest answer is that it looks like nothing. The fluent company does not announce its understanding of Brazil. It stops making the expensive mistakes. Its meetings start at the right depth. Its partners return its calls. It knows which month not to try to sign anything, which introduction to decline, and which "very interesting" to take at face value. When something goes wrong, which it will, the company hears about it early from a friend instead of late from a competitor.
You cannot read any of this in a report, and I say that as someone who has written a few. You learn it from people, over years, and it costs something. The only shortcut I know is to arrive with someone who has already paid, and who has nothing to sell you except an accurate account of where you are standing. The country is generous to people who arrive with context. It is quietly expensive for people who do not, and most of them never find out why.