Selling into the US from outside it: a GTM playbook for international founders

Many accelerator founders build from Bangalore, London, Lagos, Jakarta or Colombo and sell to buyers in New York, Chicago and San Francisco. The product travels easily. The trust does not. A US buyer who has never heard of you checks a short list of things before taking a second call, and most of them have nothing to do with the product.

This playbook covers what international founders need to sell into the US from outside it: the entity and bank account, a credible US presence, positioning and pricing for US buyers, the security answers they expect, the US account list, founder time in the market, and how to run the whole department across time zones.

Do you need a US company to sell to US customers?

You do not need a US company to invoice a US customer, but you need one to raise from investors such as YC and to look like a safe vendor to US procurement. For a venture-backed B2B startup, a Delaware C corporation is the default structure, and forming one from abroad takes days, not months.

Y Combinator's own terms make the point. YC invests in US, Canada, Cayman and Singapore corporations. Founders who already incorporated elsewhere have to flip their structure so the parent company sits in one of those four. The standard deal is $500,000 in total: $125,000 on a post-money SAFE for 7%, plus $375,000 on an uncapped SAFE with a most favoured nation (MFN) provision.

International founders are not the exception at YC. In the Winter 2022 batch, YC reported that about 50% of companies were based outside the US, with 42 countries represented and India alone accounting for 32 companies. Many of those founders face the same question you do: how to sell into a market they do not live in.

The formation itself is the easy part. Stripe Atlas, used by more than 100,000 founders in over 175 countries, incorporates a Delaware company, gets the company tax ID, issues founder equity and files the 83(b) election. Its one-time fee is $500, and it states that within two business days you are incorporated and ready to bank, fundraise and accept payments.

If you file for the tax ID yourself, the IRS lets companies whose principal place of business is outside the US apply for an Employer Identification Number by phone at 267-941-1099, Monday to Friday, 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. Eastern time, or send Form SS-4 by fax or mail. You can apply for only 1 EIN per day, so plan the order of your filings.

How do you enter the US market as a foreign startup?

You enter the US market by removing every reason a US buyer has to treat you as foreign, then running a focused campaign against a small, agreed list of US accounts. The order matters. Outreach before the foundation is in place spends your best accounts on a first impression you cannot repeat.

Each step is covered below. The first five are foundation work, which the five phases call Fix and Build. The last two are where pipeline starts.

What do US buyers check before they buy from a foreign startup?

US buyers check whether you are a real, reachable, safe and proven vendor before they check whether the product works. Most of that checking happens before they ever speak to you.

Gartner's survey of 646 B2B buyers, published in March 2026, found that 67% prefer a rep-free buying experience, and 45% used AI during a recent purchase. Your site, your security page, your case studies and what AI answers say about you are doing the selling before the first call. If any of them signals risk, you never hear about the deal you lost.

None of these answers is expensive. They are skipped because no one owns them, and the founder is busy building product in a different time zone.

What a US presence looks like before you have a US office

A US presence is a set of signals, not a lease. Get a US phone number that rings through to a person during US business hours. Put the US address on the site, the contracts and the invoices. Block meeting times in US mornings and early afternoons, and offer them first when a buyer asks for a call.

Then make the site read as if it was built for the US buyer. A dedicated page for each US segment you sell to, US case studies near the top, and a contact route that does not ask the buyer to work out your time zone. The buyer should finish the visit thinking you are a US company with a team abroad, not the other way round.

How should you position and price for US buyers?

Position for US buyers by describing their problem in their language with proof from their market, and price in US dollars on US terms. A buyer should never have to translate your site, your currency or your examples.

Start with language. US buyers search for the terms their own industry uses, and those often differ from what your home market says. Spelling, job titles, regulation and examples all signal where a company is from. Write the US pages for the US reader, even if the rest of the company works in another style.

Proof matters more than claims. Your first US customer is worth more to your US pipeline than any number of customers at home, so turn them into a case study as soon as they agree. In the agentic AI healthcare engagement, a health system speaker on webinars produced 2.6x the registrations. Buyers trust peers who look like them.

Price in USD. Quoting in another currency hands the buyer a conversion and a question about exchange risk. Use US payment terms, invoice from the US entity and take payment into the US account. For the wider pricing and budget picture at this stage, see how to spend the YC $500K.

Make the paperwork as familiar as the price. A US order form, a master services agreement governed by US law and a standard data processing addendum shorten legal review. Have them ready before the first proposal, so procurement starts from documents it recognises rather than a contract drafted for another market.

What data and security answers do US buyers expect?

US buyers expect a clear answer on where their data lives, who can access it and how you prove your controls. The strongest proof a software vendor can offer is a SOC 2 report. A foreign vendor without those answers stalls in procurement, however good the product is.

SOC 2 is the AICPA's assurance report on a service organisation's controls, examined by a CPA firm against five trust services criteria: security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality and privacy. User organisations rely on it to evaluate their service providers.

If you do not have the report yet, say when you will. Publish a security page that covers data location, encryption, access control and incident response in plain language. Name a person who answers security questions. Enterprise reviews have their own rhythm, covered in selling to enterprises as an unknown startup.

Treat the security page as a sales asset. Buyers who prefer to research without a rep read it before they ever book a call, and a clear page answers the question your champion would otherwise have to carry into a meeting you are not in.

How do you build a US account list from outside the country?

Build the US account list by naming the specific companies that match your best customers, agreeing the list with whoever sells, and sizing it to what you can work properly. A short list worked well beats a national list worked thinly.

Start from what your existing customers have in common: industry, size, systems they run, the trigger that made them buy. Then find the US accounts that share it. Read the signals in the market, such as who is hiring for the problem you solve, who is researching the category and which competitors they already use.

Pick one segment and one part of the country to start. A US East Coast morning overlaps with a European afternoon, and a West Coast afternoon with an Asia-Pacific morning. Choose the segment whose working day fits yours, prove the motion there, then add the next one.

Agree the list before anything is sent. Every channel then runs as a controlled four to six week test against it, so you learn which segment, title and message works in the US before you spend at scale. In the agentic AI healthcare engagement, leading with the CMIO produced 2.1x the meetings. That is the kind of finding a test against a fixed list gives you.

How much time should international founders spend in the US?

International founders need to be present in the US market in two ways: as the visible voice in every channel all year, and in person on planned trips built around the events where the account list gathers. Presence is what turns a foreign vendor into a known one.

The founder's voice travels without a plane ticket. In the agentic AI healthcare engagement, the CEO as the sender produced 3x the replies. In the cybersecurity engagement, founder-signed invitations produced 3x the acceptances and founder ads beat company ads with 2.4x the click-through. Founder content can be captured from recorded interviews, so it does not depend on the founder's calendar.

Trips are where it compounds. Plan each one around a single event your accounts attend, book meetings with the list before you land, and host something small of your own. In the cybersecurity engagement, events produced $247K of yearly pipeline. Read the cybersecurity case study for how events fit alongside the other channels.

How do you run a US go-to-market across time zones?

Run a US go-to-market across time zones by putting one accountable lead over the whole function, so that work in one region hands to the next without waiting for the founder. A growth department is one senior team that owns qualified pipeline end to end, from strategy to execution, under a single accountable lead.

The common failure is the founder as the only bridge. Every reply, every meeting request and every question from a US buyer waits until the founder wakes up, reads it and decides who answers. A day lost on each exchange adds weeks to the cycle, and the buyer reads the delay as a sign of how you will behave as a supplier.

Codax runs teams across the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific, which is the shape a cross-border go-to-market needs. Positive replies and signals reach sales the same day. Pipeline is reviewed with leadership every month, account by account, and a quarterly business review sets the next quarter. The timeline below shows a first two quarters built on the five phases.

The schedule is a recommended framework, not a promise of results. What it guarantees is order: no US account hears from you before the foundation is ready, and every channel earns its budget with data. For the next stage, read from 10 design partners to 100 customers, and for how US buyers find you through AI answers, read how to get named by ChatGPT and Google AI answers.

The rest of the series is on the accelerator founders hub. Selling into the US from abroad is a solved problem when the foundation is in place and the founder stays the voice.