Miro Teardown: International Walkthrough
A visual review of Miro's international customer journey
Miro is a text-book example of product-led growth success, but how effective is its international go-to-market motion?
Miro was founded in 2011, but to most people, it gained broad adoption and popularity during the COVID pandemic. Between 2020 and 2022, Miro experienced a staggering 600% user count growth, offering a delightfully simple way to collaborate with remote colleagues.
While many knowledge workers have returned to the office, Miro has established itself as an integral solution for team collaboration, boasting over 60m users.
Miro’s success is largely based on its simplicity and the viral loops built into the product. Just like Slack, Miro works best when you invite your colleagues to jump into the experience.
For the most part, Miro’s international customer experience follows the English experience closely. However, there are some surprising points of friction in the sign up and payment flow and some interesting design choices made. These all represent opportunities for Miro to improve its international experience, and with it, customer acquisition and retention.
Summary Highlights
Miro’s website is localized into 17 languages, whereas the app itself is currently available in 5 languages [French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish].
Miro uses browser language setting to accurately detect language, but switching language is awkward - it’s placed in the footer of the page, unfortunately obscured by the cookie banner.
Miro takes a shallow approach to localization: screenshots remain in English, featured customers are mostly US-based brands and the content and value proposition on the website is identical for every market.
When digging into the Miro website, there are gaps in the international journey throughout - localized links redirect to English-only content, leading to a fragmented experience.
Miro has a very simple approach to pricing with 4 tiers: Free / $8 / $16 / Enterprise. By default, they only offer US Dollar currency support and have a single pricing structure for customers in every country. Supporting multiple currencies is an obvious point of paid conversion improvement here.
For paying customers, Miro leverages Stripe to process transactions. This make for a seamless experience, yet they have only enabled credit card and invoice payment methods at this time.
There are some disconnects in the localized sign up flow - Marketing emails remain in English and redirect to English-only checkout experiences.
Miro’s engaging on-boarding flow is nicely localized for the 5 supported languages. There is room for further adaptation by-market, but it’s already a good start.
In the product experience, Miro provides a number of fully localized templates for new users - this is a nice level of attention to detail that will improve user adoption rates.
English-speaking users can avail of Miro Lite, a free online whiteboard that requires no sign up. Localized users are obliged to create accounts first.
For a full breakdown of the best practices and experience gaps in Miro’s international customer journey, read through the entire teardown, including:
Overview
Monetization
Product Experience
Wrap Up
Overview
Miro’s hompage is clean and simple, and lends itself well to localization. It correctly displays the appropriate language based on the user’s browser settings. Immediately, a couple of gaps in the localized experience can be found:
No language selector in the top navigation: for users who may have the wrong browser setting, offering an easy way to change language is essential
Screenshots remain English-only. Considering the volume of traffic that lands on miro.com, there’s a strong justification to localize the entire experience to improve the customer journey
The scrolling list of customer logos is mostly a selection of US customers. This is an easy way to adapt the appeal of a product to local audiences: highlight some of the local brands in each market
After the site loads, a chat bot immediately prompts the user, but it’s an English-only experience. This is another quick fix that would be worth investing in to improve user engagement
The language switcher is placed in the footer of the web page. While this is generally a poor user experience, it’s made worse - it is obscured with a full-page width cookie banner.
The immediate prompting of the chat bot on the homepage indicates how important it is for Miro. The availability of live support can radically improve engagement and extend the time of customer sessions.
For localized versions of Miro.com, the chat bot is entirely English-only. This is a compelling improvement opportunity. At the very least, Miro could leverage pre-baked localized responses. For higher priority languages, live chat support is worthy of experimentation.
In addition to the scrolling list of customers, Miro highlights some in-depth customer quotes and stories prominently. Once again, these are largely US-focused, which misses an opportunity to demonstrate how Miro is used in Australia, Brazil, Japan and other countries.
There is an extensive list of customer stories, but when you try to access it, it’s apparently available in English only:
There are many examples of the content intentionally not localized. This can be a reasonable trade-off - it’s important not to simply localize everything, without understanding the importance or value. But, some important-seeming assets remain English-only.
For example, take this one-pager PDF that is available for download and sharing by prospects. While the blurb to download is localized, the PDF file remains English-only.
Monetization
Miro has plenty of room to grow its international paid conversion performance. There are several points of friction that are most likely suppressing demand.
Firstly, Miro appears to support US Dollar as the currency only. After testing with multiple different worldwide IP locations, US Dollar was presented each time.
This is important for a couple of reasons:
Presenting a non-local currency (i.e. US Dollar) makes it harder for the customer to consider and compare the true cost of the product
The monthly or annual subscription will vary in actual price due to currency fluctuations, making budget control more difficult
Room for improvement: supporting local currency can drive 20%+ improvement in paid conversion rates
The buying process for Miro is pretty simple, thanks to the clutter-free integration with Stripe. There is a bug in the user journey however - I started off using French, but after validating my account, I was landed into an English-only buying experience.
Miro only offers two payment methods currently - card payment and invoices. This presents another opportunity to improve paid conversion rates and retention. Companies that offer 5 or more payment methods tend to grow 4% faster than companies with 1-3 methods. Furthermore, retention rates are higher for users that can pay with their preferred local methods.
Room for improvement: offering 5 or more payment methods can accelerate paid conversion rate and retention rates
Finally, let’s consider Miro’s pricing strategy. Their pricing levels are transparent and simple:
Free
Starter: $8 per month
Business: $16 per month
Enterprise: Contact sales for pricing (30 seats minimum)
As with many B2B companies, Miro sets a single price worldwide. Adapting price to local market conditions and users’ willingness to pay offers the opportunity to achieve the optimal paid conversion and retention rates in each market.
There likely won’t be a huge difference in the right price between the US and most of the EU, but there may be larger variances in Japan or Brazil. By persisting with a single US-based price, Miro is certainly leaving money on the table.
Room for Improvement: tailor the price of your product to suit local market conditions and users ability to pay
Product Experience
For most new users, their initial experience of Miro.com starts when they are creating a new account. After validating your email address, Miro immediately sends a welcome email with “Quickstart Resources”.
These welcome emails are an ideal opportunity to encourage users to take action and move closer to the “aha” moment that will encourage retention. Having tested multiple different languages, Miro does not appear to send localized versions of the welcome email. This experience gap risks lowering levels of new user activation and engagement.
Room for Improvement: welcome and on-boarding emails are a crucial part of the first-time user experience and should be fully localized, and ideally, adapted for each market
Within the product itself, Miro delivers a complete localized experience. A nice touch is how the core, popular templates are fully localized. This is important as it helps users visualize the variety of scenarios and use cases that Miro should be considered for.
Best Practice: provide fully immersive, localized experiences for your most important user artifacts and resources
That said, there are still some gaps in the localized journey, even for localized templates, where the description remains in English:
Miro has sprinkled thoughtful ‘moments of delight’ across the product experience, which are reflective of its brand. These take the form of small animations to congratulate users on certain tasks. Currently, these are displayed in English-only.
This is a great opportunity to improve the cultural localization of the app for global audiences. If Miro chose to localize these, it could select particularly local phrases and words that demonstrated its local understanding.
Room for Improvement: pay attention to opportunities for providing local market adaptation and cultural localization to enhance the brand appeal for non-English users
For many global business customers, they have strong concerns around the location where their data is stored. B2B companies that offer US-only data storage may encounter resistance - particularly as they move up-market - in markets such as Germany.
Miro takes an interesting approach here. By default, all customer data is stored in Ireland and Germany. This eliminates the potential for concern among any EU-based customers. Very often, US customers will be happy with this arrangement also, but Miro allows enterprise customers request data storage in the US.
Wrap Up
As a private company, Miro doesn’t share details of its revenue breakdown between the US and international markets. It’s reasonable to assume that a majority of its revenue is derived from US-based customers at this time.
However, it’s clear that Miro has huge potential to expand its global footprint, user acquisition and monetization internationally. This should start with thinking through the end-to-end user journey and eliminating the major points of friction that are suppressing free customers becoming paying customers.
Miro has set itself up well for international growth, with EU-based data storage and a large number of localized languages on its website. It will be interesting to watch how much it invests to growing its user base in advance of any acquisition or IPO event.