David Natroshvili is founder & CEO of SPRIBE, bringing cross-industry leadership to global gaming, regulation and product strategy.
Most founders can recognize when their local market starts to feel smaller than their ambitions. Fewer can point to actual evidence that going global is the right call, rather than a reaction to boredom or ego.
At my company, SPRIBE, the evidence showed up as data we could have ignored, but mostly didn’t. Today, SPRIBE operates in more than 60 regulated markets. Getting there took a series of small decisions to trust what the numbers were already showing us, long before any of it looked like a deliberate strategy.
Traction You Didn’t Build For
Aviator, our flagship product, has found some of its strongest audiences in Latin America, Africa and Eastern Europe, regions shaped by mobile-first habits and a strong appetite for social, real-time entertainment. Regional traction like that deserves different treatment than growth in a market that is targeted deliberately. It suggests the product itself, not marketing spend, is doing the work of finding an audience.
For a leadership team deciding where to invest next, that distinction matters. Growth you engineered proves your playbook works somewhere. Growth you didn’t have to engineer proves your product works in more places than your playbook accounted for.
Before I put real budget behind a region, I look for three things to hold up together. Retention matters more than the initial spike, so I want to see players coming back on their own in the weeks after, not just showing up once out of curiosity. I want to see the growth holding without paid acquisition or localization work on our end, since that is what separates a market discovering a product on its own from a market we simply haven’t tried yet. And I want it to survive more than one quarter, because a short run can be a promotional bump or a single creator moment as easily as it can be a shift in the market.
What A Partnership Is Actually Worth
Global partnerships tend to get evaluated on brand recognition, and not enough on geography. Our partnership with AC Milan is a useful example of the gap. The obvious value of teaming up with a football club that size sits in Europe, where the club’s following is already massive.
For SPRIBE, the more useful value sits in Asia, a market where our brand and AC Milan’s fanbase have far less overlap today, and where the partnership gives us a credible way into a region we hadn’t built for organically. A partnership’s real worth, for a company thinking about where to expand next, is measured by the markets it opens rather than the ones it simply reinforces.
Getting to that answer takes asking a few unglamorous questions before anything gets signed. Where does the partner already have trust that we don’t, and does that trust actually transfer to a product like ours, or only to their own brand? Do they have real distribution in the region, whether that’s media relationships, retail presence or a local commercial team, or is it just recognition with no way to reach anyone? Can they introduce us to the local operators, regulators or partners we would otherwise spend a year finding on our own?
A partnership that answers even one of those questions well is probably worth pursuing. One that can only point to audience size is a sponsorship, not an expansion strategy.
The Growth Gap Isn’t Always Background Noise
The clearest signal is often the simplest: A growth-rate gap between regions wide enough that treating every market the same way stops making sense.
In 2025, our business in Asia doubled while other regions grew at a steadier pace. That gap is a large part of why India and Southeast Asia now sit alongside Latin America at the top of our growth priorities for 2026, alongside continued investment across existing markets in Europe and Africa. The numbers made that case well before any strategy memo did.
A single strong year isn’t enough to reallocate resources on its own, so before treating a gap like that as a mandate, I ask what actually drove it. If the growth traces back to one product feature, one campaign or one operator relationship, that’s narrower evidence than a genuine market shift, and it usually calls for testing further before committing headcount. If growth is broad across products, channels and player segments instead, that’s a different kind of evidence, one that justifies moving people and budget rather than waiting for a second data point. Understanding which one you’re looking at takes talking to the people closest to that market, not just reading a dashboard.
For leaders weighing whether it’s time to expand beyond a strong local position, I’d suggest auditing for these three kinds of evidence before committing resources: traction you didn’t create, partnerships whose real value lies in the markets they open rather than the ones they reinforce, and growth-rate gaps large enough to reorder your priorities.
Ambition is necessary to act on a signal. It shouldn’t be mistaken for the signal itself.
The most common mistake I see leaders make is treating any one of these signals as sufficient by itself. A spike in a new region gets mistaken for demand. A recognizable partner’s name gets mistaken for market access. One good year gets mistaken for a trend. Each of those signals only earns your investment once you’ve tested whether it survives contact with reality, which is a slower and far less exciting process than simply announcing an expansion.
The Bottom Line
Ambition is necessary to act on a signal. It shouldn’t be mistaken for the signal itself. The lesson I’ve taken from building SPRIBE across more than 60 markets is that patience with evidence beats the size of the ambition behind it, every time.
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