1. We have a large homgoneous market where you can build a product and it’s expected it can succeed for hundreds of millions of Americans
2. EU is the easiest second market, and another step change of hundreds of millions of customers in a somewhat unified market
3. there’s not an easy 3rd economy that replaces EUs wealth, population, and comfort with English + technology
When we piss everyone off in the EU tech company growth gets kneecapped and limited to US / Canada. Theres not an easy market to expand to without much deeper focus on that specific market and its needs, for much fewer returns.
I was making hardware at one point, and it took less than a day to decide that Europe was not getting our product.
The regulations were insane.
I imagine software is significantly easier, but there is a mountain of difference when it comes to electrical and plumbing.
If you are unwilling to follow regulations to sell your hardware here, then it tells me the regulations are already doing its job properly.
It was good enough for the US.
For electronic products, it should be enough to get the CE mark on your product, and it can be sold in any country. That is the point of the EU, that any company can sell it's products or services in the whole union, there are regulations, but they are union wide, not specific for each country.
Unless you were making something very special, that each country wants to and is allowed to regulate separately.
Taxes can be different, the VAT % is different in each country. But so is it also in each county or town in the US, and your people claim that this is the reason why you can't include taxes on prices in grocery shops, which is difficult to believe here for our people. So dealing with different tax rates shouldn't be big news for you? I mean... there are lots of online shops that know about different tax rates, it's not difficult. Or you could let someone else handle it for you.