Being from outside US, I sympathize with that but:

1) It's a new service. It's reasonable to restrict your audience at first. Making it more international requires more work (shipping, billing, etc) which might end up being useless. It makes sense to test with domestic users first.

2) You should take a lot of care before shipping seeds internationally. Some countries (well, all countries I have flown to) have strict regulations on importing seeds and plants.

Totally agree with you that it makes a lot of sense for this kind of startup to focus on one country/region first. I do wish that startups would at least mention somewhere that they are aware of this. Something like "Sorry, US only for now" in the HN message, or a "I'm not in the US!" link on the frontpage with a message for international users, even if that message is simply that the company will focus on US customers only.

Exactly – non-us folk (me) feel like you just don't care about their existence when you just ask for a zip code, or US phone number etc.

Bigger companies have pulled this off so many times, restricting their customers to the US for seemingly no reason, that we get irked by it now.

If there was a message saying how it's super complicated to send seeds abroad, then we'd understand and all would be well.

Thanks for speaking up! The other posters are right that it's basically a time issue. I struggled with whether to even release at first in the entire U.S. or just San Diego.

I do care about non-us folk. One of the main reasons why I built the software the way I did (using weather data to calculate planting dates) is that I can theoretically extend the site to anywhere that I can get weather data for.

Yeah, sorry about that. I'll add a message to the site and in the future be more sensitive about this. I didn't think about it enough, and I'm disappointed that I didn't even do the minimum amount of acknowledgement that there is a world outside the U.S.

My other post below explains things a little, but support for other countries is definitely planned.

If that "I'm not in the US" button can lead to a page with general planting recommendations for people abroad, it'd be a very nice touch! Maybe a list of tools that are useful, or a link to services that may help, if you're feeling extra kind.

The question you need to ask yourself as a startup is how much time I should spend to not make money. I am sorry, if I already can't ship to you, why do I want to add all these resources for you when I will never receive money from you. Yes if you move to the US the owner might eventually make money, but that amount of time spent on such a low conversion rate is hard for a startup to justify. I think a message of US only would be sufficient for any startup.

Or even better "Enter your e-mail address here and we will notify you when our service becomes available in your country"

It seems like the best thing to do would be to get names for an e-mail list, and ask for country and locale so that he can decide if/when to go international. This particular business does not scale well internationally, though. Food, climate, local restrictions, plant import laws all make this a tough go.

Yea, I think many of us didn't understand why the Japanese never send most of their wares overseas until we started being entrepreneurs ourselves.

point 2) perhaps finding a local partner to ship stuff that is already in the country might be a decent way around this..

I just bought a plane ticket on united.com with an Aussie credit card. Had to make up a billing address, since there was no "Other" category besides the 50 states and territories :-/

Homeland Security might not be amused :)

They wont take any more of my time than they already do, and to be honest, they can go fuck themselves.

It only works in the US today, but how is that different from movies or ipads or any other product to be rolled out in the largest target market first?

It's non-trivial to scale this to 'planet wide' so until the home market is established and the concept tested there is no really good reason to scale it beyond the US, there are substantial costs associated with doing that.

Just the shipping alone for a biological product would drive you nuts.

it's different in that we un-americans will probably never visit the site again after finding out it's US only.

To see the next screen you could use the Whitehouse's Zip code: 20500

Since I grew up in the 80s and 90s I've always enjoyed using 90210 -- ahh for the days of bad hair and even worse acting! ;)

This looks like an awesome idea. I would absolutely be interested if I was in the US! (no chance of it coming to Belgium, is there, huh? :( )

haha not just me using 90210. Think I've been entering that as my zip code for US offers for a very long time :)

I guess you could do something with lat,long from GeoKit (on Rails) to avoid asking for zip code specifically.