DACH Market Entry Plan with Regulatory Go/No-Go Gates

The first gate is not a marketing gate: For a DACH launch, the thing that moves the date is regulatory, and it moves it by months rather than weeks. An igaming brand cannot spend a euro in Germany before it appears on the GGL whitelist and is connected to the OASIS exclusion register and the LUGAS activity file, and the cross-provider deposit limit of 1,000 EUR per month truncates the top of your value distribution before a single ad has been written. That changes the acquisition cost you can afford, not merely the copy. An energy supplier needs Bundesnetzagentur registration and working market communication with grid operators before a switch completes at all; a switch that fails at that layer becomes a refund and a complaint rather than a customer. Pet food needs Regulation 767/2009 labelling and LUCID packaging registration before a listing goes live. We plan backwards from those gates, and the launch date moves to meet them. The legal surface that catches foreign entrants: Impressum, price display under the Preisangabenverordnung including base price per kilogram or per kilowatt hour, the fourteen-day withdrawal right in its correct wording, and a checkout button that states what it costs. This is not paperwork. Competitors and consumer associations send cease-and-desist letters over exactly these points, at your expense, and a launch page with a wrong base price collects one reliably. We review the launch surface against this list before traffic reaches it. The ninety days, as gates rather than phases: Gate one closes when licensing, payments and German-language support are provably live: SEPA Direct Debit and PayPal at minimum, support hours a German customer will accept, and a returns or withdrawal flow someone has actually walked through. Gate two closes when the first paid cohort clears its own qualification event — a second deposit, a completed switch, a second order — at a rate you set before launch, not one rationalised afterwards. Gate three closes when unit economics hold at three times the launch spend. Each gate has a number, a date, and a named person who calls it. What you receive: A sequenced plan from signature to gate three, with dependencies drawn so that a slipped licence visibly moves everything downstream. Entry price position with the reasoning, including where you should not be cheapest. A channel availability calendar showing which channels are legally and practically open in which month. Localisation requirements written as acceptance criteria rather than aspirations. Kill criteria: the results at which the correct decision is to stop, agreed in advance while it is still an abstract question. What we refuse: We do not write launch plans for operators in licensed categories without a licence or a credible path to one, and we ask for the file reference. We do not plan a German launch around a machine-translated English site; a German buyer reads the checkout copy and leaves. We do not produce market-sizing decks, and we will not compress this into three weeks by skipping the legal surface review, which is the part that later costs money. This is the wrong engagement if: The launch date is fixed by an investor deadline and cannot move for a licence. Nobody internally owns German-language customer contact. You want a document to support a decision already made in a board meeting. Or your product has not shipped anywhere yet, in which case a market entry plan is premature and you should keep the money.