SoSafe: a full localization program, built by a team of one.
Case Study . SoSafe
One person, plus us. Maria Caravaca Gomez could see what SoSafe's localization needed. What she did not have was the time to design it and run it at the same time. Undertow mapped what was there, built the linguistic foundation, chose and connected the platform, and took over the daily work, including design. She kept every decision about markets, content and budget.
"In localization we are very often one-person teams. So it is important that your systems are well structured, so you can focus on the strategy."
Maria Caravaca Gomez, Localization Manager, SoSafe
SoSafe sells security awareness training across five European markets.
What | Before | With Undertow |
|---|---|---|
Localized email, ready to send | Too slow to plan around | 24 hours |
Campaign live across five markets | A quarter, language by language | ~2 weeks |
Design in five languages | SoSafe's own design team | Our design team |
Website update, live in every market | 2 weeks | 48 hours |
Languages: German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch
What we work on: website, design, campaigns, email
The challenge
Maria came in to run localization at SoSafe. Content was already going out in five languages, spread across a mix of providers, with nothing connecting any of it. She could see what needed to change. What she did not have was a second pair of hands: localization at SoSafe was one person, and one person has forty hours in a week.
"When I joined, the talent pool was amazing. A really good pool of freelancers, and I had no concerns about quality. The problem was that there were no integrations and no centralized system, so there was no content reuse. Every request started from scratch."
Maria Caravaca Gomez
Localization Manager & Content Marketing Team Lead, SoSafe
What that looked like, every time:
There was no one else to give that list to. Like most localization managers in B2B tech companies, she was the department. A manual process can only grow in two ways: more people, or a better system. Only one of those was viable.
What got built, and the order she put it in
Understand it before changing anything
We kept what was already working. First we asked why things worked the way they did. Then we mapped the content lifecycle from beginning to end, not only the localization part of it. We mapped where the volume was and where the delays were, and that gave us the priority order. The website came first. It carried the most volume, and it is where a buyer goes to decide.
We have run this mapping in a lot of companies at the same stage, so it moves quickly. We know which questions change the plan and which ones do not, so this stage takes weeks rather than quarters. Not because it cannot be done in house, but because in house it has to happen on top of a full week.
Get the basics right before trying anything clever
Glossaries, style guides and terminology in one place, consistent across content types, in all five languages. One set of terms for the product, one voice per market, and the rules written down instead of carried in someone's head.
"It might not sound fancy, but they are critical. [...] Without that foundation, trying to do something more ambitious, like adding AI or machine translation, you can do it, but it is risky."
Maria Caravaca Gomez
Localization Manager & Content Marketing Team Lead, SoSafe
Choose the platform for where you are going, not where you are
One requirement mattered more than the rest: flexibility. It had to connect to the marketing tools SoSafe uses today, and to the ones they add later.
"I partnered with the Undertow team, and that gave me time. They handled the conversations with our localization tooling provider and with the internal teams, so I could keep focusing on the strategy side."
Maria Caravaca Gomez
Localization Manager & Content Marketing Team Lead, SoSafe
Choosing the platform is the easy part. But moving onto it in a way that does not disrupt the content cycle requires careful planning, so we ran the old way and the new way side by side until the new one was proven.
Then take the day to day
Not only the language work. The whole operation.
Design, owned end to end
Layouts rebuilt for every language and checked, inside the same two-week campaign window as the copy
Website
Every page, every update, every new piece, in all five languages.
Campaigns
Marketing assets and landing pages, adapted for the market rather than only translated.
Market-ready and fast enough to be part of a regional plan rather than an afterthought.
She decided which markets and which content mattered. She stopped running the process behind them.
Not everything gets the same treatment
The homepage, the hero content and the pricing journey get the most care. They carry the brand, and that is where a bad experience does the most damage. Long-form and how-to content is machine-led, because what a reader wants from a help article is to understand what to do next. The budget does not shrink, but its distribution does, with more resources allocated to the pages that bring in revenue.
The services behind this work: Grow-Ready Plan, Localization Setup, Localization Operations and Customer Journey Localization, including design and QA.
What changed
No more waiting
Website updates go live across every market in 48 hours instead of two weeks, fast enough that the localized site no longer falls behind the English one. A campaign that used to stretch across a quarter, one language after another, now lands in all five markets in about two weeks, adapted rather than only translated. A market-ready localized email takes 24 hours, so regional campaigns plan around it instead of waiting for it. Design sits inside those timelines, which is why they hold.
Quality did not drop. It got more consistent
Consistency is the part a system can actually produce. One glossary, one style guide, one set of rules applied the same way to every job, instead of each request being decided from scratch by whoever picked it up.
"I assumed that moving away from fully human translation would mean a big drop in quality. That has not been the case. By adding more structure I got more consistency. It is not sacrificing quality, it is redefining how you achieve it."
Maria Caravaca Gomez
Localization Manager & Content Marketing Team Lead, SoSafe
And speed was never the whole point. In cybersecurity you cannot run a Spanish campaign in English, so launching in every market at the same time is not a scheduling win. It is what turns a campaign into traffic, leads and pipeline.
One person still makes the decisions. Everything between them and the published asset now belongs to a system, and to the team that runs it.
Questions, answered.
Running localization on your own?
Thirty minutes with Nicola, the founder of Undertow. You describe how it works today, and where it stops working. No slides, no sales pitch.
Not ready for a conversation? The Snapshot takes a few minutes, there is no form to fill in, and it tells you which stage your localization is at.