7 Go-to-Market Lessons from RegScale’s Journey to Enterprise Success

7 Go-to-Market Lessons from RegScale’s Journey to Enterprise Success

When most founders talk about enterprise sales, they focus on traditional tactics like gated content and aggressive lead capture. But in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, RegScale co-founder Travis Howerton revealed a radically different approach that’s generated over 300,000 downloads of their compliance automation platform. Here are the key go-to-market lessons from their journey:

1. Turn Domain Pain into Market Opportunity The seeds of RegScale’s success were planted in Travis’s two decades of compliance experience. As he explains: “When you’re starting a business, you have to figure out how to make somebody a lot more money, or you have to make a lot of pain go away for a price they’re willing to pay. And there was nothing I did in my career that I found more painful than compliance.”
2. Lead a Movement, Not Just a Product Instead of simply selling software, RegScale positioned themselves as pioneers of “reg ops” – bringing DevOps principles to regulatory compliance. This bigger vision has helped them build a community around their mission of transforming how enterprises handle compliance.
3. Start High and Move Down Rather than starting with small customers and moving upmarket, RegScale deliberately targeted the most demanding use cases first. Travis notes: “When you sell to the Department of Defense and they’re using it there, it’s kind of hard to say it’s not good enough for your bank.” This strategy instantly established their enterprise credibility.
4. Eliminate Friction Over Lead Capture Breaking with B2B convention, RegScale made their platform openly accessible. “We put a lot of content out there and made it easy to get. We don’t put everything behind a paywall or make you register and bombard you with marketing.” This focus on value over lead capture has driven organic growth through customer referrals.
5. Build on Modern Infrastructure RegScale leveraged cutting-edge technology stacks to deliver capabilities that legacy vendors couldn’t match. As Travis explains: “We’re just doing some stuff that’s very forward leaning… we just have the benefit of building on a modern tech stack versus starting ten years ago where everything was harder and the tooling wasn’t quite there.”
6. Balance Growth with Sustainability Despite exceeding aggressive growth targets, Travis emphasizes the importance of sustainable scaling: “The thing, if anything I’ve learned is that sort of slow is smooth and smooth is fast… being just more smooth and predictable on how you’re growing, you can still get to the same number.”
7. Find Visionary Early Adopters RegScale’s initial traction came from customers who shared their vision for transforming compliance. Travis reflects: “What we kind of found that both helped us and hurt us was finding other visionaries who are excited about the vision. Because when you’re an early stage product, you don’t do everything you want to do in the vision.”

For B2B founders, RegScale’s journey offers a masterclass in leveraging deep domain expertise while breaking conventional go-to-market rules. Their success shows that even in traditional enterprise markets, reducing friction and truly solving customer pain points can create powerful organic growth engines.

The key is finding the right balance between vision and execution. As Travis notes about their early customers: “We found like minded people who were feeling the pain and felt like something should be done about this. They helped us get our start, and so forever grateful to those folks.”

This approach has positioned RegScale to become what Travis envisions as a core part of the enterprise digital transformation toolkit – proving that sometimes the best way to capture enterprise value is to start by giving value away.