7 GTM Lessons From Building a Compliance Platform From Scratch

7 GTM Lessons From Building a Compliance Platform From Scratch

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Parry Bedi, CEO and Co-Founder of Tingono, shared the unvarnished truth about building and scaling a compliance automation platform in one of the most complex markets imaginable. His journey offers a masterclass in enterprise GTM strategy that contradicts much of the conventional startup wisdom.

Lesson 1: Sell the Vision Before You Build the Product

The most counterintuitive move Tingono made was going to market before they had a product. “We basically went to market without having anything built,” Parry explains. “We kind of did it the other way around where we said, hey, we’re building this. Do you want to buy it?”

This wasn’t reckless. It was strategic validation at its finest. Parry would show prospects mockups and designs, gauge real interest, and if they wanted to buy, he’d ask for three months to build it. The brilliance of this approach is that it separated real demand from hypothetical interest. People willing to wait three months and commit budget weren’t just being polite—they had a genuine, painful problem.

The tactical lesson here isn’t just about selling vapor. It’s about understanding that early-stage founders waste months building features nobody wants. By selling first, Tingono turned their first customer into a design partner, ensuring they built exactly what the market needed. “That first customer became our design partner,” Parry notes.

Lesson 2: Long Sales Cycles Aren’t a Bug, They’re a Moat

Most founders hear “twelve-month sales cycle” and run for the hills. Parry embraced it. “Our sales cycles are twelve months plus,” he states matter-of-factly. But instead of viewing this as a liability, he recognized it as a competitive advantage.

In heavily regulated industries, compliance decisions move through multiple layers of approval. “These types of companies, they have a compliance committee. They only meet once a quarter,” Parry explains. “So just getting in front of the committee could be three months, and then they debate it for another quarter.”

The lesson isn’t to seek out long sales cycles. It’s to understand that in certain markets, patience and process are unavoidable. The companies that win aren’t the ones fighting this reality—they’re the ones who build their entire GTM motion around it. That means maintaining a pipeline that’s 10-12 months deep, forecasting conservatively, and raising enough capital to sustain operations through extended closing periods.

Lesson 3: Cold Outreach Still Works When You Solve Expensive Problems

In an era obsessed with product-led growth and viral loops, Tingono’s acquisition strategy was refreshingly direct. “It was us cold emailing and cold calling,” Parry says. No fancy growth hacks, no sophisticated attribution models—just targeted outreach to companies with acute compliance pain.

But the execution mattered. They didn’t spray and pray. “We would just build a list and start going after that list,” Parry explains. The lists were highly targeted—specific industries, specific company sizes, specific regulatory burdens. The outreach was personalized, focused on the problem, not the product.

The deeper lesson is about problem selection. Cold outreach works when you’re solving a problem expensive enough that people will take a meeting with a stranger. If your cold email can articulate millions in potential savings or regulatory risk mitigation, you’re not spam—you’re a consultant offering help.

Lesson 4: In Enterprise Sales, Value Matters More Than Price

Tingono experimented with pricing but learned something critical: for enterprise buyers solving real problems, price objections are rarely about the number. “We haven’t really had too many deals die because of price,” Parry reveals. “Usually if the deal dies, it’s for other reasons.”

Those reasons? Wrong timing, budget already allocated elsewhere, competing priorities, or the pain isn’t acute enough to justify change. But when the pain is real and your solution addresses it, the economic buyer isn’t negotiating over whether your annual fee should be $50K or $75K—they’re calculating ROI on millions in potential compliance costs.

This reframes pricing strategy entirely. Stop obsessing over competitor pricing and conversion rate optimization at different price points. Instead, ensure you’re solving a problem that’s 10-100x more expensive than your price. When you do that, price becomes a minor consideration in a much larger value equation.

Lesson 5: Stay Lean Until Unit Economics Prove Out

Despite meaningful progress, Tingono has stayed remarkably small. “We’re six people right now,” Parry shares. In a startup ecosystem that often equates team size with success, this restraint is notable.

The discipline wasn’t about frugality for its own sake. It was strategic capital allocation. With twelve-month sales cycles and lumpy revenue, premature hiring would have burned cash before revenue could catch up. “We’ve been pretty capital efficient,” Parry notes.

The principle extends beyond headcount. It’s about matching your burn rate to your revenue velocity. If you’re in a high-velocity, short-cycle business, you might need to scale quickly to capture market share. But in a long-cycle enterprise business, patience often beats speed. Stay lean enough to extend runway, validate your model across multiple customer cohorts, and prove that long sales cycles lead to high retention and expansion.

Lesson 6: Build Your Pipeline 12 Months Before You Need the Revenue

With year-long sales cycles, Tingono had to completely rethink pipeline management. The deals closing in Q4 were conversations that started in Q3 of the previous year. This creates a unique forecasting and pipeline generation challenge.

The tactical implication is that you need to be generating 4x the pipeline you think you need, and you need to start that generation 12-15 months before you need the revenue. Miss a quarter of pipeline generation, and you’ll feel it a year later. This requires discipline that most early-stage companies struggle with—consistently filling the top of funnel even when near-term revenue looks healthy.

Lesson 7: Leverage Your Consulting Background as Customer Zero

Before Tingono existed as a software company, Parry and his co-founder were consultants helping companies with regulatory compliance. This wasn’t wasted time—it was customer research at the highest fidelity. “We realized that there’s a massive market opportunity in building software to help companies manage all these regulations,” Parry explains.

The consulting work gave them something invaluable: deep domain expertise and customer relationships before they wrote a line of code. They understood the workflow, the pain points, the buying process, and the economic value of solutions. When they transitioned to software, they weren’t guessing about product-market fit—they were codifying work they’d already done manually.

For founders in complex industries, this path offers a blueprint. Spend time in the trenches doing the work manually before you automate it. The insights you gain will be worth far more than the revenue you sacrifice by not immediately building software.