CHAMPtitles’ Credibility Playbook: Why Domain Expertise Beats Product Features in Vertical SaaS

CHAMPtitles’ Credibility Playbook: Why Domain Expertise Beats Product Features in Vertical SaaS

The demo was flawless. The ROI calculator showed impressive returns. The feature list covered every conceivable need. But the title agent sitting across the table remained skeptical. Another tech company promising to revolutionize an industry they didn’t truly understand.

This scene plays out constantly in vertical SaaS. Founders with impressive technical credentials pitch solutions to industries they’ve studied from the outside. They’ve done the customer interviews, mapped the workflows, identified the pain points. But something crucial is missing: credibility.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Shane McRann Bigelow, CEO of CHAMPtitles, explained how his company bypassed this credibility gap entirely—not by building better pitch decks, but by becoming title operators first and software builders second.

The Credibility Problem in Vertical SaaS

Conservative industries develop antibodies against outsiders promising transformation. Title agents, in particular, had watched wave after wave of proptech companies arrive with solutions that either didn’t work in production or revealed fundamental misunderstandings about how title work actually happens.

The issue isn’t that title professionals resist technology. It’s that they’ve learned to be skeptical of technology built by people who don’t understand the liability, regulatory complexity, and workflow nuances that define their work. A polished demo doesn’t answer the fundamental question: do these people actually know what they’re talking about?

This skepticism creates a chicken-and-egg problem for vertical SaaS founders. You need customers to validate your product, but you need credibility to win customers. Industry expertise would solve this, but how do you gain expertise without first working in the industry?

Most founders try to bridge this gap through advisory boards, industry partnerships, or extensive customer development. These approaches help, but they’re still fundamentally outsiders trying to prove they understand an insider’s world.

The Operations-First Credibility Play

Shane took a different path. Rather than trying to convince title agents he understood their work, he simply became a title agent. “We bought a title agency in Pennsylvania and we ran it,” Shane explains. “We did all the title work in house, did all the closings in house.”

This wasn’t a temporary immersion or a consulting engagement. CHAMPtitles operated as a real title agency for years before building software. They carried actual liability on real transactions. They dealt with genuine regulatory requirements. They experienced the same frustrations as every other title agency.

When CHAMPtitles eventually approached potential customers, the conversation started from a completely different place. They weren’t tech founders with a theory about title work. They were title operators who happened to build software. The credibility gap didn’t exist because there was no gap to bridge.

How Domain Expertise Changes Every Conversation

The impact of this credibility showed up immediately in sales conversations. When discussing workflows, CHAMPtitles didn’t need prospects to explain why certain steps mattered—they already knew because they did the same work. When addressing concerns about automation, they could speak from experience about maintaining quality and managing liability.

“Every single closing that comes through the door requires a search of the public records,” Shane explains. “You have to go find them, pull them back, review them, type findings, type exceptions into a commitment document.” This isn’t information from an interview. It’s the description of work CHAMPtitles does themselves.

The difference matters enormously. Title agents can tell when someone truly understands their work versus when someone has studied their work. The former speaks in the language of practitioners. The latter speaks in the language of observers. No amount of customer development fully closes this gap.

Domain expertise also informed which features CHAMPtitles built and, more importantly, which they didn’t. “That type of work is just manual labor,” Shane says about document retrieval and data entry. “It doesn’t require an immense amount of subject matter expertise.” This distinction between mechanical work and expertise-driven work came from doing the work, not from observing it.

The Trust Factor in Conservative Industries

Title insurance involves significant liability. A missed lien can result in substantial financial consequences. When evaluating automation software, title agents aren’t just asking “does this work?”—they’re asking “will this expose me to unacceptable risk?”

Software companies without operational experience struggle to address this concern credibly. They can offer guarantees, point to security certifications, or cite satisfied customers. But they’re asking title agents to trust people who don’t carry the same liability themselves.

CHAMPtitles operates under the same liability as their customers. They use their own software in their own title agency. If the automation creates problems, they experience those problems firsthand. This alignment of incentives builds trust in ways no guarantee or certification can replicate.

The message became implicit but powerful: we’re not asking you to trust something we haven’t tested on ourselves. We’re sharing tools we built for our own use. The risk calculation changes entirely when the vendor carries the same risks you do.

Beyond Sales: Credibility in Product Development

Domain expertise didn’t just help CHAMPtitles win customers—it fundamentally shaped what they built. Founders without operational experience often optimize for the wrong things. They build features that sound important but don’t actually matter. They miss subtleties that seem minor but are actually crucial.

Shane’s recognition that “in title, title eats software companies” came from lived experience. This insight—that the industry’s complexity would destroy companies that didn’t deeply understand it—shaped every product decision. They didn’t try to automate everything. They didn’t claim their software could replace human judgment. They focused narrowly on automating mechanical tasks while leaving expertise-driven work to humans.

These product decisions only make sense if you understand title work intimately. An outsider might see the conservative approach as limiting. Someone who carries title liability understands it as prudent.

The Investment Required

Building credibility through operations isn’t cheap. Buying and running a title agency requires significant capital that could have gone toward product development. It takes time away from coding. It creates operational complexity that pure software companies avoid.

The opportunity cost is real. CHAMPtitles could have built more features faster if Shane and his team weren’t also processing title searches and conducting closings. They could have reached more markets if they’d focused solely on software development.

But in conservative industries where credibility determines whether customers will even take a meeting, operational expertise might be the highest ROI investment available. CHAMPtitles traded faster product development for something more valuable: the ability to have conversations as peers rather than as vendors.

When Credibility Matters Most

Not every vertical SaaS company needs to operate in their target industry. But certain characteristics suggest when domain expertise becomes essential rather than just helpful.

If your target industry has significant liability concerns, operational experience proves you understand risk in ways observation cannot. If the industry has seen multiple software companies fail, credibility becomes the primary barrier to entry. If workflows contain subtleties that practitioners struggle to articulate, becoming a practitioner yourself might be the only way to truly understand them.

Conservative industries where trust matters more than features particularly benefit from this approach. Title agents weren’t looking for the most sophisticated software—they were looking for solutions they could trust. CHAMPtitles’ operational experience made them trustworthy in ways feature lists never could.

The Compounding Advantage

Credibility built through domain expertise compounds over time. Each customer conversation reinforces it. Each product decision reflects it. Each market expansion benefits from it. Competitors can eventually copy features, but they can’t easily replicate years of operational experience.

This creates a sustainable advantage in ways product features alone cannot. Features can be reproduced. Technical approaches can be mimicked. But the deep understanding that comes from years of operational experience—and the credibility that understanding creates—is fundamentally harder to replicate.

For founders entering conservative, complex industries, Shane’s approach suggests a counterintuitive path: sometimes the fastest way to build a successful software company is to start by not building software at all.