The Story of Tingono: Building a Compliance Platform One Customer at a Time

The Story of Tingono: Building a Compliance Platform One Customer at a Time

Most startup origin stories begin with a lightbulb moment—a founder sees a problem and races to build a solution. Tingono’s story started differently. Before there was software, before there was a company, there was just work. Hard, manual, unglamorous compliance work.

The Consulting Roots

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Parry Bedi, CEO and Co-Founder of Tingono, shared how the company emerged from the trenches of regulatory compliance consulting. He and his co-founder were helping companies navigate the increasingly complex web of regulations that govern modern business. Day after day, they were doing the same work: tracking regulatory changes, assessing impact, documenting compliance, managing remediation.

It was repetitive. It was time-consuming. And it was the same across every client.

“We realized that there’s a massive market opportunity in building software to help companies manage all these regulations,” Parry explains. The insight wasn’t theoretical—it came from lived experience. They had spent enough time in the compliance trenches to understand not just the surface-level pain, but the underlying workflows, the decision-making processes, the economic impact of getting it wrong.

But recognizing an opportunity and building a successful company are entirely different challenges.

The Unconventional Launch

Most founders follow a predictable path: build the product, then find customers. Tingono flipped this script entirely. “We basically went to market without having anything built,” Parry says. “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 desperation. It was strategy born from their consulting experience. They knew the problem was real because they’d been solving it manually for clients. They knew companies would pay because they’d already been paying for the consulting work. What they didn’t know was whether those same companies would buy software instead of services.

So they tested it. Parry would reach out to prospects, show them mockups and designs, and gauge interest. If someone wanted to buy, he’d ask them to wait three months. “If you really want this, can you wait three months and we’ll build it for you?”

The first company that said yes became more than a customer. “That first customer became our design partner,” Parry notes. They had a built-in collaborator who could validate every design decision, every workflow, every feature priority. Instead of building in isolation and hoping for product-market fit, they were building alongside the market itself.

The Reality of Enterprise Sales

Once Tingono had a product, they confronted a reality that would have killed many startups: enterprise sales cycles that stretched beyond a year. “Our sales cycles are twelve months plus,” Parry reveals.

For a venture-backed startup, this is terrifying. Twelve months means a prospect you talk to in January might not close until the following February. It means your Q4 revenue depends on pipeline you generated three quarters earlier. It means forecasting becomes an exercise in patience and probability.

But Parry understood something crucial: in regulated industries, this isn’t a bug. It’s how decisions get made. “These types of companies, they have a compliance committee. They only meet once a quarter,” he explains. “So just getting in front of the committee could be three months, and then they debate it for another quarter.”

The companies that fail in this environment are the ones fighting this reality. The companies that succeed—like Tingono—are the ones that build their entire operation around it. That means maintaining a pipeline that’s 10-12 months deep. It means staying lean enough to survive extended periods between closes. It means raising capital with realistic expectations about revenue ramps.

The Acquisition Engine

With long sales cycles established as reality, Tingono needed a reliable way to fill the top of the funnel. Their approach was decidedly unglamorous: “It was us cold emailing and cold calling,” Parry states.

No viral loops. No product-led growth. No sophisticated marketing automation. Just two founders, targeted lists, and personalized outreach to companies in regulated industries.

“We would just build a list and start going after that list,” Parry explains. The lists weren’t random—they were carefully constructed based on industry, company size, and regulatory burden. The outreach wasn’t generic spray-and-pray. It was consultative, problem-focused, and specific to each prospect’s situation.

The approach worked because Tingono was solving a problem expensive enough to warrant attention. When your cold email can articulate millions in potential regulatory risk or compliance costs, you’re not spam. You’re offering help.

Staying Lean in a Long-Cycle Business

Perhaps the most counterintuitive aspect of Tingono’s story is how small they’ve stayed. “We’re six people right now,” Parry shares. In an ecosystem where startups often race to scale headcount, Tingono has stayed deliberately lean.

This wasn’t about being scrappy for the sake of it. It was about matching team size to revenue velocity. With twelve-month sales cycles and lumpy revenue, premature hiring would have been fatal. “We’ve been pretty capital efficient,” Parry notes.

That efficiency bought them something invaluable: time. Time to validate that their sales process worked. Time to prove that long sales cycles led to high retention. Time to demonstrate that enterprise customers would expand once they saw value. Time to build a sustainable business model before racing to scale.

The Pricing Evolution

As Tingono closed more deals, they learned something unexpected about enterprise pricing. “We haven’t really had too many deals die because of price,” Parry reveals. “Usually if the deal dies, it’s for other reasons.”

This insight fundamentally changed how they thought about pricing strategy. In enterprise deals where the problem is expensive enough—regulatory fines running into millions, compliance costs consuming entire teams—price becomes a secondary consideration. The primary questions are: does this solve our problem, can we trust this vendor, and do we have budget allocated?

When deals died, it was because of timing, competing priorities, or insufficient pain—not because Tingono was too expensive.

The Future of Tingono

Looking ahead, Parry sees the regulatory landscape becoming more complex, not simpler. More regulations, more jurisdictions, more requirements for companies to track and manage. What started as a platform for specific compliance workflows could evolve into a comprehensive system for regulatory management across industries.

“We’re really excited about the future,” Parry says. That excitement is grounded in market reality. As regulations proliferate, the manual approach to compliance becomes increasingly untenable. The companies that win will be those that can systematically track, assess, and manage regulatory change at scale.

Tingono’s journey from consulting to software, from first customer to growing platform, offers a different blueprint for building in complex markets. Start with deep domain expertise. Validate before you build. Embrace the realities of your market rather than fighting them. Stay lean until the model proves out. And most importantly, solve problems expensive enough that your customers view you as essential, not optional.