How Tingono Stayed at 6 People While Building an Enterprise Platform

How Tingono Stayed at 6 People While Building an Enterprise Platform

Silicon Valley has a headcount obsession. Raise a Series A, hire 20 people. Raise a Series B, triple the team. The assumption is that growth requires bodies—more salespeople, more engineers, more everything.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Parry Bedi, CEO and Co-Founder of Tingono, revealed a different model. “We’re six people right now,” he shares. Six people building an enterprise compliance platform. Six people navigating year-long sales cycles. Six people competing in one of the most complex B2B markets imaginable.

This isn’t a story about scrappiness for its own sake. It’s a story about matching your team size to your revenue model—and understanding that in long-cycle B2B businesses, patience often beats scale.

The Math That Makes Lean Necessary

Tingono operates in a reality that would terrify most venture-backed startups. “Our sales cycles are twelve months plus,” Parry explains. Think about what that means for cash flow. A prospect you engage in January won’t close until the following February at the earliest. The revenue you’re booking in Q4 comes from pipeline you built three quarters earlier.

In this environment, aggressive hiring is existentially dangerous. Every new employee increases monthly burn. But with year-long sales cycles, that increased burn isn’t matched by proportional revenue growth for 12-15 months. Hire too fast, and you’ll run out of runway before your expanded team can generate enough pipeline to justify their cost.

The math is brutal but simple. If you have 18 months of runway and you double your team, you might have 9 months of runway—but your doubled team won’t produce doubled revenue for another year. You’ve just created a scenario where you’ll need to raise more capital before seeing returns on your hiring investment.

Tingono avoided this trap by staying deliberately small. “We’ve been pretty capital efficient,” Parry notes. That efficiency isn’t about being cheap—it’s about survival. With six people, their burn rate stays low enough that they can sustain operations through the natural peaks and valleys of long-cycle enterprise revenue.

What Six People Can Actually Accomplish

The conventional wisdom says you need dedicated teams for every function. Sales, marketing, customer success, product, engineering, operations. Follow that playbook and you’re at 15-20 people before you’ve proven anything.

Tingono took a different approach. With six people, everyone wears multiple hats. The founders are selling, building product strategy, and managing customer relationships. The engineers are shipping features and handling technical support. There’s no middle management layer, no specialized roles, no organizational complexity.

This creates operational constraints, but it also creates clarity. When you can’t afford to build every feature or pursue every opportunity, you’re forced to prioritize ruthlessly. You can’t experiment with five different GTM motions—you have to pick one and execute it well.

For Tingono, that meant focusing on direct sales through cold outreach. “It was us cold emailing and cold calling,” Parry says. No demand generation team. No marketing automation specialists. No sales development reps. Just founders building lists and reaching out to prospects who fit their ideal customer profile.

The simplicity of this approach is often overlooked. With a six-person team, there’s no coordination overhead. No weekly all-hands meetings to align departments. No internal politics about resource allocation. Everyone knows what needs to happen and just does it.

The Hidden Advantages of Staying Small

Beyond the obvious benefit of extended runway, staying lean creates strategic advantages that become apparent over time.

First, it forces product discipline. With a small engineering team, you can’t build everything every customer requests. You have to identify the core workflows that matter most and build those exceptionally well. This constraint often leads to better products than the feature bloat that comes from larger teams trying to satisfy every customer ask.

Second, it maintains founder involvement in every part of the business. When Parry closes a deal, he understands exactly what was promised and what needs to be built. There’s no game of telephone between sales and product. The feedback loop is immediate and direct.

Third, it keeps the team focused on what actually drives revenue. With six people, you can’t afford to have anyone working on projects that don’t directly contribute to customer acquisition or retention. There’s no room for internal tools that “would be nice to have” or process improvements that don’t move the business forward.

When Lean Becomes a Liability

Staying at six people isn’t a permanent strategy—it’s a phase that matches Tingono’s current stage and revenue model. There are real limitations that come with this approach.

The most obvious is scalability. With two founders doing most of the selling, there’s a natural ceiling on how many deals you can close. You’re limited by available hours and attention. At some point, adding salespeople becomes necessary to grow revenue, even if it temporarily compresses margins.

Customer support is another constraint. With a small team, you can provide high-touch service to early customers, but as the customer base grows, the support burden increases. Eventually, you need dedicated customer success people or the founders will spend all their time on support instead of selling or building.

Product development speed also suffers. With a small engineering team, you can’t parallelize work on multiple major initiatives. You’re building sequentially, which means some customer needs go unmet while you focus on others. This can create competitive vulnerability if larger, better-funded competitors can ship features faster.

The Principle: Match Team Size to Revenue Velocity

Strip away Tingono’s specifics and you’re left with a broader principle about startup hiring: team size should match your revenue velocity, not your ambitions.

In high-velocity businesses—short sales cycles, low touch, product-led growth—you might need to scale the team quickly to capture market share before competitors do. The revenue comes fast enough to support the increased burn.

In long-cycle businesses like Tingono’s, premature scaling is deadly. The revenue doesn’t arrive fast enough to justify the burn rate increase. You’re better off staying lean, proving out the unit economics across multiple customer cohorts, and only scaling once you’re confident that adding people will proportionally increase revenue.

This isn’t about being timid or lacking ambition. It’s about matching your burn rate to your revenue model. Parry isn’t staying at six people because he’s afraid to grow. He’s staying at six people because it’s the right size for a business with year-long sales cycles that’s still proving out its model.

When to Finally Scale

The question isn’t whether Tingono will eventually grow beyond six people—it’s when. The trigger for scaling should be evidence that additional people will generate proportional returns.

For a company with long sales cycles, that evidence comes from customer retention and expansion. If your early customers are renewing, expanding their usage, and becoming reference accounts, you’ve proven the model works. Now you can confidently hire more salespeople because you know the customers they bring in will stick around and grow.

It also comes from pipeline predictability. Once you understand how much pipeline you need to generate each quarter to hit revenue targets 12 months out, you can model the return on hiring additional sales capacity. If one salesperson can generate X pipeline per quarter, and you need 5X pipeline, the math tells you when to add headcount.

Until you have that evidence and predictability, staying lean preserves optionality. It keeps you alive long enough to figure out what actually works. And in long-cycle B2B businesses, survival is often the difference between eventual success and running out of runway three months before product-market fit clicks.

Tingono’s story isn’t a universal prescription to stay at six people forever. It’s a case study in matching your operating model to your revenue reality. When your sales cycles are measured in quarters and your early revenue is lumpy, patient capital and patient hiring win. The companies that race to scale before validating their model often don’t survive long enough to see whether they were right.