CHAMPtitles’ Multi-State Playbook: Building for Regulatory Diversity From Day One

CHAMPtitles’ Multi-State Playbook: Building for Regulatory Diversity From Day One

Most vertical SaaS companies follow a predictable playbook: dominate one geography, prove the model works, then expand methodically to adjacent markets. It’s logical, capital-efficient, and allows you to perfect your product in one regulatory environment before tackling another.

Shane Bigelow ignored this wisdom entirely.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Shane McRann Bigelow, CEO of CHAMPtitles, explained why his company deliberately launched in three states with dramatically different regulatory frameworks—and why that decision created a competitive advantage no single-state competitor could replicate.

The Conventional Wisdom

The standard advice for B2B companies entering regulated industries is straightforward: pick one market, become the category leader there, then expand from a position of strength. Master California’s regulations before tackling Texas. Own New York before attempting Florida. Build depth before breadth.

This approach minimizes complexity. Your product team focuses on one regulatory environment. Your sales team becomes expert in one market’s nuances. Your customer success organization develops deep knowledge of one set of compliance requirements. You avoid spreading resources thin across multiple jurisdictions with different rules.

For title insurance, this strategy seems especially sensible. Every state has its own regulations governing closings, attorney involvement, and title insurance requirements. Building software that works in one state is challenging enough. Building for multiple states simultaneously seems like asking for trouble.

The Deliberate Choice

CHAMPtitles took a different path. After establishing operations in Pennsylvania, they didn’t expand to neighboring states with similar regulations. Instead, they deliberately chose Florida and Texas—two states that couldn’t be more different from Pennsylvania or from each other.

“We picked states that were representative of kind of the diversity of the market and also were large markets,” Shane explains. The decision was strategic, not opportunistic. They weren’t chasing easy wins in similar jurisdictions. They were deliberately seeking out regulatory diversity.

The differences between these states are substantial. “Florida, there’s no attorney involvement in a closing. In Pennsylvania, attorneys are mandated to be involved. Texas, optional.” These aren’t minor variations—they represent fundamentally different approaches to the same transaction.

Why Regulatory Diversity Matters

On the surface, this strategy looks harder. And it is. Building software that works across three different regulatory frameworks requires more engineering effort, more compliance expertise, and more operational complexity than perfecting a solution for one state.

But that difficulty is precisely the point. Every challenge CHAMPtitles overcame to make their platform work across these diverse environments made the product more robust, more flexible, and more defensible.

When you build for Florida’s attorney-free closings and Pennsylvania’s mandatory attorney involvement, you create a platform that can handle both models. When you accommodate Texas’s optional approach, you add even more flexibility. The result is software that’s fundamentally more adaptable than solutions built for a single regulatory framework.

This adaptability compounds as you expand further. Each new state becomes easier to enter because your platform already handles diverse regulatory approaches. A competitor that built for Pennsylvania alone has to rebuild significant portions of their product to work in Florida. CHAMPtitles’ platform was built for that diversity from the start.

The Competitive Moat

The multi-state strategy creates a defensive moat that’s difficult to overcome. Single-state competitors can’t easily replicate CHAMPtitles’ breadth because they’d need to rebuild their product to handle regulatory diversity it wasn’t designed for. They optimized for depth in one market. CHAMPtitles optimized for flexibility across many.

This advantage becomes more pronounced over time. Each state CHAMPtitles enters provides learnings that improve the platform for all markets. A feature built to solve a Florida-specific problem might reveal a better way to handle similar situations in Pennsylvania. Edge cases in Texas inform improvements that benefit the entire product.

The result is a virtuous cycle. More states mean more diverse requirements, which forces the platform to become more robust, which makes additional expansion easier, which brings more learnings, which strengthens the platform further. Single-state competitors can’t trigger this flywheel without first rebuilding their products for multi-state operation.

The Capital Trade-off

This strategy isn’t free. Building for regulatory diversity requires more upfront investment than perfecting one market. CHAMPtitles needed deeper technical teams, broader compliance expertise, and more complex operations than a single-state focus would have required.

The opportunity cost is real. Resources spent managing three different regulatory environments could have gone into building more features, acquiring more customers in one market, or achieving profitability faster in a single state.

Shane and his team accepted these trade-offs because they were playing a different game. They weren’t optimizing for fastest path to profitability in one state. They were building a platform that could eventually operate nationwide—and they believed the only way to do that successfully was to bake multi-state capability into the foundation rather than retrofitting it later.

When This Strategy Works

Multi-state expansion from day one isn’t right for every regulated vertical. But certain characteristics suggest when it might be the better path.

If regulatory differences between states are fundamental rather than superficial, building for diversity early prevents technical debt later. Minor variations in compliance requirements can be added incrementally. Fundamental differences in how transactions work require architectural decisions from the start.

If your competitive advantage depends on network effects or data that scales across markets, multi-state presence accelerates those effects. CHAMPtitles benefits from learnings that transfer across states, making each expansion more valuable than isolated state operations would be.

If credibility in your market comes from demonstrating broad capability rather than deep local expertise, multi-state operation signals seriousness in ways single-state focus cannot. For customers evaluating long-term partnerships, knowing a vendor already handles diverse regulatory environments reduces perceived risk.

The Implementation Reality

Executing a multi-state strategy while maintaining quality requires operational discipline. CHAMPtitles couldn’t just launch in three states simultaneously and hope for the best. They had to sequence carefully, ensuring they understood each market deeply before expanding to the next.

Starting with Pennsylvania gave them operational foundation. The team learned the title business by actually doing it in one market first. Only after proving the model worked did they expand to Florida, then Texas. They built for diversity, but they didn’t rush it.

This sequencing matters. Building a platform that can handle multiple regulatory frameworks is different from actually operating in multiple states simultaneously without proper preparation. The former is strategic. The latter is chaos.

The Long-Term Bet

CHAMPtitles’ multi-state strategy is fundamentally a bet about the future shape of their market. They believe title automation will eventually be a national business, not a collection of local ones. They believe customers will prefer platforms that work consistently across states over point solutions that excel in one market.

Most importantly, they believe the technical and operational complexity of multi-state operation creates a moat that justifies the additional investment required to build it. They’d rather invest more upfront to build something defensible than move faster with something easily replicable.

Time will tell if this bet pays off. But one thing is clear: CHAMPtitles built a product that single-state competitors can’t easily match without fundamental rebuilds. In regulated markets where defensive moats are hard to construct, that’s a significant advantage.