Cygnetise’s Two-Year Path to First Revenue: What Blockchain Taught One Founder About Patient Capital

Cygnetise’s Two-Year Path to First Revenue: What Blockchain Taught One Founder About Patient Capital

Two years is an eternity in startup land. It’s eight quarters of board meetings with no revenue to report. It’s twenty-four months of “when will you get your first customer?” It’s 730 days watching your runway shrink while building something the market isn’t ready to buy yet.

Steve Pomfret lived all 730 of those days. From founding Cygnetise in May 2016 to closing the first sale in 2018, he learned what every category creator eventually learns: revolutionary technology and fast adoption rarely coincide.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Steve Pomfret, CEO and Founder of Cygnetise, a signatory management platform that’s raised $8 million in funding, shared how he survived the gap between building something important and convincing anyone to pay for it.

The Timeline Nobody Wants to Hear

Ask Steve how long it took to reach first sale, and he doesn’t sugarcoat it. “Started the company at the end of May 2016, and it was probably two years before actually made the first sale. So, yeah, quite a long time.”

That “quite a long time” undersells the psychological weight. Most startup advice promises product-market fit within months. Find ten customers who love you. Get to $10k MRR. Prove the model. Scale from there.

Nobody’s fundraising deck includes a slide that says “Year 1: Build. Year 2: Keep building. Year 3: First revenue.”

But that timeline reveals something crucial about enterprise B2B sales, especially when you’re creating a category. The problem isn’t that customers don’t have the problem. The problem is that they’ve lived with it so long they don’t believe it can be solved differently.

Why Enterprise Moves Slow

Banks manage authorized signatories through Excel spreadsheets and quarterly PDF email distribution. They always have. When Steve approached them with a blockchain-based platform to solve this, the interest was immediate.

The deals? Not so much.

“Lots of people were interested in what were doing,” Steve explains. But interest doesn’t translate to contracts in enterprise sales. Interest means meetings. Demos. Technical reviews. Security assessments. Procurement processes. And the question that every early-stage founder dreads: “What other customers have you got?”

“And, of course, if you haven’t gotten me.”

This is the paradox that kills category creation attempts. Big companies won’t be first. But you need big companies to convince other big companies. The loop is vicious, and breaking it takes time measured in years, not months.

The Education Burden

Cygnetise wasn’t replacing another software platform. They were replacing a manual process that had existed for decades. That meant every sales conversation started with education.

What is signatory management? Why does it matter? How does blockchain enable sharing that traditional databases can’t? Why should we change a process that, while inefficient, technically works?

“The education is like paramount, it’s super important,” Steve notes about category creation. But education extends sales cycles exponentially. You’re not just selling features against competitors. You’re selling the idea that the problem deserves a purpose-built solution.

This educational burden meant Cygnetise needed patient capital. Investors who understood that market creation precedes revenue. That product-market fit in enterprise B2B takes years to validate. That the first customers matter more for credibility than cash.

What Keeps Investors Believing

Most founders facing two years without revenue would pivot or shut down. Steve kept building because his investors kept believing. The key? Honesty.

“Just being really honest, when you’re pitching and you’re meeting potential investors, seemingly the ones that we have, they like you for who you are and how you offer it, which makes it really easy for you to work with them and then, and get follow on funding as well.”

This alignment matters most when the plan hits reality. Projections always show faster growth than reality delivers. The difference between surviving and dying often comes down to whether your investors expected the journey you’re actually on.

“The most important thing is to get investors that are going to help and support you. So therefore, you really need to be able to get on with them. You need to be aligned. And in order to be aligned, the best thing is just to be completely straight up, honest and open.”

Steve’s board became his lifeline during the darkest moments. “We’re really lucky. We’ve got an amazing board of directors who are some of the earlier investors who have all been there and done it. They’re all, like, in financial technology, there’s three of them who have very experienced and have been very supportive.”

The Dark Valley

Even with supportive investors, the path included moments where survival felt uncertain. “When you’ve only got, like, a couple of months of Runway left, and then you’re just trying to, like, fundraise, and then you have these unpredicted without going into detail, one particular instance where there was, you know, you can’t call it bit of bad luck, bit of a bad decision, and it feels like you’re just at the bottom of a hole that you can’t get out of.”

This is the reality that startup Twitter doesn’t show. The nights when runway is measured in weeks. When the next tranche of funding hinges on milestones you haven’t hit. When bad luck compounds bad decisions.

“Without them, I mean, God knows what would have happened,” Steve says of his board during those moments.

Why Two Years Wasn’t Wasted

The temptation when facing extended sales cycles is to view pre-revenue time as waste. Steve didn’t. Those two years accomplished critical objectives:

Product development that enterprise customers would actually trust. Financial institutions don’t buy demos. They buy production-ready platforms with security, reliability, and proper technical architecture.

Market understanding that informed everything from positioning to pricing. You can’t skip the learning that comes from hundreds of prospect conversations, even when they don’t convert.

Relationship building with eventual customers. Enterprise sales cycles are long whether you’re a startup or established vendor. Starting those conversations in year one often means closing them in year three.

Investor relationships that could weather the extended timeline. The board that saved Cygnetise during dark moments was built during those first two years.

The Principle: Match Capital Strategy to Sales Reality

The underlying lesson isn’t that every B2B company needs two years to first revenue. The lesson is that your capital strategy must match your sales cycle reality.

Enterprise sales cycles are long. Category creation extends them further. If you’re doing both—selling enterprise and creating a category—your runway needs to account for timelines measured in years.

This means:

Raising more money upfront than feels comfortable. If first revenue takes two years, you need three years of runway to have margin for error.

Finding investors who’ve lived extended enterprise sales cycles. Pattern matching from consumer or SMB investors will create misalignment.

Being brutally honest about timeline expectations. Overpromising and underdelivering destroys trust when you need it most.

Building board relationships before you need them. The support matters most when things go wrong, not when they go right.

When This Timeline Makes Sense

Two years to first revenue isn’t universal. It makes sense when:

You’re creating a category, not entering one. Existing categories have reference points. Categories you’re creating don’t.

You’re selling to enterprise, not SMB. Large organizations move slowly by design. Accept it.

You’re replacing manual processes, not other software. Switching costs from manual to software are psychological, not just financial.

Your solution requires meaningful technical trust. Blockchain, security, financial operations—these demand proof points that take time to build.

It doesn’t make sense when:

You can start with SMB and move upmarket. If smaller customers will buy faster, optimize for speed over ultimate market size.

You’re entering existing categories with established buying patterns. Reference points accelerate everything.

Your runway won’t support the timeline. Better to pivot to faster revenue than run out of money proving a longer thesis.

What Steve Would Tell His Earlier Self

Looking back on those two years, Steve’s perspective is pragmatic rather than regretful. The timeline was necessary given the market, the solution, and the sales cycle reality.

The key was having the right capital partners who understood the journey. “I think that’s the most important thing.”

For founders facing similar timelines, the message isn’t that two years to revenue is good. It’s that two years to revenue is survivable with honest communication, patient capital, and board members who’ve been there before.

Category creation rewards discipline over speed. Market creation precedes market capture. Revolutionary technology enables new solutions, but adoption follows institution timelines, not startup timelines.

Sometimes the path to $8 million in funding and enterprise customers runs through 730 days of building credibility one conversation at a time.