From Consulting to SaaS: How Tingono Used Services to Validate Their Product

From Consulting to SaaS: How Tingono Used Services to Validate Their Product

There’s a path to building B2B software that venture capitalists hate and pragmatic founders love: start with consulting.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Parry Bedi, CEO and Co-Founder of Tingono, revealed how months of manual compliance consulting work became the foundation for building a software platform. What looks like “wasted time” to the outside world was actually the most valuable customer research they could have done—and it didn’t cost them a dollar.

The Unglamorous Beginning

Before Tingono existed as a software company, Parry and his co-founder were consultants. They were helping companies navigate the increasingly Byzantine world of regulatory compliance. Not strategizing from 30,000 feet, but doing the actual work: tracking regulatory changes, assessing impact on business operations, documenting compliance processes, managing remediation efforts.

It was tedious. It was manual. It was repetitive. And it was the same work, over and over, across every client.

“We realized that there’s a massive market opportunity in building software to help companies manage all these regulations,” Parry explains. But here’s what most people miss: that realization didn’t come from reading market research reports or interviewing potential customers. It came from living the problem day after day, client after client.

What Consulting Teaches You That Interviews Never Will

Customer interviews are startup gospel. Talk to 50 potential customers, identify patterns, synthesize insights. But interviews have a fatal limitation: people tell you what they think you want to hear, or what they think they need, which often diverges wildly from what they actually do.

Consulting forces you to see the truth. You watch how people actually work. You see where they get stuck. You observe the workarounds they’ve built. You understand the political dynamics that make certain solutions impossible. You learn which pain points are annoying and which ones are expensive enough to justify change.

For Tingono, the consulting phase revealed several critical insights that shaped their entire product strategy. They learned that compliance work follows predictable workflows that could be systematized. They discovered that the real cost isn’t the labor of tracking regulations—it’s the risk of missing something important. They understood that compliance decisions move through organizational committees that meet quarterly, which would later inform their entire approach to sales cycles.

None of these insights would have emerged from customer interviews. They required hands-on experience with the actual work.

The Economics of Consulting as Customer Research

Here’s the beautiful part about the consulting-to-SaaS model: the customer research pays for itself. Instead of burning investor capital to understand the market, you’re getting paid to learn.

Tingono’s consulting work generated revenue that sustained the founders while they built domain expertise. They didn’t need to raise a seed round to survive while figuring out product-market fit. They had customers paying them to understand the problem space deeply.

This created a different kind of financial discipline. When you’re doing consulting, you have to solve real problems for real clients who are paying real money. You can’t hide behind MVPs or beta programs. You can’t tell a client “we’ll fix that in the next sprint.” You have to deliver results, which forces clarity about what actually matters.

The consulting revenue also gave them leverage when they eventually did start building software. They could afford to be selective about early customers. They could resist the temptation to build everything for everyone. They had the financial breathing room to focus on building the right product rather than just any product that would generate revenue.

From Manual Work to Software: The Translation Layer

The hardest part of the consulting-to-SaaS transition isn’t the technical challenge of building software. It’s the translation layer—figuring out which parts of the consulting work can be systematized and which parts require human judgment.

Tingono had to identify the repeatable patterns in their consulting work. Which regulatory tracking processes looked the same across clients? Which compliance workflows were consistent enough to codify? Which decisions could be automated and which required human oversight?

This isn’t obvious from the outside. It requires intimate familiarity with the work at a granular level. You need to have done the work enough times to distinguish between the essential complexity that requires custom handling and the accidental complexity that just needs better tools.

The consulting experience gave Tingono this discernment. They knew exactly which problems were worth automating because they’d manually solved them dozens of times. They knew which features would deliver immediate value because they’d seen clients struggle without them. They knew which parts of the workflow were mission-critical versus nice-to-have because they’d felt the pain of getting it wrong.

Building Credibility Before Building Software

One of the underappreciated advantages of the consulting-to-SaaS path is credibility. When Tingono approached potential customers with their software platform, they weren’t fresh-faced founders with mockups and promises. They were established consultants who had solved these problems manually.

This credibility accelerated their early sales. “We basically went to market without having anything built,” Parry notes. “We kind of did it the other way around where we said, hey, we’re building this. Do you want to buy it?”

This only works when prospects trust that you understand their problem deeply and can deliver a solution. That trust came from their consulting track record. Prospects didn’t need to take a leap of faith on whether Tingono understood compliance—they had proof.

The consulting work also gave them a network of potential early customers. Some of their consulting clients became their first software customers. Others provided introductions to companies facing similar challenges. The relationships built through consulting created warm channels that would have been cold outreach for a founder without that background.

When Consulting Becomes a Trap

The consulting-to-SaaS path isn’t universally applicable, and it comes with real risks. The biggest trap is that consulting revenue can become a crutch. It’s tempting to keep taking on more consulting clients because the revenue is immediate and predictable, while software development requires upfront investment with uncertain returns.

Tingono avoided this trap by making a deliberate decision to transition. They didn’t try to do both simultaneously at full scale. They committed to building the software platform, which meant turning down or winding down consulting engagements.

The second trap is building software that’s too specific to your consulting clients. If every consulting engagement is highly customized, you might struggle to identify the common patterns that make for good software. Tingono succeeded because their consulting work exposed them to consistent patterns across multiple clients in regulated industries.

The Principle: Learn by Doing

Strip away the specifics and you’re left with a broader principle about how to validate B2B software ideas: the fastest way to understand a market isn’t to study it from the outside. It’s to do the work yourself.

This doesn’t always mean formal consulting. It could mean working in the industry you want to serve. It could mean taking a job at a company that faces the problem you want to solve. It could mean doing free work for a handful of companies to understand their workflows.

The key is getting your hands dirty with the actual work before you presume to automate it. Too many B2B software companies are built by people who’ve never done the job their software is supposed to improve. They rely on interviews and user research, which gives them a map but not the territory.

Tingono’s path wasn’t the fastest to venture-scale returns. It required patience, manual work, and delayed gratification. But it gave them something more valuable than speed: certainty. When they finally built their software platform, they knew with confidence that they were solving a real problem in the right way because they’d solved it manually first.

For founders in complex problem spaces—healthcare, legal, compliance, logistics, anything with deep domain expertise requirements—the consulting-to-SaaS path offers a blueprint. Spend time in the trenches. Get paid to learn. Build credibility before you build software. And when you finally do build, you’ll create something that works because it’s based on experience, not assumptions.