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From Ponzi Scheme to Platform: How Validate is Transforming Professional Services Through Strategic GTM

Sometimes the best business ideas come from the most unexpected places. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Chris McCall shared how Seattle’s largest-ever Ponzi scheme sparked the creation of Validate, a platform that’s now transforming how professional services firms handle complex financial matters.

The story begins with Chris’s co-founder, a CPA who spent 18 months investigating what would become “Seattle’s largest ever Ponzi scheme, in fact, the largest ever Ponzi scheme in the Pacific Northwest.” The fraudster had raised over $300 million, spending half on “boats and houses and yachts, rather than investing it on behalf of the investors.”

Initially, Chris was skeptical. Coming from the enterprise software world, he dismissed it as “the $2 million spreadsheet,” questioning the market potential: “How many Ponzi schemes are there? How do you sell it? How do you replicate?”

But continued conversations revealed a broader opportunity. As Chris explains, “We’re doing the same thing that you do in any sort of financial statement audit or any sort of engagement where you have a professional involved in a complex financial matter… everyone has to base their opinion on evidence.”

This realization led to their breakthrough insight: “The entire accounting profession is based on this sample risk. If we can just go make a platform to collect and aggregate all the evidence, we can drive sample risk out of the accounting profession.”

The Long Road to First Revenue

Unlike many modern startups that rush to market with a minimal viable product, Validate took a deliberately measured approach. It was two and a half years before they acquired their first paying customer. As Chris explains, “The stack that we had to build was pretty extensive, and then selling to accountants and lawyers is pretty difficult. The difficulty being there’s not a lot of early adopters.”

This patience paid off. Once they achieved product-market fit, growth accelerated rapidly: “Word of mouth happens really fast… things started taking off really quickly after that too. So there wasn’t a lot of time delay between that first purchase and really scaling up to the first million dollars.”

Creating a New Category

Rather than positioning themselves within existing categories, Validate is pioneering what Chris calls “verified financial intelligence” (VFI). The distinction is crucial: “Evidence has an extremely high bar from a data quality perspective… when we say verified financial intelligence, it’s all of the QA to know that the data that you’re looking at is supportable in a court of law.”

This category creation required a sophisticated marketing approach. “We chose like a sage persona,” Chris explains. “It’s not that we’re the sage. It’s that we talk to customers and listen to them, and that allows us to provide intel that a lot of people don’t get because we’re talking to so many different professionals across the United States.”

Learning from Early Marketing Missteps

The journey wasn’t without its stumbles. An early attempt at broad-based marketing proved problematic. “We put in place a scorch the earth type of approach where we hired an inside team. All they did was cold prospect and dial for dollars and go schedule demos,” Chris recalls. The result? “We started to get the reputation that we’d go to trade shows where you’d see these professionals and they would come up say, ‘oh yeah, you guys are the guys that send out all those emails.'”

This experience led to a fundamental shift in their go-to-market strategy. Instead of broad outreach, they focused on understanding and adding value to specific segments, recognizing that “we’re talking to very sophisticated customers that are subject matter experts. They’re not just kind of generic consumers.”

Managing Multi-Market Growth

Today, Validate operates across accounting, government, and legal sectors, each with its unique challenges. Government sales require “patience, and you got to make very large investments in compliance,” while the legal market presents diverse entry points without a clear “rinse and repeat motion yet.”

The company maintains disciplined growth targets, aiming for “60 to 120% year on year growth.” As Chris explains, achieving this requires careful attention to execution: “It’s just getting involved in the details and understanding exactly what’s happening on any given week… Do we need to do more prospecting? Do we need to be focusing the attention on closing more deals and increasing ASP?”

The ultimate vision extends beyond just building a successful company. As Chris puts it, “If we can drive out sample risk and give these professionals way more transparency by providing all the evidence in these large, complex financial matters, ultimately that drives down the cost of capital and makes the whole financial system more efficient.”

Validate’s journey offers valuable lessons for enterprise software founders: sometimes the biggest opportunities come from unexpected places, patience in product development can pay off, and sophisticated markets require equally sophisticated go-to-market strategies. Most importantly, it demonstrates how a focused solution to a specific problem can evolve into a platform with the potential to transform entire professional industries.