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Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
Actionable
Takeaways
Identify and Solve Real-World Problems:
Look for pain points and inefficiencies in your own experiences and validate them with other companies in your target market. Use these insights to guide your product development and ensure you're addressing genuine needs.
Collaborate with Design Partners:
Engage with early adopters who are willing to share data, provide feedback, and help shape your product. This collaborative approach ensures you're building a solution that delivers tangible value and meets the demands of your target customers.
Focus on Talent Over Skills:
When building your team, prioritize hiring talented individuals with a strong work ethic and adaptability, rather than focusing solely on specific skills. Skills can become obsolete quickly, but talent will always be in high demand.
Demonstrate Value Through Product and Storytelling:
In a crowded market, differentiate yourself by showcasing the unique value your product delivers and crafting a compelling narrative around your solution. Let the proof be in the pudding, and let your team's expertise and passion shine through.
Evolve Your Vision as the Market Matures:
As your target market and the broader industry landscape evolve, be prepared to adapt your vision and product roadmap accordingly. Anticipate the next stage of maturity and position your company to lead the way in delivering even greater value to customers.
Conversation
Highlights
Building Tingono: How to Sell Software That Doesn’t Exist Yet
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Parry Bedi, CEO and Co-Founder of Tingono, shared how he built a compliance automation platform by doing something most founders are told never to do: selling a product before it existed.
The story starts in an unexpected place—consulting. Parry and his co-founder were running a consulting business helping companies with regulatory compliance when they noticed something critical. “We realized that there’s a massive market opportunity in building software to help companies manage all these regulations,” Parry explains. But instead of spending months building in isolation, they took a different approach.
Selling Vapor: The Pre-Product GTM Strategy
Tingono’s earliest go-to-market motion was pure hustle. Before writing a single line of production code, Parry started selling. “We basically went to market without having anything built,” he says. “We kind of did it the other way around where we said, hey, we’re building this. Do you want to buy it?”
This wasn’t about vaporware or misleading customers. It was strategic validation. Parry would show prospects mockups and designs, gauge their interest, and if they wanted to buy, he’d ask them to wait three months. “If you really want this, can you wait three months and we’ll build it for you?” The approach worked. They closed their first customer before the platform existed.
The beauty of this strategy was twofold. First, it validated real demand—people willing to pay meant the problem was painful enough. Second, it gave them a built-in design partner. “That first customer became our design partner,” Parry notes. They could build exactly what the market needed rather than what they thought it needed.
The Long Game: Navigating 12-Month Enterprise Sales Cycles
Once Tingono had a product, they faced a new challenge: enterprise sales cycles that stretched on forever. “Our sales cycles are twelve months plus,” Parry reveals. For a startup burning cash, this reality could be fatal.
Most founders would panic at a twelve-month sales cycle. Parry took a different view. He understood that in heavily regulated industries, compliance decisions don’t happen quickly. “These types of companies, they have a compliance committee. They only meet once a quarter,” he explains. “So just getting in front of the committee could be three months, and then they debate it for another quarter.”
The key was building a pipeline big enough to sustain the business through these extended cycles. Tingono needed to be in conversations with dozens of prospects simultaneously, knowing that only a fraction would close in any given quarter. This isn’t the fast-growth SaaS playbook, but for their market, it was the only realistic approach.
Finding Your First 100 Customers: The Playbook That Actually Worked
Parry’s strategy for acquiring Tingono’s first customers contradicts much of the conventional wisdom around early-stage GTM. There was no viral loop, no product-led growth, no massive content engine. Instead, it was relentlessly direct.
“It was us cold emailing and cold calling,” Parry says simply. But the execution was more sophisticated than it sounds. They built highly targeted lists—”we would just build a list and start going after that list”—and personalized their outreach. The focus was on companies in specific regulated industries where compliance pain was acute.
The cold approach worked because Tingono had a clear point of view on a painful problem. They weren’t selling generic software. They were offering a specific solution to a specific regulatory burden that cost companies real money and created real risk. When you can articulate that clearly, cold outreach becomes consultation, not spam.
Pricing Strategy: What Actually Matters in Enterprise Deals
Tingono’s pricing evolution reveals an important lesson about enterprise sales. Early on, they experimented with different models and price points. What they learned was counterintuitive: for enterprise buyers, pricing matters less than you think.
“We haven’t really had too many deals die because of price,” Parry explains. “Usually if the deal dies, it’s for other reasons.” Those reasons? Timing, budget cycles, competing priorities, or simply that the pain isn’t acute enough yet.
This doesn’t mean pricing is arbitrary. It means that once you’re in the enterprise consideration set, the economic buyer is focused on value, not price. If your software saves them millions in compliance costs or prevents a regulatory fine, they’re not going to nickel and dime you over your annual fee.
The implication for founders: spend less time obsessing over whether your price should be $50K or $75K, and more time ensuring you’re solving a problem expensive enough that your price becomes a rounding error.
The Team Size Question: When to Actually Hire
One of the most interesting aspects of Tingono’s journey is how lean they’ve stayed relative to their progress. “We’re six people right now,” Parry shares. In a world where startups often equate team size with legitimacy, Tingono has taken the opposite approach.
This wasn’t about being scrappy for scrappy’s sake. It was strategic. With long sales cycles and lumpy revenue, hiring too fast would have burned through runway before revenue caught up. “We’ve been pretty capital efficient,” Parry notes. That efficiency bought them time to figure out the GTM motion that worked.
The lesson isn’t that every company should stay at six people. It’s that team size should match your revenue motion. If you’re in a fast-growth, high-velocity sales environment, you might need to scale quickly. But if you’re in a long-cycle enterprise business, patient capital and patient hiring often win.
What’s Next: The Path to Category Leadership
Looking forward, Parry sees Tingono’s opportunity expanding beyond their initial wedge. As regulations proliferate and compliance becomes more complex, the platform they’re building becomes more valuable. “We’re really excited about the future,” he says.
The company’s focus now is on proving out the model at scale—demonstrating that the long sales cycles lead to high retention and expansion, that the value proposition holds across different regulated verticals, and that they can systematically build pipeline to feed the machine.
For founders building in complex, regulated markets, Tingono’s path offers a different blueprint. Sell before you build. Embrace long sales cycles as a moat, not a burden. Stay lean until the unit economics prove out. And most importantly, solve a problem expensive enough that your price becomes irrelevant.
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