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The Two-Year Journey to First Sale: How Cygnetise Built a Category from Scratch

Most founders dream of quick validation. Steve Pomfret got the opposite. Two full years passed between founding Cygnetise in May 2016 and closing the first sale. For a product solving a real problem that every financial institution faces, that timeline seems brutal. But it reveals something critical about building in a category that doesn’t exist yet.

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 built a business around a problem that companies knew they had but didn’t know could be solved differently.

The Problem Nobody Knew Could Be Fixed

Banks and financial institutions manage authorized signatories using Excel and Word documents. They always have. When Deutsche Bank needed to update their signatory list in one UK department, they emailed PDFs to a thousand banking counterparts. They did this quarterly because doing it daily would be impossible.

“They would email like in one department that I worked in within the UK, they would have to email a thousand of the banking counterparts whenever they updated it,” Steve explains. “And you can’t do that on a daily basis by emailing PDF’s.”

The inefficiency was obvious. But here’s the catch: financial institutions had tried building internal databases to manage this information. The problem wasn’t storage. It was sharing. “Banks and large corporates have tried to build their own databases to do that, and then they offer their counterparts to actually have access to view their internal databases,” Steve notes. “Now financial institutions do not want to go through firewalls and have access to other people’s counterparts internal databases or files.”

This is where category creation gets interesting. The market had a painful problem. They’d even attempted solutions. But those solutions created new problems, so everyone defaulted back to the manual process. Building Cygnetise wasn’t about convincing people they had a problem. It was about proving there was a better way to solve it.

Starting in the Channel Islands

The two-year gap between founding and first sale taught Steve something crucial about enterprise sales: big companies won’t take the risk first. “The first question we always got asked is, like, what other customers have you got? And, of course, if you haven’t gotten me.”

So Cygnetise went small and autonomous. They targeted the Channel Islands, where offshore trust companies and recognizable brand names operated small, independent offices. These offices could make their own decisions without navigating headquarters bureaucracy in London, New York, or Frankfurt.

“They’re a lot more open to innovative solutions and also, like, a smaller ticket size, they really didn’t have too much to lose,” Steve says. “They could run their existing process in parallel, so they weren’t taking on too much of a risk.”

The early deals were heavily discounted. The ticket sizes were small. But those Channel Islands customers are still with Cygnetise today, and they provided the social proof needed to move upmarket.

The Société Générale Inflection Point

Everything changed when Cygnetise landed their first bank. Not just any bank—Société Générale. Going through their due diligence process and earning their trust created the pivotal moment Steve had been building toward. “I guess. Man, hang on a second, we’re really onto something here.”

That validation opened doors. The customer base expanded from offshore trust companies to hedge funds in the US and UK, then Switzerland became a hotspot. Now Cygnetise serves oil companies, tech companies, and public companies across multiple geographies.

The Marketing Evolution That Never Stops

Ask Steve about his marketing philosophy, and you get refreshing honesty: “Oh God, we change this all the time.”

This isn’t indecision. It’s the reality of category creation. “I think it’s probably typical of creating a category. The education is like paramount, it’s super important. So we’ve tried different things and it hasn’t worked or we thought it was working, then you switch and try other things.”

The challenge creates a chicken-and-egg problem. You can’t know the best messaging until you have customers. But you need messaging to get customers. “It’s like if you’re starting from scratch, it’s like you don’t necessarily know what the best messaging or the best marketing approach is. And only then when you start getting some customers and you get their feedback and then it just goes into that big circle which is still happening now.”

Even after raising $8 million and landing enterprise customers, Cygnetise is still iterating on messaging. The difference now is they’re learning from real customer feedback at scale.

The Outbound Machine

The go-to-market breakthrough came from building what Steve calls “a pipeline generation machine.” It’s direct outbound sales, but systematic. “It’s like a numbers game. So we have a strict process in place, and we hit certain markets. We get Personas, and we do as much of it as we can with the amount of employees that we’ve got.”

The model came from Tableau, where Cygnetise has an advisor who helped them implement the strategy. The logic is simple: cover as broad a market as possible, and the sales output becomes a function of team size.

This works because the market is genuinely horizontal. The messaging changes based on geography and company size, but treasury departments all face the same problem whether they’re at an oil company in the Middle East or a small hedge fund in the US. “In fact, it doesn’t matter what geography it’s in, but it does differ and we do have to. It’s like the typical marketing Personas. Who are you selling to? Depending on the size of the company, depending on the area, etcetera.”

The Technology They Don’t Care About

Cygnetise is built on blockchain technology. In 2016, blockchain was going to revolutionize everything. Today? “I’ll be really honest, the customers actually don’t care.”

This might seem counterintuitive, but it’s instructive. Customers care about immutability. They care about owning their own data and sharing it peer-to-peer instead of through centralized databases. They care about the benefits, not the underlying technology.

“When we go through technical due diligence as part of the sales cycle or the onboarding process, that the tech people are quite interested in the technology, but the actual users, they’re interested in the application and the benefits that it provides,” Steve explains.

The lesson: leading with technology is often the wrong move. Lead with the problem you solve.

The Channel Partnership Inflection

Cygnetise has gotten 80% of its revenue from direct B2B outbound sales. That’s about to change. Banks, big four accounting firms, and large tech companies have shown significant interest in channel partnerships. “They’ve been interested in some time, for some time, but now we’re actually ready for it and we’re beginning to have formal discussions.”

Steve sees this as the path to hypergrowth. Channel partners can hit the market significantly faster and at scale. “Within the next few years, I’m pretty excited. As soon as we start having these channel partnerships and large enterprise deals, then this should be where hopefully we can take the market and get to that winner take all position.”

The Long Game

Building a category requires patience most founders don’t have. Two years to first sale. Years of messaging iteration. Starting small in the Channel Islands before moving to enterprise. It’s the opposite of the “move fast and break things” mythology.

But there’s method in the patience. Each step validated the next. Channel Islands customers proved the concept. Société Générale proved enterprise viability. Geographic expansion proved horizontal applicability. Now channel partnerships will prove scale.

The market was always there. Every bank, every hedge fund, every corporation manages authorized signatories. They always have, and they always will. Cygnetise just had to prove there was a better way than Excel and quarterly PDF emails to a thousand counterparts.

Sometimes the hardest part of building a category isn’t solving the problem. It’s convincing people the problem can be solved differently.