Tingono’s Pre-Product Sales Strategy: How to Close Customers Before Writing Code

Tingono’s Pre-Product Sales Strategy: How to Close Customers Before Writing Code

Most founders disappear for six months to build their product. They write code, design interfaces, architect databases—all before a single customer conversation. Then they launch, crickets echo, and they realize they built something nobody wants.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Parry Bedi, CEO and Co-Founder of Tingono, shared how he did the opposite. He went to market before he had a product. And it worked.

The Backwards Approach That Actually Makes Sense

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

This sounds reckless. It sounds like the kind of move that gets founders roasted on Twitter. But there’s a crucial detail that makes this strategy not just viable, but actually smarter than the traditional approach: Parry and his co-founder had been doing compliance consulting before starting Tingono. They weren’t guessing about the problem. They had lived it.

They’d spent months helping companies navigate regulatory requirements manually. They understood the workflows, the pain points, the economic cost of getting compliance wrong. They knew companies would pay for a solution because they’d already been paying for the consulting work. What they didn’t know was whether those companies would buy software instead of services.

So they tested it in the most direct way possible: they tried to sell it.

The Mechanics of Selling Vapor

Here’s how the pre-product sales process actually worked for Tingono. Parry would reach out to companies in regulated industries—the same types of companies they’d worked with as consultants. He’d explain the problem they were solving, show mockups and design concepts of what the platform would look like, and gauge interest.

If a prospect was interested, really interested, Parry made them an offer: “If you really want this, can you wait three months and we’ll build it for you?”

This single question did something remarkable. It separated polite interest from genuine pain. Prospects who were just being nice would demur. Prospects with acute compliance problems—companies losing sleep over regulatory risk—would say yes.

The first company that said yes became more than Tingono’s first customer. “That first customer became our design partner,” Parry notes. They had a collaborator who could validate every design decision, every workflow, every feature priority. Instead of building in isolation and hoping for product-market fit, they were building alongside someone who would actually use the software.

Why This Works (When It Works)

Pre-product sales isn’t a universal strategy. It works under specific conditions that Tingono happened to meet perfectly.

First, you need deep domain expertise. Parry wasn’t a first-time founder stumbling into compliance software. He’d been in the trenches doing the work manually. He could speak the language, understand the workflows, and credibly articulate the solution. When he showed mockups, prospects didn’t question whether he understood their problem—he clearly did.

Second, you need to be solving an expensive problem. If your software saves a company $50,000 per year, they might wait three months for you to build it. If it saves them $5,000, they’ll just keep using their current solution. Tingono was addressing regulatory risk and compliance costs that could run into millions. A three-month wait was nothing compared to the potential value.

Third, you need to be willing to build custom. When you sell pre-product, you’re implicitly committing to build what that first customer needs. You can’t pivot away from their requirements without losing the deal. This constrains your roadmap, but it also ensures you’re building something with guaranteed product-market fit.

What Pre-Product Sales Actually Validates

The conventional wisdom around customer validation is to talk to 50 people before building. Get feedback, identify patterns, synthesize insights. This approach has merit, but it has a fatal flaw: talk is cheap.

When you ask someone if they’d pay for a solution, they’ll often say yes because it costs them nothing to be agreeable. When you ask someone to actually pay—to commit budget, to wait for you to build, to take a chance on an unproven vendor—you get real signal.

Tingono’s pre-product sales process validated three critical things simultaneously. It validated that the problem was painful enough for companies to pay real money. It validated that prospects believed Parry and his team could actually build the solution. And it validated that the three-month timeline was acceptable—that prospects weren’t looking for an immediate fix.

These validations are far more valuable than 50 customer interviews because they represent actual buying behavior, not hypothetical interest.

The Design Partner Advantage

Once Tingono closed their first customer, they gained something that founders who build in isolation never get: a design partner with skin in the game.

This customer had paid money. They had a problem they needed solved. They had every incentive to provide honest, detailed feedback because the software they helped design would be the software they’d use.

This changes the entire dynamic of product development. Instead of guessing about workflows, Tingono could watch their design partner work. Instead of hypothesizing about edge cases, they could see them in real usage. Instead of debating feature priorities, they could ask their customer directly what they needed most.

The result was a product that had product-market fit baked in from day one because the market had literally helped build it.

The Risks Nobody Talks About

Pre-product sales isn’t without risks. The most obvious one is that you might fail to deliver. You take someone’s money, promise delivery in three months, and then discover the technical challenges are harder than anticipated. This can destroy your reputation before you even launch.

Tingono mitigated this risk through their consulting background. They understood the technical requirements because they’d been implementing solutions manually. They weren’t guessing about feasibility—they knew what needed to be built.

The second risk is that your first customer’s needs might not represent the broader market. If you build exactly what they want, you might end up with software that’s too specific, too customized, or too niche to sell to others.

Tingono avoided this trap because their consulting work had exposed them to multiple companies with similar problems. They knew their first customer’s needs were representative. They weren’t building one-off consulting software—they were building a platform for a common set of requirements.

The Principle Behind The Tactic

Strip away the specifics of Tingono’s story and you’re left with a principle: the fastest way to validate a B2B software idea isn’t to build it and hope for customers. It’s to sell the promise of it and let customers vote with their wallets.

This inverts the traditional risk profile. Instead of spending six months and $500K building something nobody wants, you spend six weeks selling and let the market tell you whether to proceed. If you can’t sell mockups to companies with acute pain, you probably can’t sell finished software either.

The companies that can execute this strategy successfully share common traits. They have domain expertise that makes their vision credible. They’re solving expensive problems where the value proposition is clear. They’re willing to commit to building what early customers need. And they have the technical chops to actually deliver on the timeline they promise.

For founders who meet these criteria, pre-product sales isn’t just viable—it’s often the smartest path to product-market fit. You de-risk your investment, you gain design partners invested in your success, and you start generating revenue before you write production code.

Parry’s approach won’t work for every founder or every market. But for those building in complex, expensive problem spaces where they have deep expertise, selling before building might be the most efficient path from zero to one.