5 Critical GTM Lessons from Validate’s Journey: Building Enterprise Software for Professional Services

When a software platform emerges from investigating the largest Ponzi scheme in Pacific Northwest history, you know there’s an interesting story behind it. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Validate founder Chris McCall shared how a complex fraud investigation led to building a platform that’s transforming professional services. Here are five crucial go-to-market lessons from their journey.

1. Sometimes Your MVP Needs to Be a Complete Product

Conventional startup wisdom champions rapid MVPs and iterative development. But Validate’s experience shows that some markets demand a more comprehensive approach from day one. It took two and a half years to acquire their first paying customer, and Chris explains why: “The minimum viable product looks a lot like a full-on production product… fit and finish is really important and you have to do a lot of the details.”

This wasn’t just about perfectionism. As Chris notes, “Selling to accountants and lawyers is pretty difficult. The difficulty being there’s not a lot of early adopters.” The payoff? Once the product met the market’s standards, “Word of mouth happens really fast… there wasn’t a lot of time delay between that first purchase and really scaling up to the first million dollars.”

2. Create Category Leadership Through Intelligence Gathering

Rather than competing in existing categories, Validate created a new one: verified financial intelligence (VFI). Their approach to establishing category leadership is particularly noteworthy. As Chris explains, “We chose like a sage persona… 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.”

3. Broad Marketing Can Damage Your Brand in Professional Markets

Early on, Validate learned a painful lesson about marketing to professionals. “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 was damaging: at trade shows, professionals would approach saying, “oh yeah, you guys are the guys that send out all those emails.”

This experience led to a fundamental shift in their approach, recognizing that “we’re talking to very sophisticated customers that are subject matter experts. They’re not just kind of generic consumers.”

4. Let Market Pull Guide Your Expansion

Instead of targeting specific verticals from the start, Validate took an organic approach to market expansion. As Chris explains, “We didn’t target any specific segments out of the gate. What we really tried to do is just find professionals that deal in these complex financial matters… We didn’t care like what firm you worked for, how big it was, how small it was.”

This flexibility allowed them to discover natural growth paths across accounting, government, and legal sectors. Each market required different approaches – government sales demanded “patience, and you got to make very large investments in compliance,” while legal markets presented various “on ramps” without a clear “rinse and repeat motion yet.”

5. Scale Marketing Investment Based on Sales Evidence

Validate’s approach to marketing investment was deliberately measured. They waited to make significant marketing investments until they saw clear evidence of scalability. As Chris explains, “We saw scale in government and accounting, and we started hiring sales. We saw repeatability. We saw the sales ramp their productivity, and then we realized, hey, we need to start making investment here.”

This patient approach to growth is reflected in their overall strategy: “We invest in the business to achieve between 60 and 120% year on year growth. So that’s how we manage our burn.” Success comes from 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?”

These lessons underscore a crucial truth about building enterprise software for professional services: the conventional playbook of rapid iteration, broad marketing, and aggressive growth may need significant modification. Success requires understanding the unique dynamics of professional markets, where reputation, evidence, and trust are paramount.

The ultimate validation of this approach lies in Validate’s vision for the future. As Chris puts it, their goal is to “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.”

For founders building enterprise software for professional services, these lessons offer a valuable framework for thinking about go-to-market strategy. Sometimes, the path to rapid growth paradoxically requires more patience at the start.