7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building a $8M Signatory Management Platform

Twenty years working inside banks doesn’t prepare you for the moment when you have two months of runway left and no customers. Steve Pomfret faced that moment. He survived it. And the lessons from building Cygnetise from zero to enterprise contracts reveal principles that apply far beyond signatory management.

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 the tactical decisions that shaped their go-to-market strategy. Here are seven lessons that matter.

Lesson 1: Solve the Right Problem, Not the Interesting One

Steve spent early 2016 doing something most founders skip: analyzing which problems actually suited his technology. “I literally was analyzing problems and which one would be the best suited for the use of the technology and which ones had, like, a better chance of making a business.”

The key insight? He looked for problems where he’d be “replacing a manual process and not replacing another technology.” This matters because manual processes have no switching costs. Excel and email aren’t competitors that fight back with sales teams and locked-in contracts. They’re just the status quo, waiting to be disrupted.

Category creation sounds exciting. But Steve’s approach was pragmatic: find the problem with the clearest path to adoption, not the sexiest technology application. That discipline created a $8 million business. Chasing interesting problems creates GitHub repositories that nobody uses.

Lesson 2: Start Where Autonomy Lives

Big companies won’t be your first customer. Steve learned this the hard way. “The first question we always got asked is, like, what other customers have you got? And, of course, if you haven’t gotten me.”

The solution? Target the Channel Islands. “We actually started looking at the market in the Channel Islands. So the Channel Islands to the UK are probably what the Cayman Islands and British Virgin Islands are to the US, where you have a lot offshore trust companies and some big name brands with small, autonomous little offices.”

These autonomous offices could make decisions without headquarters bureaucracy. They had smaller ticket sizes and less to lose. “They could run their existing process in parallel, so they weren’t taking on too much of a risk,” Steve explains.

The principle: find the smallest viable market that can make decisions quickly. Brand-name customers operating in autonomous regions give you both credibility and speed. Those first Channel Islands customers became the reference points that opened enterprise doors.

Lesson 3: Accept That Category Creation Means Perpetual Messaging Iteration

Ask most founders about their marketing philosophy, and you’ll get confident frameworks. Steve’s answer? “Oh God, we change this all the time.”

This honesty reveals something crucial about 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 is structural. You can’t know the right messaging without 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 still iterates on messaging. The lesson isn’t that they’re doing it wrong. The lesson is that perpetual iteration is what category creation requires. Stop looking for the perfect positioning deck. Start testing and learning.

Lesson 4: Build a Pipeline Machine, Not a Pipeline

The GTM breakthrough came from systematizing outbound. “So it’s our direct outbound sales pipeline generation. I’m going to call it a machine that we have, which is, it’s like a numbers game. So we have a strict process in place, and we hit certain markets.”

This isn’t sexy. It’s systematic. “We get Personas, and we do as much of it as we can with the amount of employees that we’ve got. And the sales output is pretty much a function of the size of that team.”

The model came from Tableau, where Cygnetise has an advisor who helped implement the strategy. The logic works because the market is genuinely horizontal. Treasury departments at oil companies face the same problems as treasury departments at hedge funds.

The principle: once you understand your ICP, sales becomes a math problem. How many outbound touches can you make? How many personas can you hit? The output scales with team size, which makes growth predictable.

Lesson 5: Lead with Benefits, Not Technology

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

This seems counterintuitive until you understand what customers actually buy. “They don’t care about the technology, they don’t care about the main blockchain. They do care about the facets that it provides. So the benefits.”

What are those benefits? Immutability. Data ownership. Peer-to-peer sharing without centralized databases. “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.”

The lesson applies beyond blockchain. Customers don’t buy your architecture. They buy outcomes. Technical due diligence happens later, with different stakeholders. Lead with what matters to the economic buyer.

Lesson 6: Geography Changes Messaging, Not Value Proposition

As Cygnetise expanded globally, they learned something nuanced about messaging. “The messaging changes more for the geography and the size of the company and the area within the company that you’re going to.”

But the core value proposition stays constant. “If you take a big oil company that’s based in the Middle east and you’re selling trader lists, for example, that’s going to be exactly the same as like a smaller hedge fund in the US, treasury departments. In large corporations, the messaging is pretty much exactly the same.”

This distinction matters for resource allocation. You need to adapt tone and framing for different markets. But you don’t need different products or value propositions. The problem is universal. Only the packaging changes.

Lesson 7: Time Channel Partnerships for When You’re Ready, Not When They’re Interested

Banks, big four accounting firms, and large tech companies have wanted to partner with Cygnetise for a while. But Steve waited. “We’ve been talking, 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.”

The timing matters because channel partnerships accelerate everything. “This is where we see the hyper growth coming from because they can hit the market significantly quicker and at scale for us.”

But they only work when your product, processes, and team can handle the volume. Premature channel partnerships mean disappointing large partners who won’t give you a second chance. Steve waited until Cygnetise had proven unit economics, refined messaging, and built scalable onboarding.

“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 Through-Line

These seven lessons share a common principle: category creation rewards patience and systematization over speed and improvisation. Steve spent two years reaching first sale. He started in small autonomous markets before going enterprise. He built a systematic outbound machine instead of relying on inbound. He waited for channel partnerships until the company was ready.

None of this follows the “move fast and break things” playbook. But moving fast in the wrong direction just means you fail faster. Steve’s approach—systematic, patient, increasingly sophisticated—built a platform that enterprise customers trust with critical financial operations.

The unsexy truth about category creation: it’s less about revolutionary vision and more about disciplined execution over years. Most founders aren’t willing to wait two years for first revenue. Most won’t iterate messaging for years after raising millions. Most will chase channel partnerships before they’re ready.

That’s why most category creation attempts fail. The opportunity exists not because the problem is hard to solve, but because the journey requires discipline most founders don’t have.