7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building a Title Insurance Tech Platform
Most B2B founders building vertical SaaS make the same mistake: they build software for an industry they don’t truly understand. Shane Bigelow took a different approach when launching CHAMPtitles—he bought a title agency first and spent years doing the actual work before writing a single line of automation code.
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Shane McRann Bigelow, CEO of CHAMPtitles, shared the unconventional go-to-market playbook that’s helping his company scale a title automation platform across multiple states. These lessons challenge conventional wisdom about how to enter regulated, complex industries.
Become Your Own Customer Before Building Product
The first and most crucial lesson from CHAMPtitles’ journey is about timing. Shane didn’t start by building software—he started by buying and operating a title agency in Pennsylvania. “We bought a title agency in Pennsylvania and we ran it,” Shane explains. “We did all the title work in house, did all the closings in house.”
This wasn’t a research project. It was a multi-year operational commitment that gave the team deep insight into every pain point, regulatory requirement, and workflow nuance. The payoff? When they finally built software, it solved real problems rather than theoretical ones.
For founders entering complex, regulated industries, this approach de-risks product development entirely. You’re not guessing what customers need—you’re building solutions to problems you experience daily. The credibility this creates with prospects is impossible to replicate through market research alone.
Recognize When Your Industry Will Eat Your Software
Shane articulated a principle that every vertical SaaS founder should internalize: “There’s this old adage, you know, software eats the world. And I think in a lot of verticals that’s true. But in title, title eats software companies.”
This recognition shaped CHAMPtitles’ entire strategy. Instead of approaching title as a software problem, they approached software as a title problem. The distinction matters immensely. Software-first companies in complex industries often build elegant solutions that fail in production because they don’t account for regulatory complexity, liability concerns, or established workflows.
The lesson for B2B founders: some industries require you to master the domain before you can successfully apply technology. If your target vertical has high regulatory barriers, significant liability, or complex interdependencies, operational expertise might be more valuable than technical sophistication.
Give Away Software to Capture Insurance Economics
CHAMPtitles’ most innovative GTM decision was abandoning the SaaS revenue model entirely. “We’re not a SaaS company. We are an insurance distribution business at our core,” Shane clarifies. “We give the software away for free to partner agents. And we make our revenue off of a rev share of the title insurance premium that they collect.”
This model eliminates the biggest barrier to adoption in their market: budget approval. Title agents don’t need to find money for new software, navigate procurement processes, or justify ROI to management. They can start using CHAMPtitles’ automation immediately, with revenue sharing only activating when transactions close.
The broader principle here is about aligning your business model with where the money actually flows in your industry. In title, the real economics are in insurance premiums, not software fees. By structuring their business around this reality rather than forcing a SaaS model, CHAMPtitles created a frictionless path to adoption.
Choose Multi-State Expansion Strategically
Most title tech companies focus on dominating a single state before expanding. CHAMPtitles took a different approach, deliberately entering three distinctly different regulatory environments: Pennsylvania, Florida, and Texas. “We picked states that were representative of kind of the diversity of the market and also were large markets,” Shane explains.
Each state forced the platform to become more robust. “Florida, there’s no attorney involvement in a closing. In Pennsylvania, attorneys are mandated to be involved. Texas, optional.” By building for regulatory diversity from the start, CHAMPtitles created a platform that’s inherently more valuable than single-state solutions.
This strategy has compounding benefits. Learnings from one state inform improvements that benefit all markets. Each expansion makes the platform stronger, creating a defensive moat that’s difficult for single-state competitors to overcome. For founders in regulated industries, this suggests targeting regulatory diversity early rather than depth in a single jurisdiction.
Automate Manual Labor, Not Expertise
CHAMPtitles’ automation philosophy reveals a sophisticated understanding of where technology adds value. Rather than trying to replace human expertise entirely, they focus on eliminating repetitive tasks that don’t require judgment. “Every single closing that comes through the door requires a search of the public records,” Shane explains. “You have to go find them, pull them back, review them, type findings, type exceptions into a commitment document.”
This work is tedious and time-consuming but doesn’t leverage the expertise of skilled title professionals. “That type of work is just manual labor,” Shane says. “It doesn’t require an immense amount of subject matter expertise.”
By automating the mechanical aspects while leaving analysis and decision-making to humans, CHAMPtitles created a solution that title officers actually trust. The lesson for B2B founders: don’t try to replace your users’ expertise—amplify it by eliminating the busywork that prevents them from applying that expertise effectively.
Build a Phased Product Roadmap Around Complexity
Shane’s approach to product development follows a clear crawl-walk-run philosophy. “You’ve got to crawl before you walk, before you run,” Shane notes. “And so a lot of the work we did on the front end was automating on the title side of the process.”
Rather than trying to automate every aspect of title work simultaneously, CHAMPtitles focused first on title search automation—the highest-volume, most repetitive work. Only after proving value there did they expand into closing automation, remote online notarization, and other innovations.
This sequencing matters because it builds trust incrementally. Each successful automation makes customers more willing to adopt the next one. For founders in conservative industries, this suggests a deliberate strategy of starting with low-risk automation that delivers obvious value before tackling more complex, judgment-heavy processes.
Maintain Operational Exposure for Product Intelligence
Even as CHAMPtitles scales their software platform, they continue running their own title agency. This isn’t a legacy business they’re winding down—it’s a strategic asset that provides continuous market intelligence.
By staying operationally involved, the team maintains direct insight into what actually works in production versus what sounds good in theory. They experience the same regulatory changes, market shifts, and workflow challenges as their customers. This creates a tight feedback loop that keeps product development grounded in real-world needs.
For B2B founders, this suggests that exiting operations entirely might not always be the right move. In complex industries, maintaining some level of operational involvement can be a sustainable competitive advantage, providing market insight that pure software companies simply cannot access.
The Deeper Pattern
These seven lessons reveal a consistent theme: CHAMPtitles succeeded by respecting the complexity of their industry rather than trying to disrupt it through software alone. They became title experts who happened to build software, not software experts trying to fix title.
This approach takes longer and requires more capital than pure software plays. But in regulated, complex industries, it might be the only path to building something that actually gets adopted at scale.