A handful of D.C.-area startups — Arlington-based audience intelligence software firm Tunnl and D.C.’s Prolegis, a legal and policy tracking firm, for example — have recently enlisted the help of TGS Insights, a year-old D.C. consultancy that aims to help companies grow and scale.
And their CEOs say it’s been of great benefit, in part because the founder of that group has valuable credentials.
TGS Insights founder Tyler Sinclair was the chief research officer at one-time unicorn and decision intelligence firm Morning Consult until a year ago. Sinclair said there were “no shortage of lessons learned” that he now applies to helping his client software businesses scale and reach profitability — basically helping them mimic Morning Consult’s path, while coaching them on how to avoid pitfalls.
Sinclair left Morning Consult in late 2022 after seven years. He was one of the first 15 or so employees when he joined and helped the company transition from a primarily newsletter-focused company to one that offered custom research software. By the time he left, he was overseeing a team of more than 200 research, client services and data science staff.
But at that time, Morning Consult — like many venture capital-backed, high-growth software startups — was starting to go through a difficult period. Slower growth led to multiple rounds of layoffs that began in early 2023 and have continued into 2024.
That exodus — both voluntary and through workforce reductions — also means talent has become available. Apart from starting TGS Insights on his own last January, Sinclair has recruited two former Morning Consult colleagues to his team of four. Chris Doty, former deputy lead for customer success at Morning Consult, left that company and became a consultant at TGS Insights in November.
TGS’s marketing consultant, Clare Bennett, is also the former director of marketing at Morning Consult. She departed the company in 2019.
That group’s “collective experience building new products and helping companies grow and scale makes us uniquely positioned to support other companies through those stages,” Sinclair said.
His team aims to catch companies in a key “acceleration moment,” he said, where they’re making the leap from 10 to 25 employees, or a few dozen to upward of 50, for example. Morning Consult more than tripled its headcount during the pandemic, so Sinclair’s team is no stranger to fast growth.
Rapid scaling is not inherently a dangerous thing for a company, Sinclair insists. Instead, what’s key along the way is, “stopping and assessing cracks and flaws,” he said. “That is what you tend to see play out most often with a lot of the stories in the community,” he added. His job is to help clients “manage it” and know where to place their bets, he said, so that they pay off in the long run.
The annualized value of its current agreements is around $500,000, he said. He’d like to hire and take on more clients this year, but even as an expert, he said it's still tricky to figure out how to do that in a responsible way.
“That’s going to be the constant push-pull,” Sinclair said.
“How do you come up with [a company] that is scalable but we don’t lose the most important part — which is the nuance and the customization that’s going to be required?” Sinclair wants to grow his startup — just like his clients — but won't be making any bets he can't stand behind.
