[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Govly (YC S21) - Making it easier to sell...
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Launch HN: Govly (YC S21) - Making it easier to sell to the U.S.
government
Hi, we're Mike, Jon and Nick, founders of Govly
(https://www.govly.com). We're building a place for companies,
resellers, and distributors to work together to bid on government
contracts. The U.S. government buys lots of things. In 2021, over
$218B will be spent purchasing technology products alone. The
problem is, it's super confusing to participate in the market. You
have to understand the rules, have the right connections to
government contractors, have a record of strong performance selling
to the government, and usually a sales force focused specifically
on government sales. This friction leads to fewer companies
(especially smaller companies) participating, less competition, and
ultimately the government buying the loudest or most insider-
connected products instead of the best or most innovative. Jon and
I have been experiencing this problem for the last 15 years at
various technology manufacturers, technology resellers and
government contractors. As we saw little improvement in the process
throughout this time, we ultimately decided to try to improve it
ourselves with Govly. Currently, Govly serves as a platform where
all the stakeholders in government procurement (manufacturers,
distributors, value added resellers, prime contractors and
government agencies) can securely share information about things
the government wants to buy and then collaborate on fulfilling
those purchases (talk through specs, iterate on quotes, etc.). Most
people don't realize, but the vast majority of government
opportunities are only released to a subset of organizations called
"prime contractors". We have built a network of these prime
contractors who are uploading their "private" opportunities into
our application. These opportunities can then be shared to other
stakeholders in the network via "Govly partnerships", which are
like friend requests between the different organizations, e.g.
prime contractor - manufacturer. We've also built automation tools
that help prime contractors stay compliant in their work and with
the agencies they work with. Many government opportunities are
required to go through a specific channel called a "contract
vehicle" which are typically managed by specific agencies. For
example, one of the largest and oldest contract vehicles is managed
by NASA and is called NASA SEWP (Scientific and Engineering
Workstation Procurement). This is actually how you become a "prime
contractor" in the first place: if you apply for access to a
contract vehicle, and you're selected, you're a prime contractor.
Once you are a prime contractor, you're required to do various
reporting tasks in order to stay compliant on your contracts. As
you can imagine, there is a _lot_ of bureaucratic detail with that.
We 've built automations to make it easier. This space is
exceedingly complicated and confusing but it also has a ton of room
for tech-enabled efficiency, transparency, and growth. We plan to
chip away at the problems we find until we can change the system
into the simpler, fairer, more efficient system we know it can
be...or at least bite off some pieces that can. On the technical
side, we've had fun solving some low hanging fruit that has made a
huge difference in the lives of our customers. For example, the way
that opportunities on contract vehicles are distributed is mostly
via email. Companies were managing this by receiving thousands of
emails per day and creating email filters to try to filter down to
opportunities of interest. The first iteration of our product
allowed them to redirect emails to our system so they could be
parsed and indexed in Elasticsearch. We then helped them build
specific queries as saved searches so they could get instant
notifications when a new match hit, or a digest of match activity
for the day. It was cool to create such a simple solution that
immediately provided substantial value for end users. Anyways,
thanks for taking the time to read our story. There is a free
version of Govly that you can poke around if you'd like. It
essentially scrapes public opportunities from https://sam.gov and
provides our search and saved search interface on top of the data.
To be honest, it probably is not of much interest to the readers
here _and_ the public version has not been a priority (so it 's not
that good...) Regardless, if you want to check us out at
https://www.govly.com, any and all feedback is appreciated!
Author : mikeweiland
Score : 185 points
Date : 2021-08-18 17:56 UTC (5 hours ago)
| staunch wrote:
| Many companies made processing credit cards _easier_. And then
| Stripe came along and made processing credit cards _easy_. This
| "phase transition" was what made Stripe so wildly successful.
|
| My guess is that you might be moderately successful as a business
| if you can make it "easier to sell the the U.S. government" but
| what the market would reward in a huge way is a service that
| makes it _easy_ to sell to the U.S. government.
|
| My guess is that very few startups would find your current
| solution easy, with a still-confusing explanation of how the
| system works, the high price point, and "ask us" pricing model,
| etc. The bar for "easy" is quite high.
|
| I really do hope someone solves this problem for the good of the
| country and for the sake of more good startups. Good luck.
| slim wrote:
| Out of curiosity, did you try to buy gov.ly ? :)
| mikeweiland wrote:
| We did not - good idea though!
| schoen wrote:
| It already belongs to the Libyan government, though :-)
|
| https://crt.sh/?q=%25.gov.ly
| mikeweiland wrote:
| Makes total sense.
| Farfromthehood wrote:
| Your privacy policy is a 9 page PDF, which as an immediate red
| flag. You also auto share registrants' info for marketing unless
| we opt out.
|
| I wish it was opt-in meeting.
| weilandia wrote:
| Thanks for pointing this out. This is not good and we'll make
| it better. I'm pretty sure it was a stock policy we threw up
| just to get going.
| Farfromthehood wrote:
| And the pricing link doesn't lead to pricing. Just list it.
| Don't make us jump through hoops to pay you.
| weilandia wrote:
| Once we have a better understanding of our pricing we will
| definitely do this.
| weilandia wrote:
| Though I can tell you that we have 0 marketing so at least
| anecdotally we're are not using your data
| criddell wrote:
| Are you in the same space as Carahsoft?
| weilandia wrote:
| Not directly. Carahsoft actually pays for some of our
| customers' subscriptions to differentiate themselves from other
| distributors.
| settrans wrote:
| This is very exciting and, if executed well, a very promising
| avenue to dramatically shaping the efficiency of the federal
| government. One of the greatest sources of preventable
| waste[citation needed] in the public sector today is inefficient,
| non-competitive procurement. If Govly (or another upstart)
| delivers on this promise of lowering the bar of entry to the
| marketplace of government contracts, all of society profits from
| the economies of scale.
| zdragnar wrote:
| For a real change, the other side needs to pitch in too (having
| attempted to work with them, I am rather pessimistic).
|
| The crux of the problem is similar to all large organizations-
| the power of the purse and people doing the procuring have
| different motivations and objectives than the people the things
| are being procured for.
|
| Ostensibly, there are good reasons for this- avoiding graft,
| ensuring standardization among procurements, etc etc.
|
| The downside is that what gets bought isnt what is needed,
| often costing more and doing less than if the people doing the
| work had more control over their own budget.
|
| I have encountered a number of businesses that exist only to
| help other businesses win government contracts. Automating some
| of that might help bring in a bit more competition, but I
| suspect "dramatic change in efficiency" will be a taller order.
| cenal wrote:
| I've seen SaaS products like this before.
| https://truthantowers.com/ had one about five years ago.
|
| Selling into the government is not just organizing the data to
| make the sales process more approachable but it's knowing the
| process for each sale.
|
| I have a consulting business in the space
| (https://www.govsoft.us) and won't blind bid on opportunities. We
| only work on a bid where we know some of the stakeholders.
| jidiculous wrote:
| Somewhat related: part of the Government of Canada (ESDC) has
| started their own pilot for making micro-acquisition
| opportunities much easier to both set up on the government side,
| and bid for on the contractor side.
| https://twitter.com/MicroBuysGC
| weilandia wrote:
| This is a really cool concept. It looks like the pilot is
| specifically targeting low dollar contracts for software eng. I
| love this.
| jidiculous wrote:
| Yeah, as I understand it (I currently work in another
| department), anything sub-10k has much less red tape for fed
| government procurement in Canada.
| pbronez wrote:
| Awesome! More help is always needed in this space.
|
| There are already a few contract opportunity search platforms. Is
| your primary differentiation the proprietary feeds from prime
| contractors?
|
| FYI - the SEWP acronym meaning changed a while back:
|
| > The SEWP acronym originally (1993) referred to "Scientific and
| Engineering Workstation Procurement". In 2007, the full name was
| changed to "Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement",
| pronounced 'soup', which allowed the same acronym to be
| maintained.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_SEWP
| weilandia wrote:
| Thanks for the correction! Failed by a quick google search...
|
| Our primary differentiation is the network--Being able to
| connect with your supply chain on the platform and find other
| potential partners to work with. This is what makes the
| proprietary data possible/compliant.
| pbronez wrote:
| Interesting idea, I have questions:
|
| - How will you incentivize primes & subs to participate?
|
| - How will you organize contracts and contractors to identify
| relevant partnerships?
|
| - Will you provide any ratings, reputation or other
| mechanisms to document performers' track records? How does
| that change the participation incentives?
|
| - What support will you provide to companies that haven't
| sold to the government before and thus need to start from
| scratch on certifications, etc?
| weilandia wrote:
| - Primes are incentivized to participate for a number of
| reasons. First, it provides a way for them to efficiently
| manage their own processes--Getting out of Outlook and
| providing transparency internally. As well as the
| automation tools we reference.
|
| The incentive for the primes to participate in the network,
| in the beginning, is competitive advantage. Primes are
| always trying to get new/more
| manufacturers/resellers/distributors to work with them.
| They can use Govly as a selling point similar to how
| insurance brokers might use their "easy to use employee
| portal" to differentiate themselves.
|
| - As far as organizing contracts and contractors to
| identify relevant partnerships, there are a few ways we're
| thinking about this. One will be to tie award data to
| primes and allow people to analyze the award data of
| opportunities that would have been relevant to them in
| order to identify strong partners. On the other side,
| primes can use the analytics we surface with their data in
| order for them to identify up and coming product
| types/technologies/manufacturers in order to find new,
| cutting edge partnerships.
|
| - We actually just got off a call discussing
| ratings/reputation. This is particularly interesting when
| manufacturers/resellers are deciding which primes to use.
| Prime A might be cheaper but has a history of paying late,
| while Prime B is more expensive but pays quickly. Ratings
| and reputation can play a big role here. This also changes
| the incentives of primes as the network grows because if
| more and more manufacturers/resellers are finding their
| contacts on Govly, there will be FOMO.
|
| - The first step to supporting companies to learn how to
| sell to the government is education content. Once we're
| funded, part of the plan is to dedicate time and money
| creating accessible content for this purpose. We'll also
| manually facilitate connections in the beginning and work
| on ways to productize those connections so that a new
| manufacturer (broadly used to describe anyone selling to
| the gov) will be able to more easily identify
| partners/contacts who can help them through the process.
| logikblok wrote:
| Also perhaps of interest is https://openopps.com/ and the team at
| https://spendnetwork.com/.
| RobRivera wrote:
| fedbizops with community linkage. neat
| carom wrote:
| How is your integration for DARPA opportunities and SBIRs?
| weilandia wrote:
| I believe all the DARPA opps will be in sam.gov, in which case
| the will be in the public version of Govly. If we're wrong here
| we'll definitely look into specific DARPA opps.
|
| Looking into SBIR now...
| carom wrote:
| SBIRs are going to be from multiple agencies, but they might
| get aggregated on sam.
| carom wrote:
| Honestly, I would pay for better search and categorization of
| open DARPA opportunities, as well as notifications when BAAs
| get released.
| jbpnoy6fifty wrote:
| Good idea. I'd like to follow your growth.
|
| Ps. The oldest database system alive today if i recall correctly
| is one That keeps track and manages USA government contracts and
| it's invoices
| mikeweiland wrote:
| That's super interesting! If you (or anyone) knows the name,
| I'd love to read about it.
| atatatat wrote:
| Following.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| I'd love to see this database too.
| finiteseries wrote:
| Reminiscent of Stripe in the pure schleppiness x obviousness of
| the idea!
| weilandia wrote:
| Two of the founders are also brothers :)
| sidlls wrote:
| I think you've left out the most important problems in this
| space: the graft, turf building/protectionism, and corruption.
| Tech isn't going to solve those. That aside, this seems like a
| pretty decent idea for a company.
|
| Also, this is a gem: " Most people don't realize, but the vast
| majority of government opportunities are only released to a
| subset of organizations called "prime contractors". We have built
| a network of these prime contractors who are uploading their
| "private" opportunities into our application. "
|
| A lot of people truly aren't aware of it! Nor are they aware of
| the fact that often the Primes' contract vehicles have
| requirements/constraints on the subs the primes select to farm
| work out to (e.g. some minimal fraction of the subs must be
| minority or women owned, subs cannot be foreign entities, etc.).
| What your feature here looks like to me is something that may be
| prone to abuse: primes post a set of (sub)contracts and cherry-
| pick the subs that they can shoe-horn into their checkboxes at
| minimal cost. Alternatively, this just seems to relabel links in
| the chain: instead of a would-be contractor bidding on a
| government vendor portal, they're bidding on your portal, and the
| bids are submitted to Primes instead of the government. I'm not
| sure this solves a problem so much as adds a middle-man. Maybe
| I'm misunderstanding it. Any thoughts about that?
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "I'm not sure this solves a problem so much as adds a
| middleman."
|
| The default "business plan" of any so-called "tech" company.
|
| At some point the novelty of the internet and ever-smaller
| computers ("tech") may wear off and these companies will just
| be seen for what they are: "middlemen" (with silly, infantile
| company names).
|
| The problem to solve in this space is arguably one of
| transparency ("Most people don't realise...") Allowing
| citizens, i.e., taxpayers, to see what kind of deals their
| government is making could add accountability.
|
| To the parent's point about malfeasance in government
| contracting, perhaps more transparency would better allow the
| exising laws to be enforced:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_Claims_Act
| binarymax wrote:
| I disagree with this sweeping assessment, and I prefer to
| calling a service like this an "agent", "assistant", or
| "delegate". This is because technology cannot solve most
| human and social problems, but they can help as a delegate in
| dealing with complexity so you can focus on other things
| worth your time and interest.
| ineedasername wrote:
| _The default "business plan" of any so-called "tech" company_
|
| Leaving aside this example, sometimes a middleman is useful,
| aggregating what is otherwise disaggregated into a single
| location.
|
| But if its primary function is to act as a portal into some
| other single system, then the problem is that other system.
| It also means that your business model is predicated on not
| fixing that system-- sort of like how H&R block and TurboTax
| lobby against simpler tax returns because they act as a
| portal to a complex system, and if that system is simplified
| then they are no longer necessary.
|
| Govly may end up being useful, but I expect that if it really
| catches on then in a decade they would find themselves
| arguing against meaningful procurement reform designed to
| streamline the process. Maybe I'm too cynical though.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| You're not cynical.
|
| The problem isn't middlemen per se - often, they're very
| useful. For example, almost every service provider you use
| in your private life, like a barber shop or an accounting
| company, is by definition a middleman - they stand between
| you and the person actually performing the service. It's
| clear such intermediary tends to benefit both the service
| giver and the service receiver.
|
| The problem starts when the middleman tries to lock you in.
| All kind of pathological, abusive behavior grows from
| there. In the relatively rare case of being a portal to a
| single system, they'll try to prevent you from going behind
| them and interacting with the system directly (TurboTax is
| a master example of that). In a more common case with tech
| companies, which is "aggregating what is otherwise
| disaggregated into a single location" (aka. bundling),
| they'll frequently attempt to decommodify the resource
| they're bundling. E.g. media streaming platforms making
| exclusive deals for content, or chat/collaboration and
| social media platforms working hard to prevent
| interoperability between services.
|
| It's not cynical to be on the guard, because lock-in _is_
| the default business plan of many tech companies, including
| most of the well-known ones.
| mikeweiland wrote:
| Not cynical. We agree and to a great extent it would be
| nice to participate in the reform, though knowing how the
| gov works, it'll be a few generations from now. It would be
| nice to aid or even 'be' a platform that the government
| uses instead of industry using it to make sense of the
| government 'mess'.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| If google is the middleman between me and all of the internet
| then I suppose a farmer is the middleman between me and dirt?
| Like what is even the point??
|
| This seems marginally worse than saying every data pipeline
| is just a bunch of materialized views materializing slowly.
| johnsillings wrote:
| What a hilariously broad take
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Why? Is there something different in your mind that
| startups like these tend to do?
|
| It seems to me that in the freemarket you can either create
| a "need", broadly construed, or facilitate access to a need
| that already exists. What else is there?
| oneplane wrote:
| Efficiency, specialisation, scale. You doing one thing on
| your own vs. a collection of many of those 'things' you
| used to do solo, guess which one has more potential?
|
| This does or course not mean that this applies all the
| time, everywhere, forever. But in this case, the
| 'startup' merely has a model of economy of scale, and
| then probably making sure the benefits are big enough
| that they can scrape a bit of a provision off of it. That
| way they can make money while still delivering something
| that has a higher value to a customer than the customer
| doing it themselves.
| oneplane wrote:
| With that mindset, everything becomes a middleman. Baker?
| Middleman for your bread. Farmer? Middleman for your milk.
| Hardware store? Middleman for your metal. Metal smelter?
| Middleman for your ore. Oxygen? Middleman for your survival.
|
| Citizens (taxpayers as you apparently like to refer to them)
| already have access to this information, along with access to
| a vast amount of other information. When given the choice to
| read up on government contracts and watching cat videos on
| GoogleTube they will choose the latter, not the former.
| Education would be a way to teach people how the world around
| them works, but that would cost money and it appears that
| some governments rather spend that money on other things
| (guns, oil, banks or whatever top spending your local
| government tends to have).
| thed7fu wrote:
| Disagree. A baker makes bread. Milkman does some physical
| work to produce and provide a real product. What does Govly
| do? Get in the middle of a transaction you can complete
| without them and take a fee for filing some forms for you.
| Theyre maybe a secretary or something less at the very
| most.
| bawana wrote:
| Like in healthcare. Hospital reimbursement in the US is set
| by negotiated contracts between hospital and insurer in dark
| smoky back rooms. The actual deal is unknown. Yet prices vary
| enormously so that middleware companies are popping up
| touting transparency. Something that should be mandated by
| law.
| whalesalad wrote:
| You hit the nail on the head. Even if there is a "fair bid" it
| never ends up being truly fair, and the taxpayer is the one
| footing the bill for all the nepotism.
| truthwhisperer wrote:
| Good point and the personal relationships
| clairity wrote:
| > "...the most important problems in this space: the graft,
| turf building/protectionism, and corruption. Tech isn't going
| to solve those."
|
| rather than the byzantine prescriptive requirements we have
| now, the simple, straightforward solution to all of these is to
| disallow consolidation in procurement, making the contract
| sizes much smaller in most cases. it's much easier to hide
| significant graft in a billion dollar contract vs. a multi-
| thousand dollar one. the federal government tries to use size
| as its leverage over price, but we should be using competition
| instead. make contractors compete each time for smaller bites
| of the apple, rather than giving them the whole orchard in a
| single go, which often leads to complacency and corruption.
| mikeweiland wrote:
| I couldn't agree more. The GWAC / IDIQ referenced above
| attempts to do both (increase competition with pre-qualified
| companies and limit the number of primes that have access)
| but in the end it's still a limiter to competition.
|
| This all said, there some valid reasons to limit. For
| example, if the Department of Education wants to buy 1000
| laptops and there were 5,000 responses to the opp there is a
| significant lift/cost for reviewing and responding to each of
| these. What is more cumbersome for the government is when one
| of the 'losers' protests the award. This halts the delivery
| of the computers to the customer as it goes through a 3rd
| party (still gov) review. In the end, the original awardee
| generally gets the ability to sell the computers but by this
| time they are now 18-24 months old... This is a complicated
| system governed by a few thousand pages of rules called the
| FAR (federal acquisition regulations).
| clairity wrote:
| i'd wager you wouldn't have 5000 potential vendors once
| effective competition and smaller deal sizes squeezes out
| excess profit/graft. but from my experience with state
| procurement processes, the initial weed-out phase seems
| highly automatable, leaving a much more manageable fraction
| of candidates to consider manually.
|
| also, transparency rules should be rigorous enough to
| illuminate all ultimate beneficiaries (through shell
| companies and subcontractors) so that larry, his brother
| darryl, and his other brother darryl can't artificially
| muddy competitiveness and undermine fairness.
| monocasa wrote:
| IDK, it probably comes out the same. Feels like the "one
| horse sized duck, or a hundred duck sized horses" argument.
| mikeweiland wrote:
| There is significant growth in what are call GWAC and IDIQ
| contacts (these are basically avenues to sell to any agency in
| the government under the guise that the government doesn't know
| what it wants to buy [yet] but that it is going to buy a lot of
| it) and we agree with you that they lend themselves to a
| protectionism mentality because they are generally 10 year
| contracts with only a small subset of companies that are
| allowed in (they are awarded the contract- a kind of 'hunting
| license'). We are trying to combat this protectionism mentality
| with our tool Today by bringing transparency and visibility to
| an arena that is previously unseen.
|
| For the foreseeable future, there is no way of getting around
| primes. They are the ones on the hook with the government
| should anything go wrong with delivery of the goods and
| service. Govly provides network effect of being able to find
| new subcontractors or more importantly, for would-be
| contractors to find prime that can submit bids to opportunities
| they are working on with government customers (they just need
| an avenue to actually sell to the government). Govly doesn't
| submit bids nor will it - We just facilitate the conversation
| and development of a bid between prime and sub in a singular
| place and provide both sides of the transaction a place to
| clearly see, find, track and analyze the massive amount of
| opportunities that exist (both the public and private ones
| [that primes grant access to]).
| ecesena wrote:
| This is awesome!
|
| I went through the analogous Italian process. We just wanted to
| sell a dozen solokeys to my university, but university are now
| required to go through an official process.
|
| It's been so incredibly painful that just the thought to do
| something like that again (in the US or elsewhere) scared me
| away.
|
| I have very big hopes for a startup to disrupt in this space,
| thank you for doing this.
|
| P.S: if anyone is looking for a product to test this out, happy
| to have you as a reseller :)
| bfaviero wrote:
| Love it! I spent three years selling into the government (DHS,
| TSA, and other agencies) at my last company, and just spent a
| year at Palantir as a senior PM after our acquisition. Government
| selling is unnecessarily difficult, so I'm looking forward to
| seeing you guys succeed!
| mikeweiland wrote:
| Thanks - Unnecessarily complicated and contrary to what the
| government wants people to believe, it is not transparent.
| weilandia wrote:
| I think this is overly cynical. It's complex and wants to be
| transparent, but to be honest it's hard.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| As an intern I once had an assignment to try and figure out how
| to sell water depth monitoring to the federal government (in
| Canada, but it is no better) for monitoring of a waterway.
|
| To put it mildly, we couldn't figure it out despite our solution
| having a unit price of a tenth of our competitors.
|
| This is sorely needed.
| mike_d wrote:
| You accidently discovered why the price of their product was
| 10x higher.
|
| If you have a customer that is extremely difficult to work with
| and wants to be a special and unique snowflake, you bake that
| in to the price.
| weilandia wrote:
| We see this quite a lot. Even worse is the maneuvering that can
| take place to make something look cheaper. This can happen when
| the government is procuring a complex list of things and trying
| to do so with one vendor. While the individual pieces can be
| much cheaper through multiple vendors, those vendors are not
| eligible to bid because they cannot fulfill the entire request.
|
| We're trying to circumvent this with our collaboration tools--
| Allowing multiple companies to work together on a single bid.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| You could just become the contractor there and arbitrage :)
| nostrademons wrote:
| Depends whether they view the market size as fixed (where
| you'd want to capture as much of the surplus as possible
| through arbitrage) or as expanding (where they'd want to
| bring new firms into the marketplace that don't currently
| exist).
|
| Normally government spending is about as fixed of a market
| size as exists, but with the recent expansion in government
| spending and the political winds blowing the way they are,
| this may be one of those rare moments in history where a
| platform play in government makes sense.
| jscheel wrote:
| Amazon Basics for government contracting
| mikeweiland wrote:
| That is a great tag line and I completely agree.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Given what I've seen on it comes to government of Canada
| chair procurement, this seems like it would be a needed
| niche.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Why are startup names always so horrible?
| sidlls wrote:
| Because the founders have some experience in the domain, but
| think since tech is the driving factor in "solving" the
| problems they've identified the name isn't as relevant.
| codegeek wrote:
| Why does it matter ? If google can work, i think any name can
| work.
| teknopaul wrote:
| Govly sounds like something a London street seller would say.
|
| Oi mate! Wanna up yer prices and have lucrative support
| contracts for ever? Lovly Govly.
| mikeweiland wrote:
| This is great - I've caught myself saying 'Lovely Govly'
| out loud a few times...
| atonse wrote:
| If you guys can build a Vanta for GSA etc you'd probably mint
| money.
| weilandia wrote:
| I was actually thinking about this comparison today! Having
| just onboarded with Vanta...
| gumby wrote:
| Sounds useful; I don't agree with the degree of cynicism with
| which this has been provided in this discussion.
| nataz wrote:
| I don't think you're making selling to government easier, you're
| making it easier for contractors who are bad at selling to
| government connect to contractors that are good at selling to
| government.
|
| There are lots of government contracting vehicles. Some lend
| themselves to large mega corporations, some are specifically set
| aside for small business. Some reward past performance, some are
| designed to increase women/minority/veteran owned, disadvantaged
| location, etc.
|
| Different vehicles also have different risk profiles. Some are
| optimized for speed, some for consistent pricing. Some work
| better when you have poorly defined requirements, others are used
| when there is significant risk of completion. Basically a good
| government CO/COR/TOR will work with their program managers to
| strategically structure contracts to meet mission needs while
| also proving best value.
|
| If you really want to get good at selling to the government, then
| you need to understand why something is out out to bid (or not
| out out to bid as it may be). There are tons of federal
| contracting classes for COs covering both general FAR rules and
| agency specific needs. Plus, it depends on what you are hunting
| for. It could be grants, SIBR, direct contracts, IDIQs, etc. All
| have different drivers.
|
| My suggestion is if you really want to sell to government, find a
| good federal contracts person, hire them away from the federal
| government, and have them work bids. Or at least find someone who
| can explain in detail some of the things I mentioned above.
|
| - source: I've been part of a mega corp, been a sub/small
| business selling to the government and a government program
| manager responsible for 200M/year in services and equipment.
|
| *Edit : that came across harsher than intended. This is still a
| good idea, but they are helping facilitate b2b sales, not b2g
| sales. Plus, one of the best ways to learn is to work with
| someone who has already been successful.
| mikeweiland wrote:
| No worries.
|
| First answer, we agree the headline is a bit contrived. We'll
| blame the 80 character limit :)
|
| This is a very complicated industry as you know. We do make it
| easier to find opportunities, run analytics on buying trends,
| manufacturers and customers in a single place that aggregates
| data that is not just in the public domain. This is a benefit
| for both the 'good' and 'bad' contractors. Ultimately, the bid
| must go through the prime and finding the opportunity you're
| interested in can bring you to becoming a prime or finding one
| that already exists. This networking enables a level of
| efficiency for both the user/organization and the government.
| bitshaker wrote:
| Having gone through the B2G route several times now with
| companies, this is a welcome and refreshing service.
|
| The best of luck to you and your team.
|
| The long road ahead will be worth it.
| mikeweiland wrote:
| It has been a long road and an even longer road ahead. The
| system needs some modernization and we are just a piece of the
| complicated puzzle.
| hnuser2021 wrote:
| is your system able to provide historical winning bids for
| similar or near similar contract proposal?
| weilandia wrote:
| It does a bit of this now. More to come.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| I built some similar capabilities by pulling from FedBizOpps back
| in the day. I made money simply by doing that processing,
| grouping by agency, category of the work, geography, and a few
| keywords and then emailing it to people. For some, I integrated
| with their CRM (Salesforce and SugarCRM at the time) to drop them
| in as new Opportunities for Discovery.
|
| If you can start pulling historical data to identify "similar"
| (define that!) contracts and their bid history, that could be
| exceptionally useful for competitive intel, understanding who the
| players are (govt or private side), and how they've gone
| previously.
|
| Beyond that, you start getting into bid management, including
| writing, review, and submission and there is HUGE money in that
| if you can wrap in tracking, compliance, reporting, etc. If you
| get into Exhibit 300s, may God have mercy on your soul.
|
| Edit: One more useful thing here: If you can track the awards
| (usually on the individual agency's sites), you can further dig
| into the contracts and identify great opportunities to be subs
| and/or who to sell to in the Primes.
|
| _Excuse me, having flashbacks now.._
| weilandia wrote:
| We're going to be working on all these things, but in the
| context of our network. We think this is the big differentiator
| from the typical players in the space who focus on analytics
| (like GovWin).
| mikeweiland wrote:
| I bet what you built is still in play with a those companies -
| The systems haven't changed much (if at all).
|
| We are starting to pull in award data and amassing the database
| of historical awards, customers, locations, etc. Mix that with
| requested technologies and OEMs and the data starts showing
| some really interesting competitive trends.
|
| Ultimately, organizations are going to be able to create their
| profile and list their certifications/capabilities/security
| compliances/etc. It will be a place to showcase who you are and
| what you can bring to the table for other
| orgs/primes/government customers to see.
| weilandia wrote:
| Except FedBizOps has fully transitioned to sam.gov
| dbrueck wrote:
| I misread 'to the' as just 'the' and was very intrigued.
| ilamont wrote:
| Thanks for making an effort to improve the situation. It's
| refreshing that you are realistic about the problems and
| challenges of fixing what's broken.
|
| That's not always the case - an HN post by a VC fund some years
| back (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10833213) was all
| about the market opportunity, while glossing over the tough bits.
| weilandia wrote:
| Thanks for the link. We think to only way to make progress is
| to get into the complexity and realize there are good and bad
| parts. Not just dismiss it as completely broken.
|
| Hopefully this link won't be as relevant in 5 years as it is
| today (given it was posted 5 years ago :) )
| mysterEFrank wrote:
| This is a great idea! Good luck
| lend000 wrote:
| Reminds me of the film War Dogs. Great idea. Hopefully you are
| successful, and can cut out some of the cronyism and result in
| improving government program quality a bit.
| weilandia wrote:
| Trade weapons for cat7 cables and there are similarities :)
| [deleted]
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