Launch HN: Govly (YC S21) – Making it easier to sell to the U.S. government
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?