| It's a tough market for a startup. I've worked for state .gov, and probably oversaw about $20M-50M in purchases annually. Some downsides: -Our procurement cycles are very long, sometimes as long as a year. -Procurement contract vehicles are a horror show. The contract terms and conditions are often not negotiable, and may impact your ability to get credit, etc. -You may find difficult to deal with services terms imposed by some procurement regime. -If you don't have a field sales force, you'll probably need lobbyists to get meetings. -You'll need to deal with all manner of crazy compliance regimes. HIPPA, FERPA, IRS 1075, CJIS, etc. Plus local policy. -If you "partner" with the IBM/Unisys/Dell/EMCs of the world, you may find yourself screwed holding recievables for the big vendor, used as a straw man by the vendor sales team, forced to use high cost/low quality consultants from the big vendor, or otherwise messed with. On the upside, .gov is usually terrible at negotiations, and they look at spending differently than commercial customers. You can make a fortune selling stuff, but you're not going to do it with traditional SaaS business models. You need to invest substantial time, energy and dollars into the pre-sales process. |