| If you're successful, the ideal scenario might be that the government acquires you to use your system instead. They couldn't just hire you since the end result would be the end of your business, at least as it pertains to the federal government. There are other cumbersome procurement "markets" at the state and local level, but each of those would probably be essentially a new product, each designed to the idiosyncracies of each jurisdiction. However, that also could be an opportunity to be an aggregating middleman rather than a 1-to-1 middleman with like with the Feds. Any regional or national company too small to have clout & an insider track would probably kill for the ability to use a single portal as a one-stop-shop for dealing with state, county, and city municipalities. That's where your value as a true positive middleman is hidden. Because even if they all fixed their cumbersome opaque systems (which is unlikely) there is still enormous value in aggregating them all in one place for contractors. I know, it might look like your current plan is a "platform" but it's really kind of just middleware. Aggregation makes you a platform. That also keeps you from trying to compete directly with something like Workday Finance/Procurement and their portals for suppliers and contract fulfillment: this has helped a decent amount in streamlining procurement even in places trying to map unnecessarily cumbersome practices derived from legacy systems onto it. If you're merely aggregating, you don't have to compete with that. As a caveat to all of this, while I'm a well informed outsider, I'm still an outside observer of the tech startup scene and might be speculating above my pay grade here. |