5 Go-to-Market Lessons from Zartico’s Journey Building a GovTech Category

When your entire go-to-market strategy relies on trade shows, and a global pandemic hits two months after launch, you either adapt or die. For Zartico CEO Sarah Lehman, this crisis became the catalyst for several counterintuitive strategies that would define their success in the GovTech space. Here are five key lessons from her recent appearance on Category Visionaries.

1. Build Your Brand with Soul

For B2B founders, particularly in GovTech, it’s easy to fall into the trap of soulless enterprise software. Sarah saw this gap immediately: “I’m like, wow, where is the soul? Where is the soul? People still want to do business with companies that they believe in.” This insight led Zartico to focus on building a brand and culture their partners wanted to be part of, even while selling to government entities.

2. Turn Constraints into Creative Solutions

When COVID shut down traditional B2B sales channels, Zartico made a bold move that would define their early growth. “We’re going to rent an RV, and we’re going to drive it cross country, and we’re going to bring the trade show to the people,” Sarah recalls. This unconventional approach worked because it demonstrated deep commitment to their market.

3. Let Market Needs Shape Your Product

The pandemic didn’t just change how Zartico sold – it transformed what they sold. “We launched under the premise of bring us all your data and we’ll put it nicely into a business intelligence tool to realizing during COVID what entities really needed was situational awareness, and they needed to know what was happening now, not what happened this past year from a reporting standpoint.” This pivot from historical reporting to real-time insights proved crucial for product-market fit.

4. Find the Right Investment Partners

Sarah approached fundraising with a clear philosophy: “I believe your cap table is your soul. And so I knew right away that I wanted to ensure that anyone we brought in as an investor, was aligned with who we are and where we wanted to go.” This meant extensive vetting – she estimates meeting with 150-200 investors over four years to find the right partners who understood their vision and timeline.

5. Know When to Slow Down

Despite more than doubling revenue each year, Zartico made the difficult decision to intentionally slow growth in 2023. “Your processes, your people and systems don’t necessarily keep up with you. So we decided this year we’re going to like, okay, let’s slow it down a little bit so that we can ensure that our foundation is strong,” Sarah shares. This counterintuitive move helped them reduce implementation times from 120 days to as little as 24 hours for some customers.

For founders considering GovTech opportunities, Sarah’s experience challenges common assumptions about the market. While many expect 12-month sales cycles, Zartico achieved 3-6 month cycles by building the right team with existing relationships. The key was understanding that government buyers, particularly in tourism, aren’t the stereotypical bureaucrats: “I am blown away at the passion and the commitment of the leaders of destination marketing management organizations… tourism in many instances is an underappreciated economic engine of our world.”

Perhaps the most valuable lesson from Zartico’s journey is learning to trust your instincts earlier. As Sarah reflects: “I would tell myself to trust my intuition more… I was a little deferential in moments that I had strong intuition around, like, oh, maybe we should think about this differently related to the tech stack. Or maybe we should think about this differently related to how we speak to our customers.”

These lessons highlight that successful go-to-market strategies often emerge from challenging conventional wisdom and staying deeply attuned to customer needs, even in traditionally conservative markets like GovTech.