Govly’s Framework for Building a Business-Critical B2B Product

Converting B2B software from nice-to-have to must-have is the holy grail of product development. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Govly founder Mike Weiland revealed their framework for achieving this transformation.

Start With Your Own Pain Points Rather than chasing market opportunities, Govly built something they needed themselves. “Govly grew out of that company because we needed software to help manage our own internal operations,” Mike explained. This internal origin ensured they deeply understood the problem they were solving.

Solve Real Industry Inefficiencies They identified a critical workflow problem: “I used to email it to a subcontractor and they would email it to a distributor and they would email maybe technical questions to the manufacturer and then emails would eventually come back up. And that process was incredibly inefficient.”

Build a Complete Solution Instead of partial fixes, they built a comprehensive platform. “What Govly did was put everybody on a singular platform as a way of facilitating collaboration and instantaneous communication and being on the same page at all times,” Mike shared.

Create Network Effects The platform’s value grew with each new user. “By nature of doing that, we also opened up the ability for crimes to navigate and network with new subcontractors,” Mike noted. This network effect made the platform increasingly indispensable.

Focus on High-Value Opportunities They targeted where the money flowed: “tens of billions of dollars a year gets sold just in the IT space to the federal government through these contract vehicles.” This focus on high-value transactions made their solution critical to users’ business success.

Measure Success Through Dependency The ultimate validation came from user behavior. “We’ve become not necessarily a nice to have product, we’ve become a business critical product. People depend on us every day,” Mike emphasized. When users start notifying you about outages before your own monitoring systems, you’ve become essential.

The results speak for themselves: Govly grew from $360,000 in ARR at the end of 2022 to $1.3M in 2023, with projections of $4M for 2024.

For B2B founders, Govly’s framework offers a clear path: start with real problems, build comprehensive solutions, and focus on creating network effects that make your product increasingly valuable over time. Most importantly, measure success not just in revenue, but in how essential your product becomes to users’ daily operations.