Inside Govly’s Zero-to-One Journey: Building Software for Government Contractors

Building software for government contractors isn’t a typical startup story. But in Govly’s case, the most compelling product opportunities often hide in plain sight.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, founder Mike Weiland shared how an internal tool evolved into a platform that’s reshaping government procurement.

The Origin Story The journey began in 2016 when Mike’s government contracting company faced a common challenge: managing private contract opportunities. “What we realized was, you know what, there’s all of these primes and a prime is just someone who has direct access to one of those contract vehicles,” Mike explained. “Because if you don’t have access to that contract vehicle, you can’t see those opportunities.”

From Internal Need to Market Opportunity Unlike public opportunities on SAM.gov, these private contract vehicles represent a massive hidden market. As Mike notes, “tens of billions of dollars a year gets sold just in the IT space to the federal government through these contract vehicles.”

The team built software to manage these opportunities internally. “Govly grew out of that company because we needed software to help manage our own internal operations,” Mike shared. But the real breakthrough came when others saw value in their solution. “And it turned out that software created was valuable to somebody else and turns out to industry as a whole.”

Solving a Critical Industry Problem The problem they were solving was bigger than just opportunity management. Mike explained the inefficiencies in the existing process: “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.”

Building for Scale Govly’s platform addressed these inefficiencies by creating a centralized system. “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 explained.

The Product Evolution The platform evolved beyond just managing opportunities. “By nature of doing that, we also opened up the ability for crimes to navigate and network with new subcontractors,” Mike shared. This network effect created additional value for all participants in the government contracting ecosystem.

Reaching Product-Market Fit The strength of their product-market fit became evident in how essential the platform became to users. “We’ve become not necessarily a nice to have product, we’ve become a business critical product,” Mike emphasized. “People depend on us every day.”

This transition from nice-to-have to business-critical drove impressive growth: 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 journey offers a powerful lesson in product development: sometimes the best opportunities come from solving your own problems deeply enough that the solution becomes valuable to others. Their story shows that building software for complex, regulated industries doesn’t always require following conventional product development playbooks – sometimes it just requires living the problem yourself.