The following interview is a conversation we had with Mike Weiland, CEO & Co–Founder of Govly, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $13 Million Raised to Power the Future of Public Sector
Mike Weiland
Great. How are you?
Brett
I’m doing awesome. And I’m super excited for our conversation here. Let’s go ahead and just kick off with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Mike Weiland
Yeah, absolutely. So I just said, Mike Weiland. My entire career has been government contracting. I cut my teeth at a large system integrator back in 2006 after starting a soccer equipment manufacturing company for a hot minute with a buddy of mine, but then in the government contracting space since then, started my own government contractor in 2016 or so with a co-founder. And ultimately, what we’re talking about today is Govly. And Govly grew out of that company because we needed software to help manage our own internal operations. And it turned out that software created was valuable to somebody else and turns out to industry as a whole. And so we are off the races and excited to share some of the lessons learned and stories behind it.
Brett
So government contracting, that’s a bit different from what I think most guests that I bring on talk about. Take us back to when you were 15 years old. Was it just split between being an astronaut and a government contractor? Where did this passion for government contracting come from?
Mike Weiland
Yeah, so that’s actually a funny story. Don’t really get asked that. My parents were air force, my grandfather was Marine, my one uncle was navy, and one uncle was air force. Most were aviators, and my dad was a awesome aviator and a good dad, albeit he was never home. And so I wanted to initially go into the air force as a 15 year old to go and fly, you know, the f time or the geez. There was talk of some of these high tech planes that exist today back then, but I also didn’t want to not be home with family and kids and such, so I opted for something different. I ended up sabotaging my own application to the Air Force academy, to my dad’s chagrin, and kind of went a different way.
Mike Weiland
And I went to that soccer equipment manufacturing company and got recruited by sheer randomness to a large system integrator, a defense contractor. And I walked in the doors, the security doors, and there was bastard. On the wall were the schematics of all the air force planes that have ever been made. And I literally walked in and kind of just had that overwhelming feeling of, oh, my God, these are my people. Because it was related to the air force and doing all of the cool stuff where you make more money and don’t get deployed.
Brett
What was it about government contracting that made you stick with it for this entire time?
Mike Weiland
You talk to anybody that does deal with the government. And I think the first phrase or term that comes to mind is bureaucracy and red tape and this and that. And while that’s entirely true, there is a science to it. There’s always answer. You might not like the answer, but there’s always a process. There’s not really a motion like it’s governed by so many rules and regulations. But once you find the rules and regulations and you learn how to navigate that, it’s very powerful. Like, you know, in the commercial world, you sell to a commercial entity, if they go bankrupt, you might not get your money, or they could literally say, we’re not going to pay you, and then you’ve got to take them to court. Whereas dealing with the government, you’re going to get paid.
Mike Weiland
If you delivered a good service, it might cause brain damage on getting there. But there is a process to follow. And so there’s this dependency or dependability associated with government contracting. That’s really nice. And they tend to always spend money.
Brett
What do people get wrong about government contracting? Are there any common misconceptions out there that you hear all the time that just drive you crazy?
Mike Weiland
Yeah. The first that comes to mind is there’s Jeffersy war dogs. Yeah, of course. So it’s both entirely accurate and then just dramatized per se. Most people believe that to sell to the government, everything is, I think, in war dogs, it was fed biz ops, was the website. It’s been replaced by something called SAM.gov. Most people believe that selling to the government, all of the opportunities to sell to the government come through something like a public forum, like SAM.gov, and it’s just categorically false. The government has created so many different avenues to do business and sell to the government that it’s way more involved, I should say.
Brett
Interesting. Yeah, I definitely saw that movie. And then I think I went and bought a book on Amazon about government contracting right after. Like, I’m sure many people followed that as well.
Mike Weiland
Yeah, I mean, it’s entirely true. Like, you can go to SAM.gov and you can bid to your heart’s content. It’s not likely you’re going to win anything, but it’s possible.
Brett
Now, let’s switch gears and let’s dive a little bit deeper into the company. So it looks like it was founded in early 2021. Take us back to those early conversations with your co-founders. What were those conversations like, and how did you decide what to do first, and what did you do first?
Mike Weiland
Yeah, so let’s go back just a little bit further to that defense contractor back in 2016. And so what that company did was basically, there’s many ways, as I just described, to sell to the government. And one of the ways is like the SAM.gov, which I have never bid anything on SAM.gov, yet my teams and I collectively have sold over the years somewhere to the tune of about $3 billion in goods and services to the government. And none of it was on SAM.gov. All of it was through something called a contract vehicle. And a contract vehicle. The best way to describe it is a hunting license. And that hunting license just means that you have the ability to go in, hunt something in a particular area.
Mike Weiland
And so what the government did was said, you know what, there’s this public site called SAM.gov. Here’s an opportunity to sell the government widgets or what have you. Well, there’s rules and regulations associated with the responses that can cause delays or, you know, that red tape and bureaucracy to make that procurement just a nightmare for anybody, both on the industry side and the government. And so what the government did, especially with technology, is said, hey, we’re going to create these contract vehicles, which we’re going to basically, again, that hunting license. We’re going to submit a kind of a fictitious idea of the government wants a whole bunch of stuff. Let’s see who can respond and who gives the best response. And the winners of that get access to a new subset of opportunities.
Mike Weiland
And those new opportunities fall under a new set of rules where you can’t protest it. And the opportunities don’t have to be out for a certain length of time, both of which can happen in the public realm on SAM.gov. And it’s a nightmare to deal with SAM.gov. But these contract vehicles, these hunting licenses are fast paced, fast turn opportunities to land very large contracts. And so the dollar, tens of billions of dollars a year gets sold just in the it space to the federal government through these contract vehicles. And that previous company, what we realized and why we started it was, you know what, there’s all of these crimes and a prime is just someone who has direct access to one of those contract vehicles.
Mike Weiland
Because if you don’t have access to that contract vehicle, you can’t see those opportunities. And so those are what I would refer to as private government contracting opportunities. And so if you don’t have a prime or you’re not networked, or you don’t work with a prime that has access, you don’t even know those opportunities exist. And so my first government contractor, what we did is we set out and said, you know what, I don’t necessarily need to be a prime. I need to negotiate access with people who have those contract vehicles because I have a network of suppliers that can respond to a lot of these bids fast and efficiently and at the best price, et cetera. But they don’t have access.
Mike Weiland
So what I’m going to do is I’m going to go out, negotiate access with a bunch of different primes and aggregate all of these opportunities across a bunch of these contract vehicles or these hunting licenses. And so we did that and then we built software to manage all of it because were starting to ingest hundreds of net new opportunities that were coming in the private realm every single day. And we needed a platform to be able to share it to our network. And so you can kind of see where this is heading. And what we ended up with was the early stages of what Govly is today is this platform for a seamless and transparent view of these opportunities that I as a prime and my approved subcontractor or my supply chain also I approved to have access to.
Mike Weiland
And so one of the things that Govly solved was an opportunity comes out from the government. I, as the prime, get it? 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. And if the government changed anything or made a modification, there would be new sequences of emails and then there is versioning control. And so 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 Weiland
And, you know, by nature of doing that, we also opened up the ability for crimes to navigate and network with new subcontractors based on, hey, Goblin Network, who can sell Cisco or who can sell Nutanix or who can do these services and then subcontractors, those service entities. Or the resellers could do the same with different primes where those resellers are the ones knocking in the door at the air force saying, hey, I think we should do this technology, or I can solve this problem. And then if that agency or that customer comes back and says, okay, great, submit a solicitation. I’m going to solicit it on soup. And Sup is one of those contract vehicles, Sewp? And if that subcontractor, if that reseller has access to suit, great.
Mike Weiland
But if he doesn’t, they need an avenue to find a prime that can grant him access or them access. And that’s the same for distribution and oems. Oems is a bit different in that oems are living in a world where they are the last ones to receive. Most of them have zero direct relationship to the government, yet they’re supplying billions of dollars of technology to them, but they don’t know how it necessarily gets there, at least in a tactical level of responding to these solicitations. And so what the oems have used Govly for is, hey, I’ve got a channel that sells my tech, and they’re good at bringing me government opportunities that relate directly to my tech, but what they’re not good at is finding opportunities for competitive takeouts.
Mike Weiland
Oems use our platform for market intel on where are all my competitor opportunities coming up, what are the trends in buying over time or with different agencies, et cetera. How was that for word vomit?
Brett
That was good. Learned a lot. Some follow up questions. Then, as we dive deeper into this, can you maybe just explain some basic terms for us? Talk to us about a prime. What is a prime?
Mike Weiland
Yeah, good call. So a prime just means that you are a prime contractor, aka you hold a piece of paper that is signed by a government official, as in, you are the awardee. And so when you see Nevada or Lockheed Martin or Raytheon or Northrop, they’re all system integrators. They are all prime government contractors, meaning they have been awarded a government contract. And that can be true down to the mom and pop shop down the street selling widgets like the government can issue an award to them, but the subcontracting and supply chain for a lot of these organizations is deep, like the Northrop Grumman and Lockheed building airframes they have thousands of subcontractors. All of them are government contracting because their goods and services are going to a government contract, but they are not primes. Got it.
Brett
Okay. That makes a lot of sense.
Mike Weiland
Generally speaking, the prime is the one on the hook with the government is really what it is. If something goes wrong on the airframe, it’s Boeing’s fault. It’s not necessarily, you know, Boeing can challenge it to the subcontractor, but the government’s never going to challenge a subcontractor unless there was fraud or something. But the government’s going to hold Boeing to accord.
Brett
Does the government have to approve the subcontractors, or can a prime hire anyone they want?
Mike Weiland
Generally speaking, a prime can hire anyone they want. There are certain restrictions for national security and standards, like, we have to be friendly nations, and there’s something called itar international trade and arms regulations that basically you can’t be supplying goods and services that originated in China for something that’s going into a sensitive environment.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. What about acquiring your first paying customers? I would imagine you were in a pretty unique spot because you come from this space. You have a lot of credibility. So I have to imagine it. I dont want to say it was easy to get those first paying customers, but it was probably a straightforward path. Is that fair to say?
Mike Weiland
That is fair to say. And ultimately speaking, that was our quote, unquote, aha moment. We were soliciting a reseller at the time to say, hey, come work with us. We have access to all of these contract vehicles, join our network, and we can help you increase your access to opportunities that you guys would be highly qualified to bid. And long story short was they were like, hey, yes, you know what? We’re definitely going to work with you guys. And how do we buy your software? Because they were a prime contractor. They had those opportunities coming in from multiple sources to them. They wanted access to our platform for their own use. How can we use your software to manage our own prime contracts? And that was kind of the, oh, well, maybe this is applicable to other people. And that was our aha moment.
Brett
What about marketing? How have you approached marketing? Or how would you summarize the approach to marketing?
Mike Weiland
Almost non existent until about three months ago. So we founded, I mean, technically speaking, we kicked the software out of the previous company, and Gavily was created as a LLC and then quickly converted to a C Corp, which I don’t recommend the conversion. It’s kind of a pain in the ass. So if you could start as a C corpental. There’s a tidbit of advice. We kicked it out C Corp in 2020. In early 2021, we bid Y combinator and got into summer of 21. We exited that in September with a little bit of seed money and bring you all the way to September of last year when we raised our series a and we had seven employees, so we didn’t have any marketing all the way through our series a. We were mostly up until Y comad air, were founder led sales.
Mike Weiland
We were maybe the occasional LinkedIn post by me, maybe a podcast or two here and there. But ultimately were word of mouth and were networking and, you know, post series a. Fast forward to late last year and early this. We did have a rec open in December, and we finally hired our first head of marketing and our first marketer just about two and a half months ago.
Brett
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Mike Weiland
Great question and lots. I think the first and foremost I had a, maybe animosity or resistance toward recruiters. But having a recruiter go out and find the exact person that you wanted was way easier than me trying to attempt to do it. For us, what was most important was finding a marketer that was a higher level thinker and operator. We talked to many people that had incredible ideas and great plans and great history and a wealth of knowledge and experience. And when we asked them kind of lay out what the first 2468 months looked like, you know, a lot of them or so many of them had, well, we’re going to hire this person, and we’re going to hire this person. We’re going to hire this person. And then they were basically building many empires, which I’m sure is great for the right situation.
Mike Weiland
And for us, we are a still a scrappy, small team that I need someone that’s going to come up with the idea and go execute. I don’t expect you to knock it out of the park at any point in time, but I do expect you to do it and not just sit there and try to manage a team. And so we lucked out. We’ve got a incredible. Blake has been nothing short of amazing for coming up with the ideas, putting them into motion and doing the self reporting. And so the grit, determination and being a operator in the marketing world from my perspective has been a huge lesson learned and I feel like we executed well.
Brett
What’s the go to market motion look like and how do you find customers?
Mike Weiland
So we are almost entirely sales led with outbound motions on LinkedIn and phone calls. Our industry is notorious. I mean, the tech space and especially the public sector text base. Nobody responds to emails out of Y combinator. We hired a highly recommended email campaigner that had lots of accolades and after four months even he declared our outbound email campaign as an abject failure, which was a special, very expensive, special lesson that we learned. And so our outbound is phone calls, you know, dialing for dollars with an insight team paired with an AE. We do have an increasing presence at trade shows, which is pretty cool for us, especially as the Govcon turns into a bit more of a household name. It’s nice that there was a recent exit and just more awareness in our industry is a lot of fun.
Brett
Why do you think that is, that the industry is just resistant or it doesn’t work, I should say, for cold.
Mike Weiland
Emailing, to be honest. I don’t necessarily know, other than I feel like the world of government contracting because there’s all of these publicly available data sources, these SAM.gov opportunities, that there’s this belief that, oh, I should just reach out to so and get pricing. Government says, hey world, I need a quote for 25 Dell computers. I think that somebody that sees that on a public domain is like, oh my God, I can go get a quote, I can get one from Amazon, or I can call this person, or I can call that person.
Mike Weiland
And I think these people just get inundated with so many bogus, waste your time type of stuff when if you knew government contracting that opportunity, somebody had already knocked on the door for that customer, had prepped the customer and what they’re going to buy, they basically baked it for them. But because of the rules and regulations, the government for some reason had to post that in the public domain. And so it’s almost entirely a waste of time for most people to bid anything worth anything on the public forums, if that makes sense.
Brett
Let’s dive a bit deeper into the go to market side. To date, what do you think has been the most important decision that you’ve made? Was it to stop trying to cold call?
Mike Weiland
Yes, I’d say it was the stop trying to cold call. I’m sorry. To stop trying to cold email and have a repeatable function and someone. So we have our CEO Oliver put in place basically a monitoring, a tracking and a repeatable sequencing for making these phone calls. And so it was just a repeatable process. It feels hard and difficult at times, but sticking to that process, and to be honest, most importantly is people finding people that love a outbound motion on the phone. Like there is a difference between a BDR that is good at their job and not. And it’s not a little different. Like it’s amazingly different. And some of the. I think the BDI role is one of the most underappreciated roles, at least for us. These guys are magicians.
Mike Weiland
Our team is, they are magical in what they do, in the quantity of meetings that they land for us and set up our AE’s is just amazing.
Brett
It’s funny because I feel like for the last ten years everyone’s been saying cold calling is dead. Cold calling dead. But a lot of the people I talked to, a lot of the founders I speak to, they say that’s not true at all. Cold calling still works. Yeah. You have people who say f off, never call me again. But if they go back through the deals, like they’re closing a lot of deals from cold calling. Sounds like it’s been similar for you.
Mike Weiland
Similar for me. I think the team would resonate that. I think LinkedIn emails still work as long as there’s. You need to have that decent hook. But first and foremost is cold outbound.
Brett
Let’s talk about the competitive landscape. So if they aren’t using you, what are they doing? Are they just going direct to the website?
Mike Weiland
What does that look like? Yeah, so if were to put Gov broadly in the market intel space, there’s a number of organizations out there. There’s a company called Gov Win, there’s Gavily and Gov Tribe. And ultimately all of these organizations wrap publicly available data. So they’re going to a website, they’re scraping it all down and they’re making an interface that’s easier to deal with the government. And that’s entirely true. Dealing with the government websites is awful. SAM.gov is better than it used to be. But these organizations take this data and mix it with their quote unquote, intel or their analysts. So Gov one is great at analyst reports. They’ve got a small army of people that are taking note of industry days or of government announcements or watching C SPAN or reading budget reports from Congress.
Mike Weiland
They’re writing reports and adding analysis to the data that they have access to. There’s value there. But again, if we go back to early in the conversation, the so much more money, again, at least in the tech space, is spent on these private vehicles, which these other organizations don’t have access to. They get some of the tidbits of information after something’s been awarded and these organizations are bringing in that publicly available award data. But at the tip, at the solicitation of the RFQ or the RFI, that information is not public and that’s where we differentiate.
Brett
What about your market category? So when I did the intro, I called you a public sector procurement platform. I think I stole that from LinkedIn somewhere on your website. Is that the category or what is the category?
Mike Weiland
I would say it’s more market intelligence. We aim to be a public sector procurement platform, which is all aspects of the procurement. I’d say more accurately, we are a market intel platform today.
Brett
As I mentioned there in the intro, you’ve raised about 13 million to date, or over 13 million to date. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey?
Mike Weiland
A couple of things that I think are my tidbits of gold or maybe even stating the obvious, like market condition. Timing has so much to do with it. I feel pretty lucky that were at the timing were and just knowing and talking to our investors and how much they’ve are holding there. There’s definitely money still going around, but the difficulty of raising money now compared to what it was two years ago is entirely a different world. And so there’s not that you can control anything like that. But I think what it did do for us was if you’re in a position where maybe you don’t need to raise, but you can raise, I felt being on better financial footing and so we raised like a second seed just in preparation. So kind of capitalizing on that market or industry timing experience.
Mike Weiland
And I think the only other thing was maintaining relationships with, call it your top 15 vc’s that you would like to, I think is incredibly important. It was not something that I focused on early on, but I have come to realize that twice a year call with my top 15 is something incredibly valuable because they are being on a first name basis with them is going to serve us well for future rounds. It served us well for insight, which I happened to maintain a relationship early on. And turns out that went out and tried to raise money from ten different banks and we got yeses from three. And the one that took it all was insight. And ultimately I don’t think that would have happened had I not taken their call early on when I wasn’t raising.
Mike Weiland
So it wasn’t a intro call when I went out to them and said, hey, we’re raising.
Brett
What type of growth are you seeing today? Are there any numbers or metrics that you can share?
Mike Weiland
Yeah, sure. So we ended 2022 at 360,000 in ARR. We ended last year at 1.3 and we are on track for 4 million at the end of this year.
Brett
Wow. What do you attribute to that growth and that success?
Mike Weiland
Stickiness. We have built a product, to borrow a phrase from Y combinator, we’ve built something that people love. We’ve become not necessarily a nice to have product, we’ve become a business critical product. People depend on us every day. It was early on when we’d have bug fixes that would happen to take down our site or other. We were a little bit more, call it flippant or less concerned. But today if we go down, the impact across the board is felt instantaneous. People let us know that our site is down before we know our site is down type of thing. And so the fact that people depend on us is a really cool point of pride. And dependability is important.
Brett
Final question for you before we wrap up here. Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future, what’s the big picture vision look like?
Mike Weiland
Yeah, so I think Gov will be the dominant market intel platform that serves as a foundation and maybe even an open source framework for government procurement that spans from government to all aspects of industry. We want to make government contracting accessible to everyone in a meaningful, transparent and secure way. The fact that the government has so many different avenues, we’re taking thousands of avenues to solicit and request quotes for goods and services. We’d like to figure out and be on the front running of standardizing that, making it easy for industry to understand what they’re requesting across the board.
Mike Weiland
And then on the other side, for industry being the place for finding all of those and having the best analysis and kind of being the end all, be all place for knowing what the government bought in the past, what they’re buying presently and what we expect them to buy in the future, who to talk to in the government, and then what are the trends and what are the history of dollars being spent so we can actually track and say, hey, X Agency has bought this type of software here, and here for this much, and it’s deployed at these locations. And that intel, I think, serves the government, serves the taxpayer, and serves us rather well.
Brett
Amazing. Love the vision. All right, Mike, we’re up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap here. Before we do, if there’s any founders that are listening in that want to follow along with your journey, where should they go?
Mike Weiland
Yeah. So go to Ghibli.com to check it out. You know, that’ll give you kind of a high level view of what we offer. More importantly, if there’s anyone’s listening that is interested in selling to the government or knows somebody that’s selling to the government, we are offering referrals. And so we do pay $500 per signed referral when someone signs up. And so if there’s someone that, you know, in the generally, the tech space for us right now is kind of our sector, we would love to see it. And so you can either use the fill form for requesting a demo or my email at Mike at Gobley and just put referral in the subject line, and I promise you’ll get a response.
Brett
One final question just came up. The domain. Let’s talk about that. How did you acquire that domain?
Mike Weiland
That’s funny. So one of the co-founders, Nick, our CTO, is also my brother. And back in probably 28 to 2019, it was almost as a joke. We were looking at all of the other gov’s. There’s the gov tribes, the gov wins, the gov this, the gov that. And Nick was just kind of on the fly, said, what about Gov ly? And it stuck. And I requested to buy it because someone was sitting on it. And I think we paid $1,300 or something.
Brett
No way. That’s crazy.
Mike Weiland
Yeah, I completely agree.
Brett
Nice. That’s amazing. Well, Mike, thanks so much. It’s been a lot of fun.
Mike Weiland
Brett, likewise. Thank you.
Brett Stapper
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B, two B founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit Front Lines IO podcast. And for the latest episode, search for category visioners on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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