Selling to government is counterintuitive for impatient founders. Government can't fail or be disrupted in the same way. The winning strategy is to first solve an urgent, existing problem within their constraints, build trust, and then gradually introduce broader innovation.
Government procurement is deterministic, while LLMs are probabilistic. To bridge this gap, introduce AI not as a decision-maker but as a tool to accelerate human tasks. Focus on AI assisting with research, note-taking, and initial drafting, keeping a human firmly in the loop to ensure compliance.
Inefficiency isn't due to corruption but to overworked civil servants making thousands of purchasing decisions annually. Lacking time and modern tools, they default to known vendors to avoid compliance risks, stifling competition and inflating costs for taxpayers.
Many failed ventures come from founders who either understand an industry but can't build, or can build but don't understand its nuances. True disruption happens at the intersection of these two archetypes, as embodied by the founding team.
Hazel's founder frames their major business model change not as a failure, but as finding a better path to the same goal. Their mission was always to increase competition in government procurement. This missionary focus provided the stability and clarity needed to make a difficult but correct product pivot.
Hazel initially built a marketplace to help businesses sell to government. They realized the core problem was not business tooling but government inefficiency. To truly bring businesses back, they had to empower government agencies directly, leading to a full product pivot.
Both humans and AI make mistakes. Instead of claiming AI is perfect, a more effective argument in regulated fields is that AI makes fewer mistakes and helps humans catch their own errors more quickly. This shifts the focus from perfection to improved safety and efficiency.
A common B2G sales mistake is focusing solely on the end-user. In government, users rarely have decision-making authority. The key is to understand the distinct needs of the user, the budget holder, and the ultimate decision-maker, and align your pitch with the decision-maker's high-level mission.