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Comment by thomasjudge | Hacker News Reader

As someone who works in technology in the public sector at the state level, let me just say that there is tremendous greenfield opportunity for software startups within existing government programs. Probably every program that government runs requires one or more systems to administer it; these are often painfully legacy systems. We are starting to see startups in some of these niche line-of-business areas (Medical Marijuana licensing, Senior & Long Term Care services, ...) but there are many other areas yet untouched.

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100% agree.

The problem is not that there aren't opportunities to improve but that getting those into the hands of users is often nearly impossible. Public officials are not incentivized to improve software or even services. People vote based on emotions and the downside of fucking up a software upgrade is far more politically damaging than the upside of fixing it.

Until the procurement and purchasing process is improved—changes that, in my mind, have to come from within—building better products just doesn't matter all that much. (I say this as someone who co-founded a YC-back company building software for local governments and burned out after 2.5 years trying to sell into them.)

I had the same experience. Too many hoops to jump through. No one trusts the decisions public employees make so there's too much Red tape.

Sales is too expensive.

The value to the public might be millions. The software value to the organization is nil.

Their attitude:

Oh we can process applications 10x?? Why bother? The people will wait. They always have. Why change it now? Staff won't want to learn something new.

And they almost literally cannot go out of business. The incentives aren’t there.

I don’t know. I sincerely hope someone figures it out. We could improve so so so many things

the government isn’t about efficiency, it’s about fairness. (In theory).

I was working on a contract to replace a legacy system for the federal government, and we were doing agile development (or attempting to) and let me tell you the interface between agile teams and feds is painful.

Agile development is about people over process and government is about process over people (for valid reasons!)

We sat through a retro after a sprint with some of the feds and the questions were all about deadlines and dependencies and when such and such would be complete so they started putting everything on the board and made us throw out story points and put dates on everything and we were like, congratulations you just reinvented the Gantt chart.

Like I get it, they have different incentives than most product owners do, but yeah if you think you’re going to reinvent government by bringing silicon valley development practices to Washington, you are going to have a bad time.

This 10000%. I founded a YC company that's focused on Public Sector, and we see the greenfield opportunity in this space every day.

Only 5% of a given public sector IT's budget is cloud software (most of their software is legacy/on-prem) vs. 50%+ for similar large commercial enterprise.

As governments digitize more and more, they will prefer native "gov first" products. So while it's still early days in these parts of the market, the early winners will be a great position as we move along the tech adoption curve.

It's worth noting too that the tech adoption curve still exists in government, even if it's backwards skewed. And when the early majority hits, given the scale and size, it's going to create some very large and successful companies.

Could you link to a product or two SaaS products that you like, built for gov?

How can really small players get into this space though?

Here's three: https://jumpfaster.com (All of these are at the state government level) They specialize in solutions for the senior and long term care areas of HHS. it looks like they may have started with possibly a custom development for one state agency, then turn that into a product and have since gotten other customers. This is a good strategy: for any program or solution area in state government,It's likely there are 49 others like it. https://mycomplia.com/ This company is literally a handful of people, they have developed solutions for medical marijuana licensing. They have partnered with another vendor who handles the seed to sale tracking. https://billtracker.com/ This company is I think one developer and one salesperson/CEO. state agencies need to be able to monitor bills that are progressing through the state legislature; this essentially scrapes the information from the legislative website and lets agencies focus on bills that are important to them. You can add attachments, assignments, etc. It's not rocket science, but it's better than spreadsheets. I have some thoughts on how small players can get into this space, navigating procurement, and key product features, but don't want this comment to get too long drop me an email if you're interested. My account + gmail

We agree :)

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