Building for Government and Education: A Manifesto

Why I Wrote This

When I dropped out of school at 20 to start CourseDog, I had 9 unpaid interns, $2,000 in the bank, 0 live customers, fewer than 10 lines of production code, and a face full of acne.

What I didn't have was a playbook.

I spent the first 6 months building something registrars didn't actually want. We ran free pilots that went nowhere. We chased RFPs that were already wired for someone else. We hired sellers before we had pipeline. All of those challenges were common, but I still felt lonely. 

Lots of gov/ed tech business feel that way - like there’s no playbook. All of the founders I coach now have the same questions I had:

How do I land my first 10 customers? Should I run a pilot? When do I hire a seller? Do I need SOC II to close my first deal? How do I think about resellers and contract vehicles?

This manifesto is the answer I wish someone had handed me at 20.

It's not theory. It's what actually worked, what actually didn't, and the order I'd run it in if I were starting over tomorrow. Talk to 25 buyers before you build anything. Charge market rate or premium - freemium doesn’t work. Hire a GTM engineer before your first seller. Skip the booth and suitcase the conference. Use your own MSA to start. Ignore cold RFPs.

There aren't enough of us building for governments and schools. The buyers deserve better technology, the missions deserve more recognition, and the founders deserve a real playbook.

This is mine. I hope it helps you get those first 5 customers. 

— Justin 

P.S. Check out starbridge.ai for more thought leadership on how to build and how Starbridge is there to help. 

Start With the Problem, Not the Product

The most common mistake in govtech and edtech is building from the citizen or student perspective without talking to actual buyers. Every problem you notice as a citizen already has someone inside the agency or school whose job it is to solve it. Build alongside them.

Talk to at least 25 buyers before you commit to anything.

Cold call, cold email, ask for warm intros, or show up at a conference. Seriously - cold calling works ludicrously well. If you can't get people to talk to you, you're either investigating a fake problem or not putting in the work. Spend eight hours a day getting in front of people.

At CourseDog, we spent six months building something the registrar didn't want. When we got a second chance, we locked ourselves in a room and cold-called registrars all day. We asked things like, "Tell me about the challenges you face with course scheduling. If you were to hire a full-time person to work on this, what would you have them do?" The insight wasn't genius, it was obvious once we did the homework.

At the end of each call, ask: "If I built something to solve this, would you be open to chatting further?" 

Most say yes.

Landing Early Customers

After at least 20+ discovery conversations, you'll know the problem well enough to sell. Many of your early research partners at this point should have the potential to become your first customers - because if their pain was clear enough they should want to chat with you further. If they don’t want to chat with you after your first call, revert to investigating another problem. 

Don't disappear into a build cycle. 80% of the time, you can sell before the product works. At Coursedog, we started with low-fidelity wireframes. 

Buyers beat them up and told us everything that wouldn't work. We iterated until we had an end-to-end prototype - including a space optimization algorithm (a fake loading bar that spun for 30 seconds and then showed a big checkmark: "Success! Your schedule was optimized"). 

Buyers loved it. We sold $1M in total contract value before we had the software really working. 

Do not build anything real until you're forced to. What's scarce isn't engineering capacity - it's deep understanding of the problem.

Pricing and Pilots

Free pilots fail 98% of the time. Without financial commitment, buyers won't invest the effort to make your product succeed. 

Worse, offering something for free signals inferiority. Public sector buyers see free and immediately think, ‘amateur product’. 

Even worse, you use free pilots to think you have traction when actually you are investigating a fake problem. 

At CourseDog, every free pilot we ran was unsuccessful. 

Once we started offering market-competitive pricing in enterprise 3–5 year agreements, our close rates actually went up. 

Price at market rate or slightly premium. If you do offer a pilot, define clear success criteria and require at least a small payment. 

Do not use pricing or free pilots as your levers to land your first customers - or you might just waste 6-12 months of your life (that’s how long procurement takes) where the gold at the end of the rainbow is going to be a churned, unengaged customer. 

Security and Compliance

Build only what you need to close the next deal, roughly in this order: 

1. polished security overview deck
2. commitment to future attestations within 12 months
3. FERPA compliance (schools)
4. SOC II, 
5. StateRAMP/FedRAMP as needed

Don't over-invest in certifications until you've confirmed product-market fit.

Closing Your First Deal

As you start closing your first few deals, you'll notice a key distinction between the end user, the economic buyer, and IT/Security Stakeholder

The end user is the person interacting with your product day to day - they're evaluating functionality and workflow fit. 

The economic buyer is typically a VP, director, or executive thinking about ROI at the organizational level: better citizen experience, time savings, cost savings, or even revenue generation. 

Then there's IT/security, who may show up as the actual buyer or simply as a gatekeeper evaluating your solution from a security and technical standpoint. Depending on your product category, IT can range from a stakeholder you need to loop in for political reasons to the core decision-maker driving the deal.

Your value prop needs to land differently with each audience. For the end user, focus on how the product improves their daily work. For the economic buyer, focus on broader organizational impact. For IT, be ready to speak to security, compliance, and technical integration.

Once your economic buyer says yes on your pricing proposal, you have roughly a 75% chance of closing — but it could take 2-15 months. Procurement's job is compliance, not negotiation. If they push on price, route it back to your champion (the buyer most engaged in helping to get your solution purchased).

The key decision procurement makes is whether you need an RFP. RFPs are triggered when your price exceeds the agency's sole-source threshold. Avoid them when possible. Your options: price below the threshold, or ask about sole-source justification (case-by-case, depends on the procurement team's risk tolerance).

Consider using a reseller/distributor to move faster and avoid the RFP. Reach out to us at Starbridge and we can help point you in the right direction. 

Once you reach legal, you're at ~90% close probability. Use your own MSA - don't negotiate on the buyer's paper, which will be heavily slanted in their favor. 

Find a solid template from Y Combinator or have counsel draft one. Use Claude or ChatGPT to flag red lines and negotiate yourself rather than running up legal bills.

Revenue Channels (In Priority Order)

Warm intros. Ask early customers for referrals. Find industry influencers and bring them on as advisors. Mine your LinkedIn first, second, and third-degree connections — manually scroll through and see who's connected to a buyer.

The key is making it dead simple. Here's an example of an email I sent to someone connected to the Registrar at Columbia Law School:

Subject: Connecting with Hazel at Columbia Law, Cindy?

Hi Cindy, Would you be open to introducing me to Hazel at Columbia Law? Attaching a one-click forwardable email below.

Hi Hazel, I'm the founder of CourseDog. We're an academic operations platform working with law schools like CUNY Law and SUNY Law. We help law schools with course scheduling, space optimization, and back office efficiencies. Would you be open to a call to connect?

One caveat: a warm intro from a customer who's actually using your product successfully is a hundred times more valuable than one from an advisor who isn't. The latter gets you in the door but won't close the deal, because the buyer will ask, "Why aren't you using it yourself?"

Outbound to similar accounts. Government and education buyers are a tight-knit community. Close a community college in New York, and every other New York community college becomes dramatically more likely to buy. After each win, target the most similar nearby accounts and lead with the reference.

Here's an example of a strong outbound email:

Subject: Sharing on our work with New York City, Sally

Hi Sally, I'm the founder of XYZ — we help cities with [value proposition]. We just brought on New York City and I'm going to be in the area for an implementation onsite. Would you be open to connecting? I'd be happy to swing by New Jersey and meet you in person and share about our work.

The "I'll be in the area" angle substantially increases book rates over a standard cold email.

Conferences. Start selective and pick events where your actual economic buyers attend, not general industry conferences like ASU+GSV or SXSW (great for investors, few actual buyers). Don't be afraid to ask conference organizers for attendee breakdowns.

In the early days, skip the booth and suitcase it. At Starbridge, we showed up at almost every big government and education conference with just tickets - no booth. We walked up to each booth where our buyers were and handed them a one-page handout. When your buyers are roaming the hall rather than staffing booths, just walk up to them cold. You need to be much more aggressive than feels comfortable.

The highest-converting play I've seen is account-based personalized handouts. Using a platform like Starbridge, you can enrich a conference lead list and create one-pagers tailored to each account. For example, if you're at a conference of Florida cities, your Sarasota handout references your work with the University of Florida, includes their logo, and pulls a one-sentence snippet from Sarasota's strategic plan. It shows you did your homework and makes the buyer feel like a million bucks. The conversion rates on these are incredible.

Some guerrilla plays that work: sponsor or set up an ad hoc coffee station, hand out something memorable and on-brand, bring a mascot. At CourseDog, we literally sponsored rescue puppies to come in for the day and try to get adopted. It drew massive attention and was incredibly effective for our brand. Find something unique to you that provides actual value (not just candy).

As you scale, go to more conferences than you think you should. They build brand (which makes future outbound more effective) and move in-progress deals forward.

Email and cold calls. These always work if you have product-market fit. Email is the most scalable channel: at 0.5–1% book rates across thousands of emails, it quickly becomes your top pipeline source.

Start with 100 manually researched, deeply personalized emails to understand what resonates. For example, if you sell permitting solutions and your ideal customer uses a specific competitor, write an email to the person who owns that competitor's product and include your differentiation. Once you see what gets responses, use AI to scale it.

Layer cold calls on top — expect ~10% connect-to-book rates versus 1–2% for email. Calls are less scalable but far higher converting. The best approach: send the personalized email first, then call with the same hook.

Cold RFPs. Ignore them early on. Most are written for a specific vendor. Only bid on RFPs that originated from your own conversations. Over time, review old RFPs to understand market requirements, and eventually throw darts at best-fit ones for free evaluation exposure.

Building the GTM Team

Here is the recommended order, most important though is building pipeline roles first and sellers later: 

1. Go-to-market engineer - someone scrappy who can write good copy and use AI tools to build scaled outbound plays. Look for the smart SDR, the person from ops or consulting, or the rev ops person who's always had a knack for outbound. They own pipeline generation through programmatic, personalized outreach. The founder keeps closing deals as long as possible.
2. Marketing, ideally someone who understands govtech/edtech buyers and can sharpen product messaging, scale conference presence, and improve conversion at every stage.
3. BDRs, focused on calls into prioritized account lists set by the GTM engineer, plus mining warm intros. At Starbridge, our BDRs spend 90% of their time on calls and in-person conference meetings - not email campaigns. For the vast majority of companies, calling is significantly more effective for booking meetings than sending emails. Although emails are more infinitely scalable and so they have low marginal cost
4. Sellers with experience closing at your price point and deal complexity. In the AI world, sellers should focus on selling and working inbound opportunities — not running email sequences. That's the GTM engineer's job.
5. Hold off on dedicated traditional revenue operations until you have multiple sellers and marketers. Contract it out and lean on your GTM engineer until then.

Account Scoring and Contact Enrichment

Build a simple scoring model with 5–7 attributes per account. Examples:

Government Agencies 

1. Population
2. operating budget 
3. competitor usage 
4. funding environment 
5. Relevant web info

Education 

1. Enrollment
2. year-over-year enrollment trends
3. competitor usage
4. similar signals.

Rank every account in your TAM from best to worst. 

Use the scores to prioritize calls, pick conferences, and segment email campaigns. For example, once you know which competitor each account uses, you can run targeted campaigns: "Hey, noticed you use tool XYZ" — with tailored differentiation messaging.

Enrich your contact database so you can reach every relevant buyer on a regular cadence. If you're not showing up in someone's inbox monthly, your competitor is and that puts you behind from day one. More personalized volume = more opps. 

Scaling Outbound

Set up multiple sending domains with warmed-up mailboxes (15–25 emails per day per mailbox before spam filters kick in). 

Keep these off your primary domain to protect SEO. Use a sequencer like HubSpot, Instantly, or SmartLead.

The highest-performing outbound plays: 

1. First-party data insights (the best if you have something actually compelling)
2. On-site visit wedges
3. Nearby account wins
4. Targeted lists by account characteristics
5. Meeting discussion signals
6. Strategic plan references
7. Job changes at target accounts
8. Upcoming conference attendance 

Keep emails short. Strong personalized hook, customer reference, simple CTA. Boom. 

Resellers and Contract Vehicles

Once you have a handful of contracts, setup a reseller relationship so that you can start to skip RFP’s and accelerate deals (reach out to us at Starbridge and we can point you in the right direction). 

The primary value isn't having them sell for you as much as it's access to cooperative contract vehicles (NASPO, Omnia, state-specific vehicles like Texas DIR, New York OGS, or ERIE BOCES) that let buyers skip the RFP process.

Traditional resellers won't take you seriously without a live deal in hand, ideally six figures or more. 

Since we work with a ton of resellers at Starbridge, we can get you hooked up with one so that you can get priority pricing and onboarding. 

Raising Capital

2 things matter most when raising: 

1. Finding a wedge that people actually want to buy
2. Clearly communicating your total addressable market (matters especially in this market)

‍Building a business worth investing in 

It’s straight-forward: hit milestones, close deals, show momentum. 

‍Clearly communicating your total addressable market

This is where government and education founders need to over-prepare. 

Most venture investors are skeptical of public sector markets by default. They'll assume the TAM is small, the sales cycles are long, and the contracts are low-value. 

You need to have a tight, data-backed answer on market size and a credible path to high average contract values. Spend a disproportionate amount of your fundraising prep on this because it will be the hardest part of every pitch. 

For a starting point on who to talk to, Starbridge publishes annual lists of the most active gov investors and education investors.