It will always be easier to sell to the guy who got the contract than to get the contract yourself.
You're on your way to a local networking happy hour. You show up early (ambitious), order a Guinness (ambitious), and start chatting. You end up talking to a guy in a Patagonia vest. He asks what you do, you say, "government contracting startup," and he goes "oh dude gross."
The reason he said that is because selling to governments sucks and is notoriously hard. The sales cycles take forever, buyers are risk-averse, you have to give competitors a shot at anything you work on, and the payouts often don't reflect the effort.
The Prime
The vendors who know all that and still do it are called "Primes." They hold the contract, their name is on the RFP, and they sell directly to the agency.
It's a position mostly held by large companies like Deloitte or Lockheed Martin that have spent years building relationships and learning how to navigate procurement. Becoming a prime sucks and takes a long time, but the tradeoff is that once you're in, you tend to stay in. Those contracts can last decades.
But you're a startup. You're not thinking about a 20-year moat yet. You're thinking about how to get deployed, learn, and get paid as fast as possible.
You can try to become a prime, win the contract yourself, and go through the entire process.
Or you can sell to someone who already did.
The Sub-Prime
This is where being a "Sub-Prime" comes in. You sell your service to the prime, and they resell it to the government through their existing contract. Sometimes it's baked into their core offering to make their service better. Sometimes it shows up as a line item as a value-add.
You can still build strong economics doing this, especially if your product is differentiated or critical to what they're selling. You also prevent running full RFP cycles or starting from zero in every city anymore. Think of it as outsourcing sales and procurement to your big brother so you can focus on growth.
There are obviously some tradeoffs. You give up some margin and control in exchange for speed and access. You don't own the end customer, and you're relying on the prime to carry you, which matters long term.
But early on, if your priority is speed, getting into the field, and generating revenue, it's always easier to just sell into the supply chain than to the man himself.