More often than not, the government stakeholder you're pitching to has known about the problem you're solving for a long time. Make an effort to understand why they haven't done anything about it yet.
Here's an embarrassing story for you all.
About two years ago, we set out to help cities fix more potholes. We knew the problem was that civilian reports were how cities found out about potholes, and civilians only reported things after they were already bad, never before. Our thought was that if we simply collected the location of all the potholes in a city and sent that data to their teams, they'd be able to start operating proactively.
We spent nearly 6 months under that assumption, spending hours every week talking with Colorado governments, hearing that the problem was real, the solution made sense, and the tech was worth paying for — just to get blanket disinterest in actually pursuing the work.
This was massively discouraging.
How could you acknowledge the problem as real, the solution as good, and the logic as sound, just to walk away?
Asking the obvious question
After half a year of this, it finally hit me that nobody would be offended if I just asked. It seems like this makes sense — what's stopping you?
It turns out many cities across the U.S. operate under a form of liability where, if they know about a dangerous condition for an extended period and do nothing about it, they become liable for any damage it causes.
Producing a list of every hazard in a city isn't a cure — it's a liability bomb. Every city that had agreed to work with us up to that point shared one trait: they didn't have that liability clause.
It wasn't that they didn't want to work with us. They couldn't. Doing so would have cost them more than it saved, and if we had just thought to ask, we would have known and could have fixed it within a week.
The one-week fix
Immediately after finding this out, we refined our approach to take liability into account and give cities control over what kinds of issues get surfaced. Any jurisdiction with this liability can now set standards in the system to restrict reporting to only what they want to receive, and in volumes that match what they actually have the bandwidth to address.
This change took 1 week.
We've had a 95% demo-to-pipeline conversion rate ever since.
This is one of the more embarrassing blunders I've made as a founder, wasting months over the arrogant delusion that I understood these cities' problems better than they did.
These people know the problem. It's their job to know. Even if they don't understand the full extent of it, it's not like they've never considered how to fix it. Something has already stopped them, and your solution needs to account for that.
As fun as it is to speculate, it's much faster just to ask.