Startup Dotcom - The GovWorks

Startup.com

As documented, This story feels more like a motion picture than a documentary. Even the main

characters, Kaleil Isaza Tuzman and Tom Herman, are fiction like, as portrayed. But they are the

central characters in an amazing non-fictional story; although I cannot be certain as to the

accuracy of this film’s portrayal of events. Nonetheless, the idea of Govworks.com is as simple

as it is brilliant. To solve a problem that is common to most of America and in every

municipality in it, perhaps the problem of things as they have always been. You may have

detected a bit of misdirection in that last statement but it is not my intent. It is exactly where I

am going with my interpretation of these events, as documented in the Startup.com film. There

was misdirection and too many lane changes for the pace of change to be sustained.

People are generally resistant to change; so conducting business online may be slow to catch

on for some. But in this case, I think the convenience offered and the time saved

made the product an easy sell.  The marketing of such a product would have been essentially self

sustaining. This because the local municipalities would advertise the service (if only by word of

mouth) as an added convenience to the public. After all, the local municipalities were also

beneficiaries of the products use. All of this to say, that the product was everything, the

idea, had it worked. The implementation was a major factor.

I do not doubt that there was functionality and some useful tools and attributes about the

GovWorks.com site. But I do not think they kept their focus adequately on the end goal, the

product. The first to market race, and the fast rate of change and growth, were major

contributing factors in the resulting failure. Had a few things been done differently I believe the

outcome would have been different. If they had separated the technology side of the company

as a separate entity and perhaps included a R&D component there may have been other options

to fund it. As for the first to market race, if it was to be won, perhaps releasing the product in

stages would have been better or loosing the race and building a superior product. And finally,

the product was known to have been lacking and not functional on some basic components. At

least this says that a change on the technology and implementation leadership side was needed.

Since the product was the company starting with 8 and ending with 230 in 18 months suggests

There were not enough people to implement this to start with.