I didn't see where he says "don't sell to them, sell to the organizations that sell to them". There's an entire ecosystem of resellers/VARs/distributors/etc that, for a cut, will shield you from many of the issues you'll face in the Gov or Enterprise world.
For example, I've been "sold" as a consultant via a government subcontractor(1) that took care of bidding, billing, contracts and renewals, etc and simply paid me the rate I asked for. Similarly, I've had products that a distributor took on and did all the legwork to get on the GSA lists so all we had to do was fulfillment and support. They would even structure the financials such that it met whatever DOA requirement the end customer needed, but paid us up front.
(1) FWIW, the entity that subcontracted me was another small biz that was taking advantage of the "8A" category of small business set asides. If you fit in one of the categories, it might be an option as well. This is obviously a US-centric option.
Ironically, this is a part of how some actually decent, large software companies that you'd think could afford the BS overhead and broaden out their revenue streams by using the partners. Google, for example, has a number of enterprise integrators that deal with the terrible BS of anything related to organizations that spend more time trying to figure out what to do than actually doing anything.
For example, I've been "sold" as a consultant via a government subcontractor(1) that took care of bidding, billing, contracts and renewals, etc and simply paid me the rate I asked for. Similarly, I've had products that a distributor took on and did all the legwork to get on the GSA lists so all we had to do was fulfillment and support. They would even structure the financials such that it met whatever DOA requirement the end customer needed, but paid us up front.
(1) FWIW, the entity that subcontracted me was another small biz that was taking advantage of the "8A" category of small business set asides. If you fit in one of the categories, it might be an option as well. This is obviously a US-centric option.
https://www.sba.gov/category/navigation-structure/8a-busines...