I'm John Kitsmiller. I run energizeGTM.
I help GovTech and LegalTech SaaS founders work out how to sell to government agencies and legal departments. That is the part you could have gotten from the homepage.
The rest of this page is the part you could not, which is what I am actually like to work with. Better you know that now than three weeks into an engagement.
I spent 20 years selling to government. The last eight were SaaS into prosecutor's offices, where I ran sales, marketing, and the whole GTM motion for the final five.
Then I stopped for three months.
My wife and I had been raising cattle on acreage outside Austin since 2006, planning to stay forever. Then Samsung built a chip fab a mile from our front gate, the county took nine acres for the highway that came with it, and forever turned into a decision.
I spent that fall working out what I actually wanted to do, rather than more of what I had always done. The answer was this. I like the puzzle of selling to government and legal buyers. It is a hard, slow, strange game with rules almost nobody outside it understands, and I have been playing it long enough to be good at it.
energizeGTM exists because I picked this work, not because it was next.
I am going to tell you the truth about your GTM, including the parts you would rather not hear. If your positioning is weak, I will say so. If the pipeline you are proud of is full of deals that will never close, I will say that too. Some founders find this annoying. I have made peace with that. I am not here to be agreeable, I am here to make your business work, and I take that personally.
I also do not watch the scope line very closely. Enough of my work ended up outside the agreement that I eventually built a service around one piece of it, qualifying inbound for founders who are still running sales themselves. The rest I just do.
What I want is to feel like part of your team, not a vendor you email when a deliverable is due. If you are stuck on something and you are not sure it even counts as a GTM question, that is exactly the call I want. Most of what actually moves a company at your stage does not arrive labeled.
And I would rather this be a real relationship than a professional one. I have never done my best work at arm's length.
"John has been an incredible resource for EdgeTrace as a YC company navigating GovTech GTM. He's shown up for us in ways well outside the scope of our agreement, including joining me at a conference too and even helping pick our exhibit display, without charging a dime extra. That says everything about how he works."
Kyle OrciuchFounder and CEO, EdgeTrace
GovTech and LegalTech SaaS. Mostly pre-seed and seed, up to about $5M ARR. US and Canada.
That is a narrow lane on purpose. I do not take ecommerce, or fintech, or the general B2B SaaS bucket. Staying broad would bring in more work and make me worse at the work I care about. A jack of all trades is a master of none, and nobody hands something that matters to one.
The reason I can be useful in week one instead of week twelve is that I already know your buyer. Not the org chart, the people in it.
The elected prosecutor, the victim advocate, and the investigator, all in the same office and all wanting different things. The police chief who lives and dies by what his community's crime numbers look like. The city manager whose entire job is whether residents feel well served. The managing partner weighing risk, ethics, and reputation before anything else. The chief legal officer thinking about regulatory exposure and AI governance while your demo is still on the screen.
Every one of them is running a private calculation about what your product means for them. I call it WIIFM, what's in it for me, and mapping it is most of the job. Deals rarely stall because the product is wrong. They stall because someone in the room never got their answer.
I learned that by selling to these people for two decades, not by studying them, and it does not transfer to markets I have not sold into.
I keep the roster at six to eight clients. Not a scarcity tactic, just what I can do well. If you want the longer argument for why, I wrote it up here.
There is one other thing that will make me pass. If what I described above does not sound like what you want, we are not a fit. Some founders want a vendor who says yes, delivers the thing, and stays in their lane. That is a completely legitimate way to buy. It is just not what I do, and it is better for both of us to find that out on the first call than in month three.
For most of my selling career I was on the road about 40 weeks a year. Hundreds of tradeshows, and a lot of flights taken for no better reason than a customer being worth seeing in person. I would do it the same way again.
These days the travel is the better kind. My wife and I go to disconnect, usually to a national park, sometimes to Europe to spend a while somewhere that does not work the way home does.
The rest of the time the dogs and cats run the house. There have always been dogs.
If we end up working together, you will hear about all of it. That is sort of the point.
If you read all of that and none of it scared you off, let's talk.
I do not run these calls like a sales process. It is a conversation about what you are selling, who you are selling it to, and where it is getting stuck. If I can help, I will tell you how. If I cannot, I will tell you that.
No deck. No pitch. Just a conversation.