6 Go-to-Market Lessons from Meroxa’s Journey to Landing NASA as a Customer

When most startups are chasing venture capital and enterprise deals, Meroxa took a different path. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, CEO DeVaris Brown shared how his company turned government contracts into a strategic advantage. Here are the key go-to-market lessons from their journey.

1. Find Product-Market Fit Where Others Aren’t Looking

Most startups avoid government contracts, seeing them as bureaucratic nightmares. But Meroxa found its initial success there. As DeVaris admits, “I would say we’ve reached product market fit in the government’s fit. Commercial and enterprise, we’re still searching for that, if I’m being honest.”

This transparency reveals an important lesson: product-market fit might exist in markets others overlook. While conventional wisdom pushes startups toward enterprise deals, Meroxa discovered a reliable revenue stream in government contracts.

2. Build Teams Around Your Weaknesses

A crucial lesson from Meroxa’s journey is the importance of complementary skills in leadership. DeVaris acknowledges: “Me and my Co-Founder, best in the world at building… The thing that we’re not great at is selling.”

Instead of trying to become great at everything, they focused on finding the right people: “You have to find people around you that have the same hustle mindset, that have the same work ethic, that have the same intellectual curiosity to go out and do those things, that have expertise in the area that you just don’t possess.”

3. Use Challenging Markets to Build Credibility

Working with government agencies provided Meroxa with powerful proof points for other markets. As DeVaris explains: “If you wonder about scale, a single flight generates so much data per second, we’re handling billions of records… You can’t fake scale, right? You can’t fake complexity.”

This credibility becomes a powerful sales tool when approaching enterprise clients. Successfully handling government-scale problems demonstrates capability in a way that marketing claims never could.

4. Look Beyond Initial Market Barriers

While many see government contracts as impossibly complex, DeVaris offers a different perspective: “It just takes time. It’s more paperwork than you probably have ever done in your entire life, but at the end of the day, it’s all worth it. And if you do a great job, they will be your biggest advocate for you.”

The lesson? Don’t let initial complexity deter you from potentially lucrative markets. What seems like a barrier to entry can become a competitive advantage once mastered.

5. Expand Within Your Strength

Once Meroxa established success with defense contracts, they discovered broader opportunities: “The government isn’t just defense… Department of Energy, that’s at the federal level, right? Like there’s state and local and municipal and county. There’s so many different ways that you can get involved in it.”

This approach of expanding within a proven market, rather than immediately jumping to new ones, has led to sustained growth. DeVaris projects that in a few years, their revenue split will be “60% to 70% government, 30% to 40% commercial.”

6. Focus on Execution Over Competition

Perhaps the most important lesson from Meroxa’s journey is their relentless focus on execution. Rather than getting caught up in competitive analysis or market trends, DeVaris advocates for a simpler approach: “Just get in and do great work and don’t pay attention to timelines and what other competitors are doing… Just go in and do your job and do it at the best levels because it’s literally a faucet that never stops flowing.”

This focus on execution over everything else has helped Meroxa build a sustainable business while many startups chase quick wins and rapid growth at the expense of fundamentals.

These lessons challenge conventional startup wisdom and offer a different perspective on building a successful B2B company. While the typical Silicon Valley playbook emphasizes rapid scaling and enterprise sales, Meroxa’s journey shows that sustainable growth can come from unexpected places – if you’re willing to look where others aren’t and execute at a high level.