Builder's Growth Lab
The podcast where builders, founders, and investors talk AI marketing and customer acquisition for AI builders.
Join us (Conor Douglas, Mallory Loar, Charlie Hernandez) as we talk about the latest AI coding tools, interview the creators building them, and share real builder stories with AI founders. From Claude Code to cutting-edge startups, how to acquire customers for your AI app, we talk about AI code and keep you informed and entertained.
Perfect for builders who want to stay ahead of the AI curve without the hype.
New episodes weekly.
Builder's Growth Lab
Government Money Is Sitting There - Here's Why Most Founders Ignore It | Episode #41
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Most founders building AI products are ignoring a $700B+ market sitting right in front of them: government contracts.
In this episode, Charlie, Conor, and Mallory sit down with Maurice Harari, co-founder and CEO of BidLab, to break down how small and mid-sized businesses can actually compete for and win government RFPs. Maurice shares how his company evolved from a hands-on consulting operation into Bid Banana, an AI-powered platform that matches businesses to relevant bids, estimates ROI, and cuts the time it takes to write a winning proposal.
We get into why most people use AI wrong when writing RFPs (and how that tanks their win rate), the story of a client who bet his last $5,000 on a government contract and walked away with a multi-million dollar deal, and what human oversight actually looks like inside an AI-assisted workflow. We also cover the hosts' takes on OpenAI's Pentagon deal, Jack Dorsey's 40% layoffs at Block, and why 2026 is shaping up to be the year of the AI agent.
If you've never thought about government contracting as a distribution channel, this episode will change that.