About
The software taught us the market. The market showed us what still needs people.
01Origin
What we kept seeing
Selling software to government contractors means spending a great deal of time inside their operations. You see the pipeline, the capture process, the tooling, and the places where good companies lose time they cannot bill.
After enough of those conversations, the same handful of problems kept appearing. Not exotic ones. Ordinary, expensive, fixable ones. Some of them a product can solve. Others need someone to sit down and build the specific thing that company needs.
None of it is hard in a technical sense. These problems persist because of who is available to fix them. A firm large enough to staff a proposal team is too expensive to hire for a website, and a product priced for a thousand seats is never going to be shaped around the way one company works.
So the work sits. Eventually it gets absorbed by whoever has the least billable week, which is usually the person you can least afford to pull off delivery.
Mission Services is the second category. It exists so that the answer to a real operational problem does not have to be a license for software that was designed for somebody else, or a quote written for a budget nobody has.
What kept coming up
- 01Websites that undersell the companyBuilt when the company was half the size, or built from a template that had no idea what a capability statement was.
- 02Work held together by spreadsheetsCritical operations running in shared workbooks with no history, no permissions and one person who understands them.
- 03Tools that do not fit small contractorsEnterprise software priced and shaped for organizations ten times larger, bought because nothing else existed.
- 04Proposal load falling on delivery staffThe person who understands the technical solution is also the person billing on current contracts.
- 05Vendor economics that do not workQuotes written for a budget the company does not have, from firms whose overhead has to be paid by someone.
02How we work
Why the economics work
The economics only work because the structure is small. One person carries the architecture and the build, which removes the layer most firms spend your budget on and removes the translation loss between the person who understood the problem and the person who writes the code.
The honest limit of that is capacity, not capability. What narrows the gap is method rather than headcount: current frameworks, AI-assisted development and patterns already built and shipped, which is how one builder now carries work that used to occupy a team.
What this is not: a staffing arrangement. We do not place people into your organization by the hour, and we will not claim a standing engineering bench we do not have.
Founder-led core
Architecture, build and delivery. The same person from first call to handover.
Modern methods
A small team ships at the pace of a larger one because the tooling has changed. We build with current frameworks and AI-assisted development rather than billing the hours those used to take.
Your team
We work against your people and processes rather than around them, and we hand back code and documentation you own.
03Built, not just advised
We ship our own software
The same people who would build your system build and operate production software of our own. Applications with real users and real uptime expectations. Document processing. Organizational knowledge systems. Procurement workflows, dashboards, geospatial interfaces, and the cloud infrastructure underneath all of it.
That is the whole argument for hiring us rather than a firm that only advises. Every opinion on this site about how software should be delivered came from having delivered it and having lived with the result.
04Who you deal with
The name behind the work
Jack McGowanFounder
Built and shipped software into the government contracting market before starting this service line, and still writes the code that goes out.
A site that promises founder-led delivery should say who the founder is. If you engage us, this is the person who scopes the work, writes the code and answers the phone. When something falls outside what we do well, we say so at the start rather than working it out on your budget.
- Started
- 2025, Oklahoma City
- Based
- Atlanta, GA
- Also works from
- Oklahoma City, OK
- Philadelphia, PA
- Delivery
- Founder-led, end to end
05Contracting
Contractor details
- UEI
- YK4VDHV3QSJ5
- CAGE
- 1Z7P6
- Business status
- Disability-Owned Business
NAICS
- 541511Custom Computer Programming ServicesPrimary
- 513210Software Publishers
- 541519Other Computer Related Services
- 518210Computing Infrastructure, Data Processing and Hosting
- 541715Research and Development in Engineering and Sciences
PSC
- DA01Application Development Support Services
- DA10Software as a Service
- DH10Platform as a Service
Memberships
- Oklahoma Defense Industry Association (ODIA)
- Consortium Solutions Group (CSG)
Verify in SAM.gov Blacksmith Mission Services is a service line of Blacksmith AI LLC.
Corporate
Blacksmith Mission Services is a service line of Blacksmith AI LLC.
Blacksmith AI builds software products for the government contracting market. Mission Services is the hands-on side: the delivery work, the systems built to order, and the support that a product cannot provide.
If you are looking for software to buy rather than services to engage, Blacksmith AI is the place to start.
Still the fastest way to find out: send us a problem.
We will tell you whether it is something we should build, something you should buy, or something you should leave alone.