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Comment by hdivider | Hacker News Reader

Good stuff. Niche idea for ya: consider government contractors. Gov sites tend to be atrocious. Manual change tracking can mean you find a $1M RFP weeks earlier, which increases chance of winning. (Consider mda.mil. There's no email signup. What they consider a 'newsletter' is in fact a list of PDFs hosted on their site.)

And that's federal gov contracting. State/local is even more of a Wild West. So much so that many, maany companies just never have the bandwidth to even find RFPs and navigate those ancient sites.

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While that may be true if contractors/competitors for contracts were generally unaware of the contract until posting, that’s usually not the reality. A lot of government contracting advice from experienced contractors is that if you’re discovering it via a public source (i.e. the website) you’re too late.

This I am afraid is not true either, though. I know many dual-use companies who discovered an RFP (not just on SAM), late -- i.e. with a proposal deathmarch -- and got through.

My understanding is that those scenarios are the exception, and finding obscure contracts that have gone undiscovered isn’t really an untapped fount of free, missed, opportunity.

That said, aggregators like bonfire etc. can get you pretty far if that’s your strategy!

Yeah it's probably true that such things are the exception. But for a startup, a chance at e.g. a $256k SBIR Phase I and then $1.9M Phase II and the modern follow-on options in e.g. the Army (called the CATALYST program and other things) -- this one exception turns the company into something real.

So because the amounts are large (compared to commercial, in terms of when a customer first buys from a small company), those cases really make a huge difference.

Oh yeah, grants are great, but a completely different beast!

I have to counter yet again, apologies. :) SBIRs yes are considered grants, but I've seen the same phenomenon for e.g. CRADAs and OTAs. Functionally this is all similar: we find them often on bad gov websites, and an automated tool to track changes can greatly help many companies to win them.

How can you be "too late?" Isn't the point of RFP postings that they're the first step in a process of soliciting proposals (bids) for the requested project? They're certainly not supposed to be granted on any kind of first-come, first-served basis... combatting that sort of corrupt insider dealing is the whole reason there are legal requirements to post them in the first place. So while I don't doubt the premise of your cynical truism that "if you're discovering it via a public source you're too late," I hope that this is a separate issue from the RFP process itself, because any project where that's the case must be a project where the RFP was meaningless in the first place. And that behavior is also explicitly illegal, even if it's unfortunately prevalent and infrequently prosecuted.

Funny how much better government might get if we just let their employees post on Craigslist

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