I
Federal contracting · The whole contract, start to finish · Ongoing

LastAwarded

The problem

A federal contract is one continuous job and it is run in pieces. The opportunity sits in one government system, the bid in a folder, the award in an email, the agreements under it in a filing cabinet, the money in a spreadsheet, and the recompete in somebody's memory. By the time an audit asks for the record, or an option year runs out, the thread has already been dropped.

The constraintPublic sources only. No private lists, no inside knowledge, and an estimate is labelled as an estimate.

What I did

Founder, product architect, designer and engineer. The twelve-feed pipeline, the entity resolution, the scoring, the contract and agreement models, the money ledger, the interface, the course and the subscription layer.

Scale
  • 83.2M+ awards on record
  • 1,012 six-digit industry codes
  • 18 months of warning on a recompete
  • 8 facts on every pursuit
ArchitectureLastAwardedI
  1. 01Ingest twelve public award, notice, rule and budget feeds
  2. 02Normalise them into one vocabulary: the moat is the cleaning
  3. 03Resolve entities, one record per vendor under every spelling
  4. 04Six questions answered for any code, eight facts on any pursuit
  5. 05Award history by buyer and incumbent, back to 2001
  6. 06Recompete radar: the rule lands a year before the solicitation
  7. 07Price-to-win from what the government actually paid
  8. 08Vehicles, labor rates and the budget lines behind a buy
  9. 09Bid worksheet, compliance matrix and capture plan to write against
  10. 10The contract run after the win, and the agreements underneath it
  11. 11The money against the contract, with the record an audit asks for
  12. 12Win and loss tracked against what was actually bid
  13. 13Search you can type a sentence into, and briefs in plain words
  14. 14A twelve-module course for anyone who has never sold to the government

Everything you need to win and run federal contracts, in one place.

One system for the whole of it, start to finish: find the opportunity, capture it, write and price the bid, win it, run the contract and the agreements under it, track the money with the records ready for an audit, and be ready for the recompete. For any company that sells to the federal government, from one person to a contracts organization with many teams.

The government publishes everything it buys, going back to 2001, and it is all but unreadable. This reads twelve of those published feeds and joins them so one industry code answers six questions at once and every pursuit carries eight facts: who buys this, who has been winning it, what it went for, whether you can perform it, who to call first, and whether to pursue it or walk away.

The timing is the point. A recompete you hear about when the solicitation drops is one you have already lost, and the rule that shapes a buy lands about a year before the solicitation does. Both are in here, alongside price-to-win from what the government actually paid, the vehicle the work runs on, the labor rates on the schedule and the budget line behind it.

What happens after the win is the half that usually goes missing. The award, the modifications, the agreements underneath it and every dollar against it stay on one record, so what did we agree to and what has it cost is a single place rather than four, and the record an audit asks for is already written. Win and loss are tracked against what was actually bid rather than what was hoped for.

The hard part was never the code. The moat is the cleaning: the parsed history, one record per vendor under every spelling of its name, and being willing to say a number is an estimate when it is an estimate.

Continue.

§ 02 · Traverse
Where to next

LewisDe La Paz

Independent practice

Colophon
TypeFraunces · Instrument Serif · Inter Tight · JetBrains Mono
PaletteCream · Obsidian · Oxblood · Saffron
BuiltBy hand, in the open
RuntimeShared hosting · No third-party trackers
MotionLenis smooth scroll · WebGL atmosphere · Reduced-motion honored