If you're new to government contracting, it can be daunting to get started.
There are a lot of websites, many of which are old and hard to navigate, and it's hard to read through the noise within all of them. So here's a guide for anyone who's new to the space on how to actually find government contracts.
Start with SAM.gov
SAM.gov is the number one (and notoriously frustrating) website for finding federal contracts. Before you can bid on anything, you'll need a UEI — that's a separate process, worth its own post.
Once you're registered, here's the actual search flow:
- Navigate to the search bar and filter for "Contracting" and "Contract Opportunities."
- Use the side panel on the left to narrow your search — NAICS code, keywords, dates, location, and a handful of other parameters.
- Run the search. You'll get a list of opportunities matching your query.
- Click into any opportunity and download its documents to figure out if it's actually relevant to you.
- If it is, use those documents to put together your proposal and send it to the contracting officer listed on the notice.
That's the whole loop. Simple in theory. In practice, this is where most people get stuck.
The bottlenecks
- SAM.gov is a keyword search engine, not a fit engine. Unless you get extremely specific with your query, you're either drowning in irrelevant results or missing opportunities entirely because your keywords didn't match the exact language in the notice.
- There's no notification layer. SAM.gov updates every day, but there's no alert system telling you something new and relevant just posted. You either check manually and often, or you miss it.
- You have to read the documents to know if you're actually eligible. A lot of solicitations bury one-off clauses like a certification requirement, a size standard, a geographic restriction, that quietly disqualify you. Skimming the summary isn't enough. You have to read the attachments every time.
None of these are dealbreakers on their own. But stack them together across dozens of searches a week, and you end up with a BD analyst spending most of their time on manual research instead of actually pursuing opportunities. Some smaller firms just offload this to an intern too.
Where Capto comes in
This is the exact gap we built Capto to close.
Capto ingests your company profile (NAICS codes, past performance, certifications, set-asides) and runs that search for you, every day, without you having to remember to check. It also works at the document level: we actually open and read the attachments on each opportunity, and compare them against your capability statements and past performances to flag whether you're a real fit before you spend time on it.
The goal isn't to replace the judgment call on whether to bid. It's to make sure the opportunities that reach you are worth that judgment call in the first place.
If you're new to GovCon and still figuring out where to look, I'd start with the manual process above because it's worth understanding how the raw search actually works. But once you're doing it daily, you'll feel the bottlenecks yourself pretty quickly.