Built for the contractor who does not have a proposal team

Who built it

Watch my introduction1:09

I'm Moses Ganiyu. I spent over a decade in the public sector, as a principal statistician, a business intelligence analyst in a capital planning department, a certified IT database administrator, and a data quality assurance specialist. I worked with capital budgets and contracts, and I learned how much important detail lives in documents few people have time to read, and how easily one missed change becomes an expensive mistake.

I've also built large-scale data platforms in the private sector. I hold a bachelor's degree in statistics, a master's in data science, and postgraduate certificates in cloud computing and generative AI from The University of Texas at Austin.

InstantSam combines all of it: an inside understanding of how public contracts and budgets work, and the discipline to check every page. If a review misses something, I want to know. Email me directly at talktomoses@instantsam.com.

The problem is not finding work

There is no shortage of tools that will tell you a contract exists. SAM.gov itself is free, and many services will email you a list of new notices every morning. Finding opportunities was solved a long time ago.

The problem is what comes next. A listing gives you a title, an agency and a deadline. The actual requirements live in the attachments: the Statement of Work, the submission instructions, the evaluation criteria, the clauses that quietly disqualify you if you miss them. A large solicitation can run to hundreds of pages.

Large contractors solve this by employing people whose entire job is to read. If you are a five-person company, that work lands on the owner, at night, after the real work is done. Often it does not get done at all, and a bid gets skipped that might have been won.

What it does

Every hour, InstantSam checks SAM.gov for new solicitations, presolicitations and sources sought notices, so the opportunity list stays current. When you ask for a document review, it downloads up to fifteen of the attachments, PDF, Word or spreadsheet, and reads them, up to 150,000 characters of each and 400,000 in all. What comes back is a briefing: scope of work, mandatory requirements, submission instructions, evaluation criteria, risks, red flags, and a bid or no-bid read.

Around that sit the things you need to act on it. Award history from USAspending.gov, so you know who holds the work now, what they were paid, and when their term ends. The contracting officers who buy what you sell. Alerts when something matching is posted. A calendar of the response deadlines and questions cutoffs on the work you are chasing.

How we think about the AI

The analysis is grounded in the documents. If something is not in the documents it read, InstantSam is instructed to say so rather than invent it. That constraint matters more than it sounds: a confident, wrong summary of an RFP is worse than no summary, because you would act on it.

It is a research assistant, not a decision maker. It reads faster than you and it never gets tired, but the bid is still yours to call, and the solicitation is still the authority. Read the source document before you submit.

Where the data comes from

Federal opportunities and entity registrations come from SAM.gov, and award and spending history from USAspending.gov. Grants come from Grants.gov, SBIR and STTR topics from the Department of Defense, requests for quotation from DLA DIBBS, ceiling labor rates from GSA CALC+, and planned purchases from the federal Forecast of Contracting Opportunities and the City of Boston. State and local bids come from eight state and city purchasing portals. All of it is public information that government publishes. InstantSam is an independent product. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to SAM.gov, the General Services Administration, any federal agency, or any state or local government.

When InstantSam gets something wrong

Every line of a compliance checklist quotes the sentence of the solicitation it came from, and a review quotes the documents where a requirement is precise, so a wrong reading can be checked against the source. If you find one, write to support@instantsam.com with the notice number and what looks wrong. A person answers within one business day, compares the reading with the documents, and corrects InstantSam where the fault is ours.