Step 1: Map Your Customers Before You Do Anything Else

You will be tempted to start applying for SAM.gov contracts that are asking for your product. DO NOT DO THIS. The vast majority of these contracts are shaped by other companies and have already been won. Thus, you need to play by their rules and do the same. You need to know exactly who inside the government cares about what you build, who has money for it and who has the authority to champion it.

The Department of War is the largest organization in the world employing roughly 3 million people. There are hundreds of program offices, each with its own priorities, funding amounts and buying authority. Your first job is to find the handful that have an obligation and money to buy your shiny thing.

Start with Steve Blank's directory here, which maps the entire DoW acquisition structure by portfolio and office. Work through it systematically. For each office that seems relevant, you want to know: what is their stated mission, what programs are they currently running, who leads them, and what have they bought recently.

What you are building is a target account list, the same way a commercial sales team would. Except here, your accounts are Portfolio Acquisition Executives, program managers, and contracting officers rather than VP of Engineering titles.

Step 2: Understand the Contracting Structure

Once you know who your buyers are, you need to understand the mechanics of how they actually purchase things. This is where most founders get stuck. The government cannot simply wire you money because a general you stopped at a conference said “good work” to your demo. Every purchase has to flow through a contract vehicle, a legally established mechanism that authorizes the government to buy from companies. If you do not have a contract vehicle, you cannot get paid, regardless of how much your end users want what you build.

The traditional path: FAR-based contracting

Most of the Department of War still runs on the Federal Acquisition Regulation. The standard FAR-based process runs from Request for Information (RFI) to Request for Proposal (RFP) to award, a cycle that routinely takes one to three years. It was designed for large defense programs with established requirements, long timelines, and prime contractors.

As a startup, you do not have the bandwidth to compete on these. A full FAR-based RFP response can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in proposal preparation, require compliance infrastructure you have not built, and you will most likely lose to an incumbent who has held the relationship for a decade. 

The good news is that the government has spent the last several years building faster on-ramps specifically designed for commercial companies. The three that matter most for startups are SBIRs, CSOs, and OTAs.

SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research)

SBIRs are the most startup-friendly entry point into government contracting. The federal government deploys roughly $4 billion through SBIRs annually. The DoW publishes every open SBIR request publicly here. Each topic represents a specific problem an end customer funded and is motivated to solve. If a program office is writing SBIR topics in your area, they have budget, they have a documented problem, and they are actively looking for a company to hand money to.

The program runs in three phases, and each one serves a different purpose. Phases I and Phase II are one-time grants. Phase III awards you a contract vehicle.

Phase I awards typically range from $50,000 to $250,000 for a six to twelve month period of work. The output is usually a feasibility study, a white paper, or a proof-of-concept demo. Taken in isolation, Phase I money won’t make your business overnight but it gets you in the room to start building relationships and hearing real problems. Winning a Phase I means a program office has formally validated that your approach to their problem is worth investigating. 

Phase II awards range around $750,000-$2,000,000 for a two-year period of work. Phase II work almost always requires active prototyping, usually involving direct collaboration with an actual DoD unit or end user. You are building and iterating in front of a real customer, which means you are simultaneously developing the product and developing the champions inside the bureaucracy who will eventually advocate for buying it at scale. If you win one of these, it’s critical you execute on it well.

Phase III is the transition. Unlike Phase I and II, Phase III is not a grant and it does not draw from the SBIR program's own research funds. It is procurement money, typically allocated by a Portfolio Acquisition Executive from their own program budget. What Phase III gives you is a contract vehicle from which anyone across the DoW can legally buy from you directly, without needing to run a new competition or spin up a new contract. They route their procurement funds straight to your Phase III. There is no ceiling on Phase III contract value. Find every customer with budget and a need, and sell.

Anduril is a golden example of mastering this playbook by using their early SBIRs to transact over $445 million on their Phase III’s.

CSO (Commercial Solutions Opening) is a faster contracting method that lets program offices buy commercial technology without a full FAR-based procurement process. Submissions are typically a whitepaper or a short pitch video rather than a formal proposal. Program offices can now award a follow-on production OTA directly from a successful CSO, which speeds up the path to a production contract. OTA awards are negotiated as commercial agreements rather than FAR contracts, meaning your IP and data rights are actually negotiable rather than defaulting to the government's broad data rights position. SBIRs are a great way to get your foot in the door, CSO -> OTA is another great way to start generating real revenue quickly from the federal government.

OTA (Other Transaction Authority) is the most flexible vehicle of the three. OTAs allow the government to contract for prototype development outside the standard FAR framework entirely, which means faster execution, fewer compliance requirements, and more room to negotiate deal terms. The current administration has pushed hard to expand OTA usage, and most of the interesting early-stage defense contracts are now flowing through this mechanism.

One dynamic worth understanding: the current administration has made it significantly easier for end users, meaning the soldiers, analysts, or operators who would actually use your product, to pull technology toward themselves. A unit with a documented pain point can now organize demonstrations and rapid evaluations much faster than the traditional acquisition process used to allow.

Step 3: Find Your End Users and Get in Front of Them

Program offices control who gets the contract and end users create the demand. Think of program offices like a parent doing the family grocery shopping on someone else's dime. They get a list of requirements and a budget, and they decide which brand of eggs, which clothes, which gear to buy. But if the kids at home are loudly enthusiastic about one specific brand of eggs, that preference carries weight in the selection. End users are the kids. Their advocacy changes the outcome.

The fastest path to a contract is finding the operator, analyst, or warfighter who genuinely needs what you build, getting them to use it, and letting them become your internal champion inside the bureaucracy.

The way you find these people is by going where they gather. There is a circuit of industry days, demonstrations, and conferences where government buyers and operators show up specifically to see what commercial technology exists. AFWERX, NSIN, DIU demo days, and service-specific innovation events are the most accessible entry points. Show up with your demonstration and results in hand, blow them away and they will help find the right stakeholders for you to talk to. Always always always ask how they buy things, figure out if you’re talking to the person with the pain point or the money.