Learn

Field notes on running a grants and RFP radar

We spend our weeks watching grants and RFPs land — and watching the teams that catch them. These are the playbooks, scorecards, and source breakdowns we wish someone had handed us when we started.

• Sourcing

  How to actually find new federal grants before your competitors do

  Most teams hear about a grant the week it gets posted to the agency mailing list. Here's how the teams that win the same grants found out two and a half weeks earlier — and the alert hygiene that gets you there.

  9 min read

• Triage

  The RFP scorecard we use to triage 40 opportunities a week down to the 3 worth pursuing

  Most teams either chase everything (and lose to focus) or chase nothing (and miss the obvious wins). Here is the scorecard we run every Monday — including the four dimensions that matter, the weights we use, and the kill criteria.

  11 min read

• Sources

  Grants.gov vs SAM.gov vs commercial scrapers: an honest 2026 breakdown

  Which source actually finds what, how stale the data is, and where each one falls down in practice. Includes the failure modes we have personally lost grants to.

  12 min read