We built RFP Planner to solve our own problem first: tracking federal and state contracting opportunities across scattered portals, then actually getting a response drafted before the deadline. It's now a product other small businesses use to run the same process.
The Challenge
Government contracting opportunities live across multiple, inconsistent sources — SAM.gov at the federal level, state-specific portals like Texas's ESBD, and agency-specific postings on top of that. Small businesses without a dedicated business-development team either miss opportunities entirely or burn hours a week manually re-checking portals. And once an opportunity is found, reading a 40-page solicitation to decide whether it's worth pursuing is its own bottleneck.
What We Built
RFP Planner, live at rfpplanner.com, is a multi-organization SaaS platform built around three problems: finding opportunities, understanding them quickly, and tracking a response through to submission.
Automated opportunity discovery
A pluggable fetcher architecture pulls live opportunities from SAM.gov and the Texas Electronic State Business Daily (ESBD) on a scheduled Celery job, normalizing each into a common record — solicitation number, opportunity type, set-aside code, place of performance, and NAICS codes — and matching results against each organization's tracked interests automatically, with no manual searching required.
AI-generated executive summaries
Solicitation documents arrive as dense PDFs and Word files. RFP Planner extracts the full text and sends it to an LLM to generate a plain-language executive summary of what the opportunity actually asks for — turning a document nobody has time to read cover-to-cover into something a business owner can evaluate in under a minute.
A real pipeline, not just a bookmark list
- Each tracked RFP moves through a customizable, ordered pipeline of stages per organization — identified, pursuing, submitted, won/lost — instead of a flat to-do list.
- Supporting documents attach directly to each RFP record, so a solicitation, an amendment, and an internal draft response all live in one place.
- A business directory helps identify potential teaming partners and subcontractors for a given opportunity.
- Postmark-based email notifications alert a team the moment a new, matching opportunity is found, instead of relying on someone remembering to check.
Because every organization runs its own pipeline configuration, the same platform works whether a company is tracking two opportunities a month or fifty — the workflow scales with the team, not the other way around.
The Result
RFP Planner turns opportunity discovery from a manual, easy-to-miss chore into an automated feed, and turns a dense solicitation into a summary a small business can act on quickly — the same infrastructure CypressBit relies on for its own government contracting pipeline.
It's a pattern we like: build the internal tool to solve a real operational problem first, then harden and package it as a product once we know it actually works under real deadlines — the same path our Transportation I-O Modeling Lab and SMBS platform followed before it.
