Watch the original Substack video, or listen below while you read.

If you’re only searching SAM.gov, you’re looking at a percentage of the federal opportunities relevant to you. Probably less if you sell anything innovative.

An increasing amount of business opportunity is sitting inside a sprawling network of Other Transaction Authority (OTA) consortiums, innovation marketplaces, and DIU-style pathways — most of which never surface on SAM.gov as opportunities. They show up only as awards, after the fact, in a tab most contractors don’t know exists.

This Week’s Federalytics walk through how to find them, how to verify the marketplace is real before you pay a membership fee (yes, some of them charge you), and a question from one of our GovClose students that gets to the heart of how this game is actually played.

The marketplace problem

A student recently asked me about a site called One Nation Innovation — onenationinnovation.org. They host something called a “Challenge Marketplace” with active opportunities like:

• Soldier Experimentation Data Fabric Prototype

• Enterprise War Room Command and Control Prototype

• Telemetry Antenna Radome

• Digital Forge Anvil

• Kansas City District Rapid User-Centered AV Design and Deployment Prototype

When I see a site like this, the first question I always ask is: is this real, or is this a company aggregating opportunities and slapping a marketplace label on it?

One Nation Innovation isn’t a government agency. It’s a nonprofit under contract with the government — which is exactly how a lot of OTA consortiums are structured. They get put on contract, then they host challenges, then they put companies on contract/subcontract through that vehicle. Fast. Often outside the Federal Acquisition Regulations (AKA Other Transaction Authority (OTA))

So how do you verify it before you invest time (or money)?

The SAM.gov tab almost no one uses

Here’s the workflow.

Go to SAM.gov. Log in (you have to be logged in now — that’s one of the big changes since they absorbed FPDS). Click Contracting → Contract Awards.

You’ll see the standard search interface. Most people stop here. But there’s a tab next to “Awards” labeled Other Transactions. Click it. See the attached video for a complete breakdown.

This is where the OTA awards live. Search by awardee, dollar range, or date.

When I plugged in “One Nation Innovation,” I saw a $25.4 million award against a total contract ceiling of $36 million. That’s the consortium being funded by the government to run their marketplace. The individual challenges they host are awarded through that vehicle to companies who respond.

Translation: the marketplace is real. The awards are flowing. It’s worth my time.

If I’d searched only the standard “Contract Awards” tab, I would have found nothing on them and assumed it was vapor.

A brief detour on OTA history

OTAs aren’t new. They were created during the Space Race when we needed to buy things faster than the FAR allowed. The framework lets the government bypass normal acquisition rules for prototyping, research, and innovative work — and the Department of War (formerly DoD) has been doubling down on OTAs hard over the last 18 months.

A few things worth knowing if you’re new to this:

• OTAs are not grants. They are contracts. (SBIRs aren’t grants either, by the way — common misconception.)

• The application bar is often dramatically lower than a traditional RFP. Some OTA challenges ask for a 500-word solution description. Some DIU pathways want a three-to-five page essay. Compare that to spending six weeks writing a full proposal.

• Because of how fast the process moves, relationships matter less on the front end than they do with traditional FAR-based contracts. You can often apply cold and still get serious consideration.

That last point matters. The traditional “build the relationship first, win the contract second” playbook still applies for most federal sales — but OTAs are one of the few places where a strong technical submission can carry you without prior relationship equity.

Finding more consortiums

One Nation Innovation is one of dozens. To find the others, I do something embarrassingly low-tech: I Google “OTA consortium list.”

The MITRE list is the most comprehensive. From there, I click through the consortiums that align with what my client or my own portfolio is targeting. Healthcare consortium. Counter-WMD consortium. Defense Electronics consortium. Robotics-adjacent. There are dozens, and most have a public membership directory you can scan to see if your potential teaming partners — or competitors — are already inside.

A few diligence checks I run on every consortium before joining:

1. Membership fee. Some are free. Some are $250/year. Some are several thousand. Know what you’re paying for.

2. Open opportunities count. Some consortiums look impressive on paper and have one forecasted opportunity for Q4 2027. That’s not worth a membership fee.

3. Award history. Cross-reference the consortium name in SAM.gov’s Other Transactions tab. If they’re not making awards, the marketplace is dead even if the website looks active.

4. Member list. Who’s already in there? If the list is full of companies that look like yours, the consortium is real. If it’s a ghost town, move on.

DIU is the other one to watch

The Defense Innovation Unit uses OTAs as their primary contracting pathway, and they don’t charge a membership fee. Right now they have three open solicitations including Project Titan Core — modular data centers for AI compute at the tactical edge. That’s a meaningful program. The application is a short essay, and if you make it through the first cut, you fly out and pitch in person.

I went through the DIU process myself years ago. We submitted three pages against a five-page max, made the cut, and ended up presenting in Silicon Valley. That’s how fast the OTA pathway can move when you’re aligned to the right problem.

A question from inside the GovClose program

On a recent coaching call, one of our certified graduates — Harold — asked a question that I think a lot of you will recognize. Harold’s already won a contract with the Army (about nine months after starting our program) and he runs a consulting practice on the side as a CMMC expert, which is going to be one of the most in-demand skill sets in the federal small business space for the next several years.

His question was this: “There’s a contract I’m tracking that’s coming up for recompete. How do I actually broach the subject with the contracting officer? Can I just ask? Do I have to be subtle about it? What’s the protocol?”

The honest answer is: yes, you can just ask. Government acquisition professionals have a mandate at certain points in the acquisition lifecycle to talk to industry — and most contracting officers are happy to take the conversation if you approach it correctly and before the solicitation drops. Once the solicitation is out, the rules tighten dramatically because anything they tell you that they don’t tell other bidders becomes grounds for a protest. So the window is pre-solicitation. That’s when you call. That’s when you email.

What you ask is straightforward:

• “I’ve been tracking this contract. It’s a three-year vehicle and I’m not seeing anything yet on SAM. Are you planning to recompete?”

• “If so, do you have a sense of when, and what vehicle you’re using — GSA, NASA SEWP, something else?”

• “Is the funding still in place, or has the requirement changed?”

Three questions. Each one of them potentially saves you weeks of wasted pursuit work.

Here’s what most people miss: even if the contracting officer can’t tell you everything, anything they do tell you reshapes your strategy. “We’re extending it a year” means you’ve got time. “We’re moving it to GSA Schedule 70” means you need to either get on a schedule or partner with someone who’s already there. “Funding got cut” means stop pursuing it today.

And the cautionary version of this — the one I’ve seen burn incumbents repeatedly — is when a current contractor has the work, lets it ride for three years without staying in close communication with the program office, and then finds out the office moved to a different vehicle and the incumbent isn’t on it. They get squeezed out of their own renewal. Just because they didn’t stay in the conversation.

If you’re an incumbent right now, the highest-leverage thing you can do this quarter is reach out to your program office and ask if everything you’re delivering is still working for them. That single conversation is the best government sales play I know.

If you want to go deeper

Harold’s question is the kind of thing we work through every week on our GovClose coaching calls — real situations, real contracts, with the structure of how to actually move from “tracking an opportunity” to “winning the contract.”

If you’ve been reading Federalytics for a while and you’re starting to think seriously about whether a structured program would compress your timeline, our team runs short conversations with anyone curious about the certification — no pressure, no pitch deck, just a straight conversation about whether the program is the right fit for what you’re trying to build. You can request one from GovClose.com.

The graduates who get the most out of it tend to fall into one of 3 camps:

1. People with an established commercial business that want to create government contract revenue

2. People building consulting practices around federal contracting expertise.

3. People taking account executive roles inside companies that sell to the government.

A surprising number of our students and graduates play in multiple areas of government contracting. Harold, for instance, has a government contract and also provides consulting work to companies, creating multiple streams of income.

The bottom line

If you’re only searching SAM.gov, you’re seeing a fraction of the opportunity landscape. The OTA universe is where a lot of the innovation dollars are flowing right now, and the gap between “people who know how to navigate it” and “people who don’t” is widening fast.

Do the work this week:

1. Log into SAM.gov, click the Other Transactions tab, and search for awards in your space over the last 90 days.

2. Google “OTA consortium list” and pull the MITRE list.

3. Pick three consortiums aligned to your offering and run them through the four-step diligence above.

4. Bookmark DIU’s open solicitations page.

You’ll likely surface two or three opportunities you didn’t know existed. That’s the floor on what this exercise produces, every time I’ve run it with a student.

The contracts are out there. They’re just not where most people are looking.

— Rick

Federalytics is a newsletter on federal contracting strategy, market intelligence, and how to actually win in the public sector. Subscribe at federalytics.substack.com. Watch the full video walkthrough on the GovClose YouTube channel.

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