I Built an App the Government Doesn't Want You to See Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

00:00 The US government spent $834 billion on contracts last year, and most small business owners don't even know this money exists. So, I went and built a tool that finds all of these government contracts for you, and it took me only this many minutes to build it. And no, I don't know how to code. I'm just talking to an AI. Let me show you exactly how I built this, and then how you can profit from it as well.

00:21 So, it all starts on sam.gov. This is the federal website where every federal contract gets posted. This website gets 2.2 million visits a month, and it's an ugly website. It's clunky. It's hard to use. But new, amazing deals are posted here every single day. Lawn care, IT, construction, consulting, you name it. But this site is brutal to use. It looks like it was built in 2004.

00:43 Filtering is a nightmare. Most people give up before they ever find anything. So, what I wanted to do is to build something that makes this dead simple. Type in what your business does, pick your state, and see contracts you can actually bid on with dollar amounts. Also, you don't need to be a business owner. If you're an aspiring business owner, that also counts.

01:04 Now, a website like this would normally cost between 10 and 20,000 to build, plus a team of developers, and weeks or months of going back and forth. But instead, I just used Replit Agent 4. Now, AI coding tools have been out for a couple years now, and they're amazing, but they're still kind of clunky. You got to go one step at a time. You describe what you want, you wait, you review, you repeat, you fix it.

01:27 Agent 4 is different because I can have multiple AI agents working on different parts of the app at the same time. One's building the back end that pulls the contract data. One's building the front end that helps people search more efficiently. And then another agent is generating the landing page. And they're all running in parallel. So, it's kind of like managing a team of engineers, except they're always clocked in, no one takes breaks, and they don't talk back.

01:51 So, let's build this together. I'm going to show you exactly how I do what I do, so you can build whatever you want, and maybe you can find some cool government contracts while we're at it. All right, so I'm here in Replit and I wanted to give Replit a really good thorough prompt. So, I went over to Claude and I said, "Claude, I want to build this website that piggybacks on sam.gov.

02:08 It makes it easier to use." I gave it like three simple sentences. Then I said, "Make me a beautiful prompt to give to Replit to make sure that it does a great job." So, here's my prompt. I'm not going to read it all. You can pause and read it yourself if you want. Boom, there's the top part. Boom, there's the bottom part. Boom, there's the last part.

02:27 I don't know what half this stuff means, but looks smart, so I'm going to go with it. And then I just pasted that in there and said, "Build this for me, please." Okay, right here it's asking for my sam.gov API key. Anyone in the world can make an account at sam.gov. Once you do, you just click on account details, then API, then you click generate API key.

02:44 I don't even know what API stands for. You don't need to, either. You just need a big string of numbers and you paste it right here into Replit. All right, there's my key. Now, this key will enable me to pull all the data I need from sam.gov without having to scrape or work around any of their restrictions. So, what you're looking at here is all of those agents that I talked about running in parallel.

03:03 It's generating the front end right here. It's checking something with open API right here. It's talking about proxy routes over here. I have no idea what that is. Front end is generated. Man, this is incredible. Boom! Look at that. Okay, that took about 4 minutes. Wow, the US government spent 834 billion on contracts last year. Find yours. That looks incredible.

03:26 It's really good design. I own a tree trimming business, so this is the preview. This should work as it actually works in real life. Let's go ahead and see if there's a tree trimming contract. Boom! There it is. Posted March 9th, Department of Defense. That's incredible. I mean, look, it even has a quiz. That was probably part of my prompt that I didn't even read, where people can find out if they qualify by answering this quiz.

03:48 They even put a disclaimer here at the bottom. Okay, now if you look at the preview, it looks great, but there's some other things I want to do to it. I would love for it to have a email collection field so people can be notified when new government contracts are posted that meet their filters. So, I'm going to ask Replit to do that. Okay, my prompt is add a way for people to be able to subscribe to get email notifications when new contracts appear that match their filters.

04:13 After they run their first search, show a pop-up that says don't miss out, we'll email you when new listings appear that match your filters. So you can be the first to attack it. After showing that pop-up, also give people the option to do the same across pages they navigate to. Now I'm asking it to add three to five blog posts that will help my site appear better in search results when looking for government contracts.

04:34 And if I want even better search engine optimization, I can click plus here to use a skill and I can do a branding generator, I can do an SEO optimizer, SEO auditor, all kinds of cool things. Here's what's cool about Agent 4. If you click this plus up here, I can ask Replit to have its multiple agents run concurrent tasks. Whereas before you had to wait, wait, wait, wait, wait for Replit to finish the task that it was working on.

05:01 And I'm impatient, I never really liked that. So now, not only will it automatically run concurrent agents without you asking, but if there's something specific you want that it doesn't know about, you can click that plus button and ask him to do it. Okay, now I do like this landing page as it is. This is my one-shot prompt. But I'm going to use this thing called infinite canvas where I can go look at other versions of the same landing page.

05:23 And maybe I'll find one that I like more. So, after clicking canvas, I'm going to click just reimagine. And nothing's permanent here, I can reverse anything. It's just giving me previews of what it might look like. So, explore different approaches, try different layouts, explore different vibes, more like this but better, optimized for usability, show me the opposite of this and surprise me.

05:41 I'm just going to click surprise me. So it says it's going I'm going three different variations of the hero section, which is what you see right here. So, if I swipe over here to the right, I can see the other three versions that it's generating right now. Okay, awesome. Version one, it's calling the opportunity pulse, aka live urgency. 347 contracts are closing this week.

06:02 Don't let them slip away. Ooh, I like that one. Option two is find your lane industry selector, come boring. And option three is proof it works success story. Well, I don't really like that cuz that's not real. I don't want to lie. So, you know what? I think I like the original one the best. So, I like this one the most out of these three, but I I like the one I came up with the most.

06:27 So, I'm going to keep it. So, now the second to last thing I'm going to do is I want it to make a five-slide pitch deck. Let's say, hypothetically, I want to go raise money for this. I want to take everything on this website, put it in a in a PowerPoint because I hate making PowerPoints, and I know you do, too. So, I'm just going to say, "Make a five-slide pitch deck.

06:44 Explain what this tool does, the market size, and how it helps small businesses find set-aside opportunities." Okay? It has the context it needs. Now, it's making the pitch deck. Okay, there it is. There's my pitch deck. Six slides. All right. Boom, boom, boom. Looks amazing. So, if I wanted to go raise money for this, I could use this. And if I want someone on my team to put real human eyes on it and to fix it, they have all these like team sharing abilities where multiple people can work on the same Replit project.

07:11 So, the last step of this process is just to hit publish. Okay, so now I got to think of a name for this business, and the name that Replit automatically assigned it was GovDealFinder, and I kind of like that. So, I'm going to go see if the domain name is available. Oh. And look at that, it is. So, I'm going to spend 12 bucks, buy the domain name, and go ahead and link it to this Replit project, and click publish.

07:33 Boom. So, how cool is this? I wanted to build a business in the government contract space because Google Trends and AHRefs and all these other random tools were screaming at me, there's opportunity here. And also, Replit is a partner of this podcast, so I thought, why don't I just use that tool that I use every day off camera? I personally love it. Why don't I use that tool to build what I want to build anyway and hit record so you guys can hopefully learn something.

07:56 So, if you sign up for Replit with the link in my description, you'll get 10 bucks in credits for free, so you can go build and ship something yourself. And remember, the government hands out almost a trillion dollars a year in contracts and about 200 billion of that is reserved for small businesses. Those are businesses with under 10 employees, even zero employees.

08:14 And most business owners have never even looked at a government contract or even thought about it. So, no matter what you want to build, use Replit Agent for, it's incredible. And if you want to go look at government contracts, check out govdealfiner.com cuz I just built it right in front of you. The website is live. Otherwise, you can go to sam.gov and we all know that's going to be a terrible experience. Anyway, thanks for hanging out in the corner office.