SalesPatriot

What do they actually do

SalesPatriot provides a back‑office SaaS platform that helps small manufacturers, resellers, and defense contractors find, prioritize, manage, and bid on Department of Defense (DoD) RFQs. The product continuously ingests DoD solicitations and NSN opportunities, matches them to a firm’s capabilities, and ranks opportunities so teams can focus on the most relevant ones SalesPatriot homepage, manufacturer page.

Teams use SalesPatriot to coordinate internal bid workflows in a central board (procurement, engineering, pricing, production), track required checks for submission, and capture award history and win/loss data to inform future pricing and targeting. The company positions the product for firms that process many RFQs per month and highlights AI‑assisted matching/scoring, prime RFQ ingestion, and analytics; the site shows product screenshots and a demo flow, indicating an active product for early customers manufacturer page, about.

Who are their target customer(s)

• Small manufacturers making NSN‑tied parts for the DoD: They miss relevant solicitations or spend hours manually searching and mapping RFQs to their capabilities, causing slow responses and lost awards. Manufacturer, About
• Contract manufacturers and small defense contractors with lean bid teams: They struggle to decide which opportunities to pursue and to coordinate pricing, engineering, and production before deadlines. Manufacturer
• Distributors and resellers quoting on behalf of multiple suppliers: They must monitor many prime/DoD solicitations and assemble quotes quickly across accounts, which is hard without centralized discovery and tracking. Homepage, Manufacturer
• Capture/proposal managers: Tight timelines, compliance checks, and fragmented information make it easy to miss requirements or submit incomplete bids. Manufacturer
• Small business owners or ops leads growing DoD revenue: They lack clear win/loss data and actionable analytics to choose which product lines or contracts to focus on, leading to wasted effort. About, YC profile

How would they acquire their first 10, 50, and 100 customers

• First 10: Run targeted pilots with warm, high‑fit manufacturers and small contractors from founder/YC networks and inbound demo requests; map their NSNs, show matched RFQs, and document time‑savings and early wins to secure testimonials.
• First 50: Turn pilot learnings into a repeatable onboarding playbook led by a deployment specialist; use case studies to drive referrals, targeted outbound to supplier directories and primes’ small‑business rosters, and close deals at a few relevant trade events with live demos.
• First 100: Add inside sales to handle inbound from content/ads and formalize referrals; build channel/partner integrations (e.g., distributors/primes, ERP/quote tools) to lower setup time while keeping a small deployment team for higher‑touch accounts.

What is the rough total addressable market

Top-down context:

DoD reported roughly $445B in contract obligations to FPDS in FY24—the procurement pool suppliers compete to win; the DoD/NATO catalog contains millions of NSNs (DLA cites “over 8 million active items”), underscoring the volume of part‑level opportunities DoD FPDS, DLA NSN, DAU NSN.

Bottom-up calculation:

There are ~617k U.S. manufacturing businesses; if 3–5% actively sell parts to the DoD and bid on RFQs regularly, that’s ~18k–30k manufacturers, with distributors/resellers adding more, yielding a practical serviceable market in the low tens of thousands of firms. This aligns with federal small‑business contractor counts and dollars (e.g., ~$183B to small businesses government‑wide in FY24), indicating a large base of potential buyers among active DoD suppliers IBISWorld, SBA scorecard, GovSpend summary.

Assumptions:

• A small but material share (3–5%) of U.S. manufacturers actively sell parts to the DoD and respond to multiple RFQs per month.
• Distributors/resellers serving NSN parts add materially to the serviceable customer count.
• Focus is on U.S.-based firms that regularly pursue DoD RFQs rather than the broader global NSN ecosystem.

Who are some of their notable competitors

• Deltek GovWin: Large federal market intelligence and opportunity database for solicitation discovery, spend tracking, and competitor research; overlaps on discovery but geared toward larger enterprises and analyst workflows.
• BidLink: Defense‑focused bid discovery with NSN/part‑number search, saved searches, and award visibility; competes on surfacing DoD opportunities for suppliers.
• GovPurchase: Marketplace and alerting service emphasizing parts/NSN discovery for manufacturers, with daily bid emails and filters; competes on targeted RFQ discovery for small suppliers.
• Sustainment SRM: Supplier relationship and RFQ/bid management for manufacturers; overlaps on centralizing RFQs and internal bid workflows.
• GovSignals: RFP/RFQ automation and AI tools for DoD contractors to speed proposal work and improve compliance; overlaps on automating find‑and‑respond workflows.