New SDB IT firm, solid technical background, zero past performance — those of you who broke in as subs, what actually worked?
Formed an IT/AI services LLC in Illinois this spring after ~6 years building payments infrastructure on AWS at a large bank. Solo for now. SAM registration in, CAGE finalizing, SDB self-certified, AWS SAA certified. Niche is cloud-native development — serverless, containers, and LLM/AI pipeline integration — which seems to be in demand on IT modernization task orders.
Current plan, in order: APEX Accelerator counseling, state/county MBE certifications (Illinois), DSBS profile + prime supplier portals, small commercial contracts to build reference-able past performance, then pursue subcontract/teaming with primes on unclassified task orders. 8(a) is a 2028 target.
For those of you who actually made the jump from "registered and credentialed but no govt past performance" to a first subcontract:
- What was the actual mechanism of your first win — SBLO outreach, industry day, a relationship from a prior job, SubNet, something else?
- As a solo technical founder, did primes take you seriously for 1-2 person task order roles, or did you need a teammate/bench first?
- Anything in my sequence above you'd reorder or drop as a waste of time?
- What do new subs consistently get wrong in their first year that you'd warn me off of?
Happy to share back what works as I go.