About

Federal work shouldn't depend on who has time to search for it.

The government posts thousands of contract notices every week. Many are reserved for small businesses, but finding the ones that fit your trade and your state means searching SAM.gov regularly, and most small firms are too busy doing the work to do that.

The Set-Aside does the searching. Every Monday it sends a short list of open set-asides, early notices and recent awards for one state and one industry, with a link to the official notice for each.

I'm Johan Struijk, the person behind The Set-Aside. I started it because federal agencies reserve a lot of work for small businesses, but the listings sit in one very large database, and a small firm shouldn't need a free afternoon every week to find the few that fit. I'd rather do that search once, carefully, and send the result to everyone it helps.

I'm not a government agency and I'm not affiliated with the SBA or SAM.gov. I read the public listings, and every listing in the newsletter links back to the official notice.

Johan Struijk

Editor, The Set-Aside

Reply to any issue or write to hello@thesetaside.com. It comes straight to me.

How each issue is made

Step 1

Collect

Every new notice is pulled from SAM.gov's public data, the official site where agencies post contract opportunities.

Step 2

Sort

Notices are kept if they're set aside for small businesses, or if they're sources sought notices asking which small firms could do the work. Each one is grouped by state and by industry code.

Step 3

Send

Each subscriber gets the edition for their state and industry on Monday morning, sorted by deadline.

What we never do

Small businesses that register with the government get a lot of email from people pretending to be official. To be clear about who we are:

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