Bidsmith for NYC Procurement

Open bidsmithnyc.com and click Get started. Sign up with Google or with email + a verification code. Pilot access — Bidsmith isn't public yet, but anyone with the URL can sign up.

After sign-up Bidsmith lands you on /welcome and asks which side you're on:

• Contractor— you bid on NYC public-sector work. You'll see Find work, Respond to RFP, and My firm in the nav.
• Agency— you issue RFQs to qualified vendors. You'll see Dashboard, New RFQ, and Vendors in the nav.

Change your mind later via the "Switch to contractor / agency →" link in the footer.

If you picked contractor, Bidsmith routes you through a 4-step wizard at /onboarding:

1. Firm basics — legal name, address, NAICS codes, trades you self-perform.
2. Certifications — NYC M/WBE, NYS M/WBE, DBE, 8(a), SDVOSB, etc. Numbers and expiry dates.
3. Bonding & insurance — single-limit and aggregate bonding, GL / Auto / Umbrella / WC limits.
4. Past performance — a few signature projects with client, value, year, and a short scope description.

Steps 2-4 are skippable (you can come back via Company profile), but the more complete your profile, the better Bidsmith's AI can score matches and draft responses for you. The dashboard shows your completeness percentage and nudges you to fill the gaps.

If you picked agency, Bidsmith routes you straight to the agency dashboard. No mandatory profile — start creating RFQs immediately.

From the top nav, click Dashboard (or open bidsmithnyc.com/agency). You'll see a list of your existing RFQs by status: draft, posted, closed, awarded.

From the dashboard, click + New RFQ. Fill in:

• Project title.The work's name — e.g. "Bronx River Houses Masonry Restoration, Phase 2". Don't paste a URL.
• Agency. NYCHA, DDC, SCA, DOT, etc.
• Procurement method. RFQ for two-step qualifications, CSB for low-bid, RFP for scored.
• Estimate, schedule, M/WBE goal, bonding, insurance.Fill what you know. Anything missing renders as "[AGENCY: SUPPLY THIS]" in the generated RFQ so you can fix it later.
• Drawings & specs. Drag and drop PDFs (up to 30 MB each), or paste public Drive / Dropbox / Box / S3 URLs.

Click Create.

Bidsmith reads your inputs and the uploaded drawings, then generates a complete NYC-standard RFQ in Markdown plus a procurement-flow diagram. This takes 30–90 seconds.

The generated RFQ appears in the Draft RFQ panel. Read every word.The AI is honest about placeholders (it never invents dollar values, dates, or certifications), but boilerplate sections may need editing for your specific agency's conventions. Edit inline in the textarea, then click Approve & publish.

Top-right corner: Find responders. Bidsmith ranks vendors in your database against this RFQ — bonding capacity, M/WBE status, trade alignment, past performance. Vendors with red "blocked" badges fail a hard requirement and can't be invited.

Check the box next to each vendor you want to invite (high scorers are pre-checked). The right column shows whyeach got their score, so you can override the model where it's wrong about your project. Click Notify selected at the bottom of the page. Each vendor gets an email with a private link to their draft response.

Back on the RFQ page, you can see which invited firms have opened their draft, run pre-flights, and completed sections. Bids close on whatever Bids due date you set during intake.

After sign-in with your contractor role, you land on Find work — your contractor dashboard. It shows three things:

• "Have an RFP? Start a response" — the primary CTA. Drops you into the upload flow.
• Invitation inbox — drafts started for you by agencies that invited your firm directly.
• RFPs matched to your company — the auto-discovery panel (next step).

The matches panel pulls fresh solicitations from City Record Online (the City's official procurement notice publication) and scores each one against your firm profile via Claude. To run it the first time:

1. Click Sync CROL — pulls the latest 1,000 solicitations into Bidsmith. ~3 seconds.
2. Click Refresh — scores them against your profile in batches. ~10–20 seconds for the first 100.

Top 5 with a fit score ≥ 40 show with a colored score pill (green = strong fit, amber = moderate, grey = stretch), the agency, procurement method, posted date, and a one-sentence rationale from the AI. Click the CROL link on any row to read the full official notice. Refreshing again later catches new postings — cached scores cost nothing to re-read.

Either pick an auto-discovered RFP (open the CROL link to confirm details, then come back and click Have an RFP?) or use one you already have from PASSPort / an agency portal / an email. Both paths converge:

• Click Have an RFP? Start a response on the dashboard or go to /respond.
• Paste the RFP PDF (drag & drop, up to 30 MB) or paste its public link.
• Bidsmith parses the document into structured intake fields (agency, method, dates, M/WBE goal, bonding, scope) — 30–90 seconds. Review and correct any field the model misread, then click Continue.

Or, if an agency invited you directly: they sent you an email titled "Bid invitation: [project title]". Open it and click Open your draft response. Critical:sign in with the exact email the invitation was sent to — Bidsmith verifies ownership before granting access. Wrong email = "Wrong account" page; sign out and retry.

The workspace has four tabs across the top. Start with Eligibility. The tab has two panels stacked.

Top panel — Pre-flight eligibility. Click Run check. Bidsmith compares your firm's profile (bonding, certifications, VENDEX, past performance) against the RFQ's hard requirements. Outcomes:

• Eligible — you can bid.
• Conditional — you can bid, but one or more requirements are borderline (e.g. bonding capacity close to the threshold). Read the notes.
• Ineligible — you fail a hard requirement (e.g. missing required certification). The notes tell you what to fix.

Bottom panel — Pursuit analysis (SWOT). Click Run SWOT analysis. This is the should question to eligibility's canquestion — even if you're eligible, should you pursue? Bidsmith generates a go / consider / skip verdict plus four quadrants — Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats — each with concrete actions specific to this RFQ × your firm. Cached on the response, so re-reads are free. Click Regenerateif the analysis feels stale after you've updated your firm profile.

Click Generate draft. AI writes a complete five-section bid response using your firm profile and past performance: Project Understanding, Approach, Schedule, Key Personnel, Past Performance. 30–60 seconds.

Read every section. Edit each one to add specifics, fix language, or remove anything the AI got wrong. Click Approve sectionon each. You'll see 1/5 approved → 5/5 approved as you go.

The AI will never invent past projects, awards, or people your firm doesn't actually have. If a section feels thin, that means your firm profile is thin for this scope — you can edit the section to add real detail, or acknowledge the gap honestly.

If the RFQ requires M/WBE participation, click Build plan. AI proposes certified sub commitments — names, cert numbers, scopes, dollar allocations — that meet or exceed the goal. Review and edit. For each proposed sub, AI also drafts a commitment-letter request you can send to that firm to lock in their participation.

Click Run pre-flight. Bidsmith checks every hard requirement: bonding, insurance limits, M/WBE plan against goal, VENDEX status, mandatory walkthrough attendance, federal SAM.gov exclusion list, NYC debarment list. Each check is pass / fail / warn. Every check must pass before you can download.

Once all three gates are green — narrative approved, compliance passing, M/WBE plan built — the Download submission package button activates. Click it. You get a .zip containing:

• bid-package.md — your combined narrative + M/WBE plan + compliance attestation
• opportunity-rfq.md — the agency's approved RFQ for reference
• attachments/ — every file you attached to the response
• manifest.json — machine-readable inventory of what's included

Open PASSPort in a new tab and sign in with your NYC procurement account. Upload the zip following the agency's instructions in the RFQ. Bidsmith does not submit for you — by design.Auto-submission to a city procurement portal is a liability nightmare, and you wouldn't want it anyway.