In this hands‑on YouTube tutorial, Chris Koerner demonstrates how he built a fully functional web app—GovDealFinder—that aggregates U.S. federal contract listings from SAM.gov and presents them in a user‑friendly interface, all without writing code himself. He begins by highlighting the massive $834 billion annual government contracting spend and the $200 billion set‑aside for small businesses, framing the market opportunity. Using Replit Agent 4, he crafts a concise prompt (refined with Claude) that instructs multiple AI agents to work in parallel on the backend (API integration with SAM.gov), the frontend (search UI), and the landing page. He walks through generating a SAM.gov API key, feeding it to the agents, and watching the app materialize in about four minutes. Koerner then iteratively adds features—email subscription alerts, SEO‑optimized blog posts, and design variations via Infinite Canvas—by issuing targeted prompts. He also generates a five‑slide pitch deck, purchases the govdealfinder.com domain, and publishes the site. Throughout, he emphasizes the speed, cost savings (versus a $10‑20k traditional build), and the broader potential for anyone to leverage AI‑driven development to access government contracts. The video ends with a call‑to‑action to try Replit (with a credit incentive) and a reminder of the untapped contract market.
Chapters
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. 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 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. 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. Now, a website like this would normally cost between $10,000 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 gotta go one step at a time. You describe what you want, you wait, you review, you repeat, you fix it. 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 backend that pulls the contract data, one's building the frontend 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. 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 wanna build this website that piggybacks on SAM.gov. It makes it easier to use. I gave it like 3 simple sentences and 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 gonna read it all. You can pause and read it yourself if you want. Boom, there's the top part. Boom, there's a bottom part. Boom, there's the last part. I don't know what half this stuff means, but it 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. 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. Okay, 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. It's generating the frontend right here. It's checking something with OpenAPI right here. It's talking about proxy routes over here. I have no idea what that is. Frontend 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. It's a 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. It even put a disclaimer here at the bottom. Okay. Now, if we 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 an 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. After they run their first search, show a popup that says, don't miss out. We'll email you when new listings appear that match your filter so you can be the first to attack it. After showing that popup, also give people the option to do the same across pages they navigate to. Now I'm asking it to add 3 to 5 blog posts that will help my site appear better in search results when looking for government contracts. 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 could 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. 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 them to do it. Okay, now I do like this landing page as it is. This is my one-shot prompt, but I'm gonna use this thing called Infinite Canvas where I can go look at other versions of the same landing page and maybe I'll find one that I like more. So after clicking Canvas, I'm gonna 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. Optimize for usability, show me the opposite of this, and surprise me. I'm just going to click surprise me. So it says it's going to try 3 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 3 versions that it's generating right now. Okay, awesome. Version 1, it's calling the opportunity pulse, AKA live urgency. 347 contracts are closing this week. Don't let them slip away. Ooh, I like that one. Option 2 is find your lane industry selector, kind of boring. And option 3 is proof it works success story. Well, I don't really like that because 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 3, but I, I like the one I came up with the most, 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 5 5-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 5-slide pitch deck explaining 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. 6 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. So the last step of this process is just to hit publish. Okay, so now I gotta think of a name for this business and the name that Replit automatically assigned it was GovDealFinder and I kinda like that. So I'm gonna go see if the domain name is available. Oh, and look at that, it is. So I'm gonna spend $12, buy the domain name, and go ahead and link it to this Replit project and click publish. 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. So if you sign up for Replit with the link in my description, you'll get $10 in credits for free so you can go build and ship something yourself. And remember, the government hands out almost $1 trillion 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. 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 govdealfinder.com because 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 Koerner office.
