STOP Writing Federal Contracts Like This (ARPA-H / DARPA Mistake)

If you got invited to submit a full proposal for ARPA-H and your first move was to open a blank doc, you're likely doing it wrong. I've worked on dozens of these applications, including award ones, and I see the same pattern all the time, only to realize they built it on the wrong foundation and have to redo everything. But here's the shift. Don't start with the narrative. Start with the technical backbone. These are your objectives, your tasks, your subtasks, and most importantly, your quantitative milestones, because this is the area that actually gets evaluated. This is what defines whether your approach is credible to the ARPA-H reviewers. And this typically lives within your TDD, and this is the most scrutinized part of any other transaction proposal. Everything else, like your narrative, your budget, your team, flows from this. So if you skip this part up front, essentially building a house without a foundation. And this applies across ARPA-H, ARPA-E, DOW, or pretty much any federal R&D contract. So my advice: start here first and then build everything else around it. Let me know in the comments if you do something similar or something completely different.