Set the expectation correctly
Most businesses that eventually win federal work spend months finding their footing first: registering, learning to read notices, watching a market for a while before anything looks biddable. That is not you being slow. It is the actual shape of the process, and the businesses that quit are usually the ones who expected a win in the first few weeks and treated the quiet months as failure instead of the normal on-ramp.
The funnel, honestly
Roughly, it goes like this: register on SAM.gov, spend real time watching notices in your industry codes before anything fits, respond to a sources sought or two once something looks close, bid when a solicitation actually matches, lose more of those bids than you win, and eventually win one. Every step in that chain is normal to repeat several times before the last one happens. A single loss is not a signal to stop, it is closer to the median outcome of a single bid.
What it actually costs in hours
Registration is an afternoon, plus a validation wait that is out of your hands. After that, the ongoing cost is watching: reading notices regularly enough that you do not miss the ones that fit, which for most businesses is a standing weekly task, not a one-time search. Writing an actual proposal, even for a small opportunity, commonly takes days of focused work once you count the compliance matrix, the pricing, and the writing itself. None of this is a small time investment, and treating it as a background task you get to occasionally is the most common reason people give up before the first win.
What shortens it
Two things genuinely compress the timeline. Micro-purchases and other small, simplified-acquisition-tier buys are a lower bar to a first award, closer in size and formality to a normal commercial sale, and a real win there is real past performance. Subcontracting under an established prime is the other real shortcut, because it borrows someone else's relationship and track record while you build your own.
What does not shorten it
Paying for a lead service does not, because the notices themselves are public and free on SAM.gov; you are only ever paying someone to read what you could read yourself. Nothing shortens the evaluation and award process once you have bid, either. The only genuine levers are the two above, plus the unglamorous one: staying in the search long enough for the funnel to do what funnels do.