Your first 30 days with Quarry

This plan assumes federal work is genuinely relevant to your business: an active, or nearly active, SAM.gov registration, and at least one NAICS code that actually describes what you sell. If your revenue is entirely state or local government, or entirely private commercial work with no federal angle, a 30-day trial of a federal notice feed won't tell you anything useful. That's not a fit to test; it's just the wrong tool.

If federal work does fit, here is a plan that gives you real evidence by the end of the month instead of a guess.

1 · Week one: finish your profile honestly

Fill in your NAICS codes, the states or regions you actually work in, and any certifications you already hold. Guessing wide to "catch more" backfires; it just fills your feed with notices that don't fit, and teaches you to stop trusting the verdicts. Then read the feed daily. You're not looking for a bid yet. You're checking each verdict against your own read of the notice, so you learn quickly whether the reasons it gives you hold up.

2 · Week two: respond to one sources sought

Pick a real match from your feed, ideally a sources sought notice, which is low-stakes and exactly the kind of notice that rewards showing up early. Respond to it. This is the step people skip, and it's the one that actually tests whether the matching is worth anything: not whether an email arrived, but whether the thing in the email was worth an hour of your time.

3 · Week three: run the qualifier checks and fix registration gaps

Work through the certification qualifier pages, HUBZone, WOSB, SDVOSB, 8(a), against your actual facts, not your hopes. Then check your SAM registration for the gaps that cause rejections: an expiring date, a business name that doesn't match IRS records character for character, NAICS codes that no longer describe what you do. See SAM registration and size standards if you're not sure you still qualify as small. None of this is Quarry-specific work; it's foundation work that makes everything else, including our matching, more accurate.

4 · Week four: decide with real evidence

By now you have three weeks of verdicts you've personally checked, one real response behind you, and a cleaner registration than you started with. Decide plainly whether the feed earned its place in your week. If it caught something you would have missed, or saved you real reading time, keep going; see plans once Explorer's three saves stop being enough. If every verdict was obvious, or nothing in a month was worth opening, it isn't for you, and that's a legitimate answer. Cancel from your profile; there's no retention step in between.