Explaining Bidsstack To A Smart Five Year Old
This essay aims to explain in the simplest of terms what we are building. Bidsstack is our attempt to fix some of the issues in our tender system despite the number of people who have tried before.
In our previous articles, we wrote in a standard essay format. This article will be in a dialogue style. Our characters are Elder and Child, and each character follows subsequently from the other.
Elder: I gathered you here to explain what Bidsstack is building.
Child: Isn’t that the startup company that is trying to fix South Africa’s tender system?
Elder: Exactly that, very good. Do you know what is wrong with the current system?
Child: You have to know people to get a tender, right?
Elder: That’s what most people generally say but it’s wrong, the actual problem with the system is due to complexity.
Child: What do you mean?
Elder: The current system is highly complex from multiple sides of the machine, the people who apply for tenders, the people who review the tenders, the people who sub-contract, etc.
Child: What do you mean? I still don’t understand.
Elder: Let me break it down for you. The person filling out the tender finds the system complicated. They must find and get the tender documents, fill them with the correct details, and finally submit the tender. Finding the documents is not very easy, some places charge for the documents or ask that you contact them, but this is changing with a number of government entities publishing tender documents themselves.
The complexity of finding tenders and how Bidsstack Can help
Child: Tell me about it, from what I’ve read, finding tender documents can be very difficult and Bidsstack makes it really easy to find many tenders but there are some tenders that are still not there.
Elder: Some entities don’t upload all their published tenders in an easy and transparent way for people to find the documents, generally you have to email or call them to get the documents. Bidsstack is working on solving this problem but it will take time.
Child: I think I understand what you mean.
Elder: We have made it slightly easier for people to find tenders but there is so much room for improvement. Following that, we are working on making it even easier for people to find the tenders they want. We call this new service NotifyPlus, it sends a daily email that has a list of tenders a person is interested in.
Child: That’s pretty cool, what else are you doing to help?
How Our newest features can help your business
Elder: We built a few calendar features that make it easy to save tenders to any calendar, this will help people not forget important tender dates. We just released a new paid feature called Watchlist. People can add a tender to a list to get notified when updates to that specific tender occur.
Child: I went to the site and tried the calendar feature, it was easy and intuitive. How does Watchlist work?
Elder: You can find it on the same page you found the calendar feature, once a person has entered their tender to their watchlist, Bidsstack will compare the tenders in the list against our tender list. Once we find a tender’s details that don’t match what was in the list, we will notify the Bidsstack user.
Child: That will help keep people informed of changes, what are examples of changes that you are comparing against?
Elder: For now, we are comparing tenders where the open date has changed, usually this means an entity failed to find the right candidate so they are re-advertising the tender to try again. Once we let a user know that a tender is open, they can re-apply. They might need to change a few things on their original application.
Child: That sounds like it will save costs for the company but more importantly, it will help the tender applicant be informed of changes about the tender. So, what is next for Bidsstack?
Elder: That will have to wait for our next conversation.