Tender Smart — a startup that aggregates all tenders in Kyrgyzstan on a single platform

Kubanychbek Zholdoshbekov, city — Bishkek, entrepreneur, director of Tender Smart LLC, Instagram

How it all began

I received my education in Shanghai. Since my student days, I have been engaged in the supply of goods and equipment. For the past five years, I have been actively participating in government and commercial tenders.

To find profitable and interesting tenders, we monitored a large number of sources: websites, newspapers, and social media. Sometimes we did not know who our competitors were or at what price to sell the goods. Over time, these needs and pain points grew.

In 2021, the idea came to create a tool for ourselves that would combine all procurement announcements in one place, allowing us to have all the analytical data of Kyrgyzstan in our field of activity.

Team

My mentor and partner, Bakyt Irsaliyev, implemented our idea. He has rich experience in startups, with projects such as: OOBA.KG, Caps Platform, InWork, "Tvoi Zaryad" (Your Charge), and Check In to his credit.

Bakyt's development team brought the first ideas to life in a short time. At first, we simply collected procurements from government portals in Kyrgyzstan. The platform's functionality could filter these announcements by four criteria: keywords, budget, field of activity, and organizations. And the daily email newsletter ensured that we did not miss an interesting tender even on weekends.

In the beginning, government procurements appeared automatically on the Tender Smart platform. We manually searched for and added commercial ones to the database. Later, commercial organizations began registering themselves and announcing procurements for goods or services on our platform.

The most difficult part of our project was the need to develop a user habit among our clients.

Target Audience

Our target audience consists of companies engaged in trade or providing services in various fields, ranging from construction to legal services.

Tender Smart is needed by companies that need to stay informed about all procurement announcements. The platform can analyze the entire tender market, provide information about competitors and purchasing organizations. And the CRM system integrated into the platform will help control all processes of participating in tenders.

Currently, more than 2,500 users are registered on the platform across Kyrgyzstan.

Incubation Programs

There are several excellent opportunities for startup development in Kyrgyzstan. In 2022, we participated in the Accelerate Prosperity acceleration program. It interested me because I wanted to learn about new trends in the startup ecosystem in Central Asia, listen to great speakers, and understand how to develop my project.

During the acceleration, we had experienced trainers and speakers, and we immediately applied new knowledge in practice. We were trained in conducting CustDev, goal setting, reaching MVP, creative thinking, PR, marketing strategies, and financial management.

We were made to understand that traditional business and a startup are completely different things. Within the framework of this acceleration, we not only received a lot of useful information but also attracted investments. Thanks to the funding, we improved the product by completely rewriting it. Now TenderSmart is fully equipped.

After that, we participated in several forums. One of them took place in Almaty — Digital Almaty 2023. There we made it to the top 100 startups, found new partners, and analyzed the Kazakh market.

Difficulties

When developing a startup, it is necessary to constantly experiment. You will have to abandon some developments — without this, implementing innovations will not be possible. In one case, we implemented an automatic contract development system, but it turned out that each purchasing organization had its own contract template, which turned out to be completely unnecessary for our users. We had to remove this function.

Another example: recently we implemented a "Supplier Registry" section, in which we add all reliable suppliers, dividing them by field of activity. As a result, we received many positive reviews from purchasing organizations.

Kyrgyzstan lags significantly in the field of information technology. Compared to the Western market, the Central Asian market is not that large. But it can become a testing ground for startups, where they can understand their mistakes and improve their products to eventually reach the global level.

Achievements

The main achievement of our platform is its integration into the work processes of our partners in Kyrgyzstan. According to them, Tender Smart optimized work by 15-20%. More than 400 tenders are announced on our platform daily.

All our functionality is developed exclusively based on feedback and needs of our users, which gives us at least 10-15 registered users per day.

Plans

Our goal is to become a bridge in placing tenders in the online space. We strive to contribute to the construction of a healthy business community of suppliers and purchasers of goods and services.