OfBusiness wanted to acquire SMEs at scale, but at a low cost of acquisition.
With infrastructure as the key focus sector for the company, the idea was simple: make government tenders as easy to search as products online.
SMEs had traditionally relied on grapevine networks or scattered government portals to find opportunities. Poor UX, downtime, and clunky search on these sites meant wasting hours and still feeling like something was missed. I led the build of BidAssist to solve exactly this problem.
I led the team which designed and scaled a crawling engine that pulled data from 7,000+ Indian government sources, normalised messy formats, and classified tenders into clear categories. Over time, it expanded to 80K+ sources across 190+ countries, pulling in 70K+ new tenders daily and monitoring millions for updates.
Suppliers could search, set alerts, and track tenders across sectors, & geographies down to Pincodes from infra, IT, machinery parts to even consulting, all in one place.
The focus was on building a centralised discovery engine that SMEs could trust:
BidAssist didn’t replace experts who analysed tenders, but it made discovery and management simple, reliable, and scalable.
BidAssist scaled to 1.5M SMB users, largely through SEO/SEM and long-tail keyword strategy acquiring users at scale while keeping CAC low.
The biggest learning? Search brought SMEs in, but reliability and trust in the platform is what kept them coming back. Need to keep a close eye on end to end funnel to manage retention & CSAT while growing.
By focusing on aggregation, classification, and discovery, I built BidAssist into India’s largest tender engine. The key takeaway: growth doesn’t always come from complex recommendations, sometimes it comes from building trust in a simple, reliable discovery tool.