Hello, my name is JC, I’m the founder of Happy Tenders.
If you have a minute or two, here’s the story of Happy Tenders, a firm that chose to tackles one of the most off-putting market in the World: public RFPs.
Early in my career, I had a company that specialized in the distribution of passenger railcar parts. Like many other suppliers, my company relied on bids and RFPs issued by operators — in my case transit agencies — for business.
To make sure I didn’t miss out on any opportunities, I had to visit 50 + internet portals daily. I would spend on average 3 to 4 hours a day doing so. It was painful but very gratifying when I’d win a major opportunity.
Even though it was time consuming, I’ve always kept a huge Excel file with important informations on which vendor won which RFP, on transit agencies rolling stock and on product part equivalences. I became quite good at finding interesting winnable RFPs and tenders.
In fact, other distributors — that were not in direct competition with my company — started asking me to track public RFPs for them. It’s then that I realized that tracking these bids and RFP was a major pain for lots of them. Happy Tender was born!
Inspired by Reid Hoffman famous quote: « If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late. », my team and I launched a very imperfect on-invitation-only bid tracking platform dedicated to the transit industry, the one I knew the more about.
As of today, we are still working on the software. Every day we try, we fail, and we learn. I’m so grateful for the patience of our very-early-adopters and could not thank enough my team for the amazing work they put in.
We hope to be able to launch the first version of software in the next year or so and would be thrilled if you’d give it a try.
—
Jean-Charles Bonneau
Founder & CEO, Happy Tenders.