Tech in Baby Steps

(Baby Step 1)

The B2B transaction market in India has always been perceived as the slowest adopter of technology. Users being hooked to their own archaic systems and needing a personal touch for large orders have always been the big hurdles.

One of our 1^st learnings in dealing with the problem at OfBusiness was to be patient. Building for top priority first and then solving the harder ones has been our method. One baby step at a time. The first two that we picked up were lead acquisition and internal efficiency. Later on, we added themes like customer integration, supplier integration, SAAS and loan management.

In Part I today, covering lead acquisition.

We built a (now popular) tool called BidAssist, that solved the problem of viewing the right tenders (revenue opportunities to work with the government, its agencies and the public sector) for every business. Tenders in India are voluminous (more than 15,000 in a day across ~500 domains, each being individually voluminous as well) and are non-standardized (each tender is very different from the one built for the same purpose. By crawling, reading, and cataloging this data neatly, we built a repository that was useful for the customer. Also, the customer is incentivized to leave more information online with us, as that makes us give him a more relevant and personalized list of tenders.

Over a period of time, we have now added a lot more services (like profiles of bidders that won past tenders), which has built a larger pool of loyal customers (now touching a million) who leave a lot of data about them that helps us in lead acquisitions and more informed, warm intros. The service is also monetized now as customers pay for premium services and subscriptions.

Baby step 1. Lead acquisition. Solved the B2B way. Essential service to the B2B ecosystem coupled with a profitable engine that also is a lead acquisition tool. And a highly engaging one, everyone loves revenue opportunities.

Now BidAssist has jumped one step ahead. It is a global service now, which opens Indian SMEs to global tenders. There will be a day soon when it will be the “Google for tenders.”