BidReady RFPs: Building a B2B SaaS from Zero
Co-founded and designed a curated RFP subscription platform for digital agencies: from product concept and commercial model through to UI, go-to-market, and automated acquisition. Launched in 4 weeks and reached breakeven in 5.
We Built the Tool We Always Needed
BidReady RFPs came directly from lived experience. Through my work at Cross Coast Digital, I had spent significant time on the client side of RFPs: sourcing, qualifying, and responding to public sector and enterprise procurement opportunities. The tooling available was universally poor: generic portals with tens of thousands of irrelevant listings, outdated opportunities, and no meaningful filtering for digital-focused agencies.
The problem wasn't that RFPs were hard to win. It was that agencies were spending 20 to 60 hours a week just building a shortlist of opportunities worth considering. That time had a direct cost: and no existing product was solving it well.
"Sam.gov has 40,000+ active opportunities. Maybe 20 are relevant to us. Finding them takes most of Monday."
I co-founded BidReady with two partners: Alex (tech, backend) and Jason (customer success, RFP sourcing). My remit covered product design, commercial strategy, UI, and go-to-market execution. The goal was to ship a lean, credible product fast and validate the market before over-investing in infrastructure.
Research & Product Definition
The research foundation for BidReady was domain expertise rather than traditional primary research. Having been the target customer: sourcing and qualifying RFPs as part of agency work: meant the pain points were already well understood. The product decisions were grounded in direct experience of what was missing, not assumptions about it.
Defining the Product
The initial product was a single-tier curated feed: digital-only, budget-qualified ($20k minimum), human-reviewed. The enterprise tier came later and came directly from a customer. Our first subscriber kept asking detailed questions during onboarding: could we filter by certification type? By compliance history? By client sector? Drawing on our own experience appraising RFPs: knowing exactly what procurement teams look for and how agencies qualify: we recognised this wasn't a niche request. It was a second product. The enterprise tier was built to give fully customised filtering to agencies that needed precision over volume, with a founder discovery call to define the query and ongoing refinement as the agency evolved.
Ongoing Validation
Post-launch, customer feedback became the primary research input. Enterprise subscribers received a founder discovery call at onboarding to define their custom query: this was both a service differentiator and a structured way to understand how different agencies thought about RFP qualification. Quarterly check-ins with enterprise customers provided a regular feedback loop that directly informed product refinements.
Strategy & Design Principles
Building a product with two non-designer co-founders on a lean budget shaped every design decision. The principles weren't aspirational: they were practical constraints that turned out to produce better outcomes.
Trust Over Features
The credibility of the product depended entirely on the credibility of its founders. The design had to communicate that this was built by people who had actually been in the room: not a faceless scraping tool. Every page, every piece of copy, and every UI decision was filtered through this: does this feel like it was made by experienced practitioners, or does it feel like generic SaaS?
One Action Color
The design system was deliberately minimal: warm off-white and soft stone backgrounds, near-black text, and a single amber accent used exclusively for CTAs. No competing colors, no decorative UI. The constraint forced clarity: every element either supported the conversion path or wasn't there.
Lean and Shippable
The UI was built in Odoo's website editor, which meant working within a component-based system rather than designing from scratch. This was a deliberate choice: shipping fast and validating the market mattered more than pixel-perfect custom UI at zero revenue. The constraint kept the product lean and forced prioritisation of what actually mattered to the user.
Design & Build
Homepage & Marketing Site
The homepage was structured around the customer journey: establish credibility fast (founder story, specific numbers), show what they'd get (live sample RFP cards), make the value case (pricing comparison vs competitors), and convert (3-day free access CTA). Every section had a specific job and a specific reason to exist.
The Product Interface
The core product: the RFP list: needed to let subscribers filter quickly and get to the detail without friction. I designed the filterable list view with a modal popup for full RFP detail, keeping the table scannable at a glance while making depth available on demand. The weekly email digest design followed the same principle: lead with the custom shortlist, surface the most relevant opportunities first.
Subscription & Checkout Flows
The commercial flows needed to handle three paths: standard subscription, enterprise subscription (with discovery call scheduling), and 3-day free access via token. I designed each flow to minimise drop-off: the free access path in particular had to feel frictionless, since it was the primary conversion mechanism from outbound campaigns.
Go-to-Market & Acquisition
Designing the product was half the work. Getting customers into it required designing an acquisition system from scratch alongside the build.
Channel Strategy
I identified LinkedIn and cold email as the primary outbound channels based on where our ICPs (bid writers, proposal managers, agency founders) were most reachable and most receptive to a direct, specific approach. The strategy was to lead with a single relevant RFP: specific to the prospect's agency: rather than a generic pitch. Show the product working, not describe it.
Automated Outreach
I helped design and build the automation infrastructure for both LinkedIn and email outreach: custom message sequences, personalisation logic based on prospect data, and the token-based 3-day access flow that served as the conversion bridge between outbound contact and paid subscription. The system was built to feel personal at scale: each message referenced something specific about the recipient's agency.
SEO & Organic Pipeline
In parallel, I built an organic acquisition strategy: a scripted process to post free, high-quality RFPs on LinkedIn and Reddit weekly, driving awareness and search visibility. This fed a secondary pipeline alongside the direct outbound campaigns and supported the longer-term SEO strategy built around terms our ICPs were actively searching.
Results & Impact
Within 5 weeks of launch:
Visitor-to-customer conversion, significantly above SaaS benchmark, driven by high-intent traffic and a frictionless free access path.
From product definition to live product: UI, commercial flows, acquisition system, and automated outreach all shipped within the window.
The product was profitable within 5 weeks of launch, validating both the pricing model and the acquisition strategy.
"Finally a list I can actually use. I found three relevant opportunities in the first ten minutes."
- Enterprise subscriber, onboarding call feedback
What I Learned
Domain expertise accelerated every product decision. Knowing the pain firsthand meant we didn't spend months validating what we already knew.
Building in Odoo's editor forced ruthless prioritisation. The product shipped faster and the UI was cleaner for it.
The outreach system, the token flow, and the conversion path were as much design work as the product itself. Treating them the same way produced better results.
A single onboarding conversation with our first customer revealed the need for a whole second product tier. That same discovery call format became the delivery mechanism for enterprise: every enterprise subscriber gets one to define their custom query.
Running SEO, LinkedIn, and cold email in parallel from day one meant multiple acquisition channels reinforcing each other rather than sequentially building them.
What I'd Do Differently
Earlier usability testing on the product interface: we shipped based on founder intuition and iterated from customer feedback. A few moderated sessions before launch would have caught friction points sooner.
Team accounts from day one: several enterprise customers wanted multi-user access immediately. Building that into the initial product would have removed a retention risk in the early weeks.