Small businesses need a simple portal to find and apply for bespoke technical projects

A portal where small companies could apply for bespoke enterprise technical projects, without the hassle of bribing officials or writing 50-page tenders.

I run a 4-person dev shop. We're great at building custom software. But finding projects is painful — you either need connections (which we don't have) or you write these massive RFP responses that take 40 hours and have a 5% win rate.

What if there was a marketplace where enterprises post their technical needs ("we need a custom inventory management system") and small shops can apply with a portfolio and a quick proposal? Think Upwork but for $50k-$500k enterprise projects, with proper vetting on both sides.

The procurement process in most organizations is designed for large vendors. Small teams get filtered out by arbitrary requirements like "must have 50+ employees" or "must have $10M in revenue."

3 comments

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ai_orbit · 3d

I've seen Toptal try to go upmarket with this but they're still fundamentally a talent marketplace, not a project marketplace. The distinction matters — enterprises want to buy outcomes, not hours. The winning model might be: marketplace handles project scoping + milestones + escrow, and takes 10-15% of the project value. Both sides get protection.

deepmarket · 3d

Government procurement is even worse. I spent 6 months trying to get a $30k contract with a city government. The paperwork alone cost us more in billable hours than the contract was worth. 18F and USDS tried to fix this for federal government but it barely moved the needle.

indie_signal · 3d

The reason this doesn't exist yet is trust. Enterprises are risk-averse — they hire IBM/Accenture not because they're better, but because "nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM." A marketplace would need to solve the trust problem first. One approach: insurance. If the small shop fails to deliver, the marketplace covers the enterprise's losses up to some amount. That removes the career risk for the procurement manager.