Think big, start small

In October 2001 I was laid off. I was living in NYC and working for a web design firm at the time and fully billable, but following 9-11 the economy was in a spin. Two months later, with very little money in my bank account, a $1500/month rent, and very little sales and management experience, I incorporated Confluent Forms LLC.

I quickly struggled to learn about Requests for Proposals, how to write proposals, contracts, statements of work, etc. I began writing proposals to any project I could find that I felt I could win. Sites like Craig's List were my bread and butter, along with a site that Forbes ran for organizations posting RFPs. These sites required a registration fee ($250 to $1,000) but the projects were never ones I could bid on (I was too small) and then the site just died off. I found myself hunting Google for RFPs at all hours, going from individually listed RFPs on the websites of small organizations to hundreds of RFPs on the procurement websites for states and cities. In order to find RFPs to bid on you had to go to hundreds of places, hunt/peck through a myriad of badly architected websites, register your company before being provided with the content, and often times get outdated and expired projects as the fruit of your labor.

In 2004 I thought to myself "Why not make a site that can be a destination for all of the organizations and companies out there to list their projects and provide free registration for anyone to upload or download the information?" If I make the destination, the RFPs will come to me instead of all of this wasted time I'm spending trying to find them out in the wild.

Initially I filled the database with RFPs that I'd found or received by email (having signed up to dozens of services) and allowed everyone to download them hoping that some people might voluntarily join into the concept and start listing RFPs they had but weren't bidding on. I thought people would understand the idea of "one man's garbage is another man's gold". Not much luck there. My business partner then helped me change the system around to rely on "credits"; you'd initially get a small amount of credits that you could redeem for access to the RFP information, file download or link. In order to get more credits, you'd need to upload a valid RFP to the site and share. Most of the people would register and use their initial credits (worth two downloads), then stop using the site. This part of the system has been a bit slow to catch on, but the more people that join, the more RFPs that get uploaded because at some point in time you want access to yet another RFP. Hopefully we're reaching that self-perpetuating point...

That's how the RFP Database (RFPdb) was started. At this time the site has an average of 100+ active RFPs, hosted over 1300 RFPs, over 5,500 active users, and organizations thank me for drawing so much attention to their little-publicized RFPs and enabling them to get good competitive bids.

My hope for the site is that more organizations find it and take advantage of it, and that more business people find it, use it, and participate in its concept. It's beneficial for them to advance it since by creating a more popular destination it will decrease their need to search the wild for new projects.