PurplePublic sector tendering
The tender system that became Bidwell
We built Purple a system to find public sector tenders and draft the responses. The problem was not unique to Purple, so the system became Bidwell: a live self-serve product for UK SMBs, with 32,858 award records ingested and 2,100+ pages indexed.
- contract award records ingested
- 32,858
- pages indexed on bidwell.app
- 2,100+
- UK tender portals monitored
- 5
Most case studies on this page end with a system handed over to the client. This one kept going. We built a tender system for Purple, the same company whose website rebuild has its own case study here, and the problem it solved turned out not to be a Purple problem at all. The system became Bidwell, an AI tender discovery and drafting product for UK SMBs, now live under its own brand.
The problem Purple had
Purple bids for public sector work, and UK public sector contracts are published across a patchwork of portals: Find a Tender for higher-value contracts, Contracts Finder for everything over £12,000, plus Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales and eTendersNI. That means two separate jobs before any work is won. First, watching all of those portals to spot the tenders worth bidding on. Second, the writing: a full tender response is a 20 to 40 hour slog of pulling together case studies, policies, accreditations and answers to dozens of buyer questions, most of which the business has answered before in a slightly different shape.
So we built Purple a system that watched the portals and did the heavy lifting on the writing.
What we built
Three jobs in one system: find relevant tenders, hold a knowledge base of the company's own material, and draft complete responses from it.
- Tender ingestion. Automated workflows pull structured OCDS data from the Find a Tender API and the Contracts Finder bulk dataset, alongside the regional portals. Award notices in that data carry supplier Companies House numbers and the official small-business flag, so the system knows not just what was published but who actually won it.
- Knowledge base. Past responses, credentials, case studies and policies go in once. When a blank tender document comes in, the system extracts the questions, matches each one against the knowledge base, and drafts answers in the company's voice, exportable to Word or Excel.
- Daily matching. Keywords and sectors are set once. Ingestion runs daily, new notices are matched against the profile, and a daily email lands with AI-written summaries of the opportunities worth a look. The design target is to turn that 20 to 40 hour writing job into 2 to 4 hours of review.
From one client to a product
Here is the thing: nothing in that system was specific to Purple. Every UK SMB that bids on public work, or wants to start, faces exactly the same two jobs. The pain was never one company's missing tool; it was the same expensive, repetitive task across thousands of businesses that would each only pay an SMB price to fix it. That is a product problem, not a consultancy problem.
So the system got its own brand, its own pricing and its own acquisition engine. Bidwell is live at bidwell.app with three self-serve tiers from £15 to £40 per month, deliberately priced for SMBs in a market where most competitors start around £500 per month. It ingests from five UK tender portals, holds 32,858 contract award records (counted live on 10 June 2026), and has over 2,100 pages indexed in Google, all generated and maintained by the same pipeline rather than a content team. The same award data drives its own outbound: 17,136 prospect companies derived from it, 6,110 named decision-makers enriched, and 3,416 outreach drafts written by the system. One person runs all of it. Nobody at Operosus touches a customer's tender; the whole path, from first ad click to paid subscription to drafted response, is self-serve. Customer revenue figures are not yet published.
The pattern
This is the path we keep telling clients is open to them, demonstrated end to end. A client engagement surfaces a problem. We solve it bespoke, and in doing so build the ingestion, drafting and automation the solution needs. When the same problem clearly exists across enough businesses, those parts become a product with its own brand, pricing and acquisition engine, built on exactly the stack we use for client work. If your business runs on a repeated expensive task, the system we build to fix it might be worth more than the fix.
How we did it
Related product
The system in this study, live and self-serve under its own brand, from £15 a month.
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Purple
Rebuilt to get found