When I posted about Forcepull last month, I mentioned I’d already started my next side project. Well, it’s live now: tenderwatch.world.
The problem
Public sector procurement is a goldmine if you’re the kind of business that can win those contracts. Software, cloud, cyber, digital transformation, and similar work are where councils and government bodies spend serious money on this stuff.
The trouble is finding the opportunities before the deadline passes. You have to manually search across Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales… and most of the portals are genuinely painful to use. Important contracts slip through the cracks because nobody has time to check four websites every morning.
What TenderWatch does
You pick the sectors you care about, whether that’s software, construction, catering, or whatever, add some keywords if you want to narrow it down, and leave your email address. That’s it.
TenderWatch watches the procurement sources, matches new tenders against your preferences, and sends you a daily digest. One email. No dashboard to log into. No password to remember, just sign in with a magic link if you want to tweak your watch later.
Want an email when a new public sector software contract appears? Most businesses immediately understand the value.
That’s the whole pitch. I’m not trying to sell AI. I’m trying to sell not missing contracts.
How I built it
Rails 8, SQLite, Solid Queue, Kamal. The usual modern Rails stack. One data source to start with, Public Contracts Scotland, with keyword and CPV sector matching. No LLMs, no agents, no orchestration theatre. Just ingest, normalise, match, notify.
It turns out that’s enough. The hard part wasn’t the matching algorithm. It was the unglamorous plumbing: email deliverability, magic-link auth, defeating Outlook’s link prefetchers, stopping people from enumerating subscribers. All the stuff that doesn’t demo well but determines whether the product actually works in production.
305 tests, all green. Deployed and running.
What’s next
More procurement sources, like Contracts Finder, Find a Tender, and Sell2Wales. Paid tiers once there’s demonstrated interest. But the bar for “next” is simple: do five real businesses wake up and find the digest useful?
If you’re a Scottish software or digital business, or anyone who bids on public sector work, sign up at tenderwatch.world and tell me if it’s worth keeping.