The market
Measured, not estimated. Numbers below come from a full harvest of MyProcurement — 11,529 notices, every one read.
Consultancy is a thin slice of a big board
| Category | Notices | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Supplies | 6,078 | 52.7% |
| Services, non-consultancy | 3,979 | 34.5% |
| Works | 1,397 | 12.1% |
| Consultancy | 75 | 0.65% |
Fifty-two live at any moment, roughly twenty-five new a month. Small — and small is the point: nobody can sell alert volume into this, so value has to come from winning more of a handful of bids.
Three lanes. Two are taken.
Find the tender
Tender2U — 24,000 customers, 540k tenders. TenderAlerts — five sources plus award history, RM 0–299/mo. Plus four global crawlers.
Crowded
Produce the document
Nobody in Southeast Asia. Eligibility triage is taken in Indonesia; proposal generation runs in Saudi Arabia and South Africa. Not here.
Open
Enterprise bid suites
Loopio, Responsive, AutoRFP, AutogenAI. Answer libraries, proposal managers, Fortune 500 pricing.
Crowded — wrong buyer
What the neighbours have already built
| Where | What they do | Drafts the bid? |
|---|---|---|
| Malaysia | Alerts across five portals, plus who won and for how much | No |
| Indonesia | 134,926 tenders across 691 portals. Eligibility matched to business codes, plain-language bid-or-skip, win-rate prediction | Triage only |
| Saudi Arabia | Reads the tender booklet, generates a full sectioned proposal. 300–950 SAR/month | Yes |
| South Africa | Requirement extraction, proposal drafting, compliance gaps | Yes |
Two readings, both true. The model works — it is running profitably in two other emerging markets. And it is not a clever idea — the defensible part is procurement-regime knowledge and a firm's own structured data, never the concept.
Four numbers to hold on to
The last one settles the shape of the business. There is no round to raise here, so it has to be profitable early or not attempted — which argues for a narrow, paid, unglamorous product rather than a platform.
Where it starts
Malaysia first, because the procurement regime is knowable and the
paperwork is standardised.
Then Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam — and the
multilateral pipeline, which uses the same form set.
ADB, the World Bank and the Islamic Development Bank all run the standard consultant form set this is built against. The national variations are a thin adapter, not a rewrite — so the engine does not care which door it walks through.