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Imagine for a moment standing at the entrance of a gigantic maze. You’ve navigated a few different mazes in your time and so are excited at the thought of this new challenge. At the end of the maze lies an incredible treasure, yours for the claiming, except for one small problem: you’re not at the entrance alone. You’re surrounded by people with a plethora of different experiences and abilities. Some have navigated this exact maze before and recall what twists and turns lie ahead. Others have been given helpful clues about what to look out for. A few are in the exact same position as you and they know this – so their plan is to copy what you do but faster and better. 

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The average tender writing and submission process is a lot like this scenario. To win, you need a strategic advantage. The challenge often is uncovering this advantage and what tools you already have to unlock it. Going back to the maze for a second, imagine you had a map that told you exactly how to navigate the maze. Not only that, the route mapped out used your expertise and skills to give you the upper hand. The best part of all is that all this information is for your eyes only, making it harder for others to imitate or re-create. 

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Laurie Nicol is building that map with Tendl. 

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Public faux pas and the privacy problem

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In a previous professional lifetime, Laurie was an acoustic engineer. In this role he found that privacy of the client’s information was paramount, particularly when working on a project, tender, or similar sensitive document. 

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Sharing how he initially came up with the concept for Tendl, Laurie said “I was working for an engineering firm and someone uploaded one of the proposals to an online PDF generator. This proposal became the number one hit in their search results. This prompted me to make a private large language model (LLM) for engineering firms that could be used to write reports, tenders, or proposals.”

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After he came up with this concept, Laurie started focusing on what areas of a business were most impacted by this problem, which helped him narrow down to tenders. With the problem in sight, Laurie started work on building a solution, and launched the first version of the Tendl app in May 2024. 

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Using a local AI model, Tendl leverages clients’ past tender libraries to assist with drafting  tender documents privately and effectively. If, like me, your only experience with AI models has been Chat GPT, then you may ask – how does Tendl’s AI learn?

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Explaining, Laurie shared “A common misconception that people put forth about AI is that it is constantly learning. The reality is that a lot of learning relies on data and how well AI is able to learn relies entirely on data. One of the big improvements in the current generation of LLM is that it doesn’t need to learn as much about your specific data to learn. This is very different from four or five years ago when that was necessary for high performance. What we’ve been able to do now with AI and language models, more generally, is use a far lower amount of specific, narrow use case training data and leverage all of the knowledge we’ve got from training on the internet so that the performance is really good.”

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Since launching in May, Laurie has used customer research and feedback to further evolve Tendl and provide options more suited to individual needs. 

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“I started with an app that ran entirely locally. It was completely sandboxed and didn’t share any information. Some customers did not have computers powerful enough to run this and so I added a cloud backend, using APIs to access the AI without storing any information. Since Startmate, I’ve been focusing more on the journey around tendering and tender management. So looking at what tenders you should go in for, understanding how your business matches the requirements of the tender, responding, tracking the response and feedback received, and finally incorporating that information into the next tender”, Laurie said. 

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This Tender Management Platform was just released in September and is essentially  “HubSpot for tenders”. 

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Going it solo

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Laurie is a solo founder, responsible for aspects of the business from idea conception, to implementation, to fundraising. While he describes himself as a serial entrepreneur, and Tendl is not his first foray into the world of entrepreneurship, going about this journey solo is nevertheless daunting. 

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“One of the reasons is that meeting a co-founder is a serendipitous moment that you almost can’t want too much because then it may never happen”, Laurie shared with a laugh. Continuing, he said “My view is that I’m not waiting for permission or someone else to go and do it. You just go ahead and do it. There’s a lot of tools now that mean you can multiply yourself, for example AI allows you to write code much faster than you used to be able to. Ultimately, I have this fundamental belief that founders need to be able to do the business that they are founding. In my case I can write tenders, I can write code, I can talk to people, and so all of the core skills I’d be looking for a founding team for I can do myself. I’ve right-sized Tendl for myself.”

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Being a solo founder, Laurie is hyper aware of both his strengths and weaknesses. In fact, a self-reflection on his blind spots is what prompted him to apply for Startmate’s Accelerator program. 

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“I’m a technical founder and sometimes being a technical person means you’re not taking a 10,000 ft view of the business. It is easy to fall into the build trap. I did Startmate so that I would have 12 weeks to focus and grow other aspects of the business such as talking to customers and understanding their problems”, he said. 

In fact, Laurie did this interview while in Canberra, where he was meeting with customers and putting his learnings into practice. Since joining the Accelerator program, he has used customer feedback to expand Tendl’s offering with two new products. One was the previously mentioned Tender Management Platform and the second is a rapid Tender Drafting Service that drafts tender responses in under 24 hours. 

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Beyond the business side of things, Startmate’s community has also proved incredible value for Laurie. “While the Accelerator is challenging to do as a solo founder (I had a couple of other solo founders in the community reach out to me and affirm that), I also think that it is uniquely useful. I don’t have people in the trenches with me going ‘That was a really good day’. I get that from the mentors and network at Startmate. This means that you go through the 12 weeks of the program with people in your corner”, he said. 

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Building momentum and incorporating joy

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If a regular start-up grows and evolves at breakneck speed, then what Laurie is with Tendl can only be defined as hyperspeed. His goal for the Accelerator program is to maximise  his understanding of customers – the value they’re looking for, who he can help now, and who he needs to focus on later. After the program ends, he’s looking to action all that feedback through product development. 

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“Finishing the Accelerator, I have a lot of product development I will need to be doing. The goal for me is to try and convert some of that into revenue. That is the ultimate proof point but it will also help me build momentum behind the business and grow”, he said. 

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Listing some of his biggest milestones to date, he said “Getting my first customer felt amazing. Then getting the second customer was also really transformative, maybe more so than the first one because it shows that you’re not crazy and it’s not just a fluke.”

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A big milestone that Laurie is looking forward to is growing Tendl enough that the business model becomes sustainable allowing him to raise money, expand the team, and even start paying himself a salary. 

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Ultimately though, he believes that running a start-up is about more than just growth or sustainability. “One of the things I decided at the start of Tendl was that it was important to enjoy the journey. That has been a guiding philosophy all this year while building Tendl. Building a business is going to take longer than you think and will be incredibly hard, so it is important to enjoy every aspect of it,” he said. 

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Tendl and Laurie have both grown rapidly since the business started in January 2024. At this rate it’s not hard to imagine a future where it will be the leading software for winning tenders across industries. 

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