A pair of Loughborough startup founders have been offering up advice to other entrepreneurs following a recent investment in their business.
BidScript raised £200k through Praetura Ventures was supported by the British Business Bank and the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund.
Founders of the startup claim their platform is able to complete tenders applications within two minutes, just under a hundred times quicker that the manual average time. The software is being used across three continents by organisations of varying sizes, operating in a variety of sectors.
Henry Brogan, currently studying Business, Economics and Finance at Loughborough University advised other early stage founders to talk to customers as quickly as possible:
“Validate your idea, you may be solving a problem, but will someone pay for it? And how much? They’re the tellers of whether you’re onto something – unless you’re creating your own market like Uber, or AirBnB. Talk to your customers, validate your idea, get your product in their hands, collect feedback, and iterate. Move fast.
“Niche down and then scale up. Master a vertical and then go horizontally. The reality of start-up life is that it’s not easy or glamorous, you have to live and breathe your work. However, it is one of the most rewarding, enjoyable, and insightful jobs you can do. If you can become creative and disciplined in a domain of your interest, there are a breadth of opportunities and problems to tackle.”
Henry Brogan co-founded the company in October 2023 with his childhood friend, Tyler McCarthy:
“My co-founder Tyler and I have known each other since we were 12 years old. We went to the same high school, did the same GCSEs, went to the same college, and did the same A-levels. He is now at Manchester Metropolitan University, studying computer science and excelling as a software engineer.”
“In October 2023, after half a year of consultancy work (knowing that businesses were struggling with their data management and we were on the brink of technological evolution), Tyler and I came across the bid/proposal management function and soon realise that it was causing trouble for organisations of all sizes, especially in the middle market. We jumped in with both feet and didn’t look back. I still remember incorporating the business from my Butler Court dorm room, where I did a lot of my preliminary work, before receiving support from LUinc.”