The Canberra Times test

Front page of the Canberra Times today!

Running a bootstrapped business is a hard slog - to say the least - so it's worth celebrating a little when you get the chance. Well, today is one of those days, with a nice article in the Canberra Times about my journey from Public Servant to running a technology product company in Canberra.

Today also marks another milestone, as I've just launched the AwardedTenders product (dashboards for public procurement outcomes) into the UK and Canadian markets.

When I launched AwardedTenders in 2022, I was surprised at the demand for a (better) way to navigate publicly available data procurement, but since then I've spoken to more SMEs than I could count about why having access to this data is so important for them.

As I've grown the AwardedTenders product, it's been rewarding to be able to make a small difference to so many businesses who all want to see improvements to public procurement.

The past couple of years have also seen demand from within Government for access to their own data in a more useful form.

I recall a conversation I had years ago with one of the co-founders of Swirrl - a UK based company building products for public data in that market - he said that, in their experience, the largest beneficiaries and most engaged users of public data (once it was more accessible and useful), was other parts of the public sector.

I've always been motivated by making Government more efficient, and today's article is another nice nudge to keep doing that.

If you'd like to check out what better public procurement data looks like, head over to https://awardedtenders.au.

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