Launch HN: Stir – Government Procurement as a Service

Hey HN!

I'm Jay Nath, founder of STIR (https://www.cityinnovate.com).

STIR is a digital platform that connects the world’s most innovative tech companies with governments to solve challenges over 16 weeks. At the end of the 16 weeks governments can choose to go into contract with the startups (nearly 80% get a contract). Our key innovation is streamlining govt procurement by 10X: govts can issue an RFP in days vs months/yrs and startups can respond in hours vs days/weeks of effort.

I created STIR when I worked for the Mayor of San Francisco to help close the innovation gap between cities and private-sector. It never ceased to amaze me how many of workflows and services were paper-based or put together using a MS Access database and yet we're surrounded by so much tech talent.

My vision was to help catalyze the growth of the govtech ecosystem by creating startup-friendly contract opportunities. Something that was really important to me was ensuring that governments articulated their pain points and the outcomes they wanted to achieve instead of being proscriptive about solution requirements.

This has led to some great benefits: * Over 50% of our startup founders are from under-represented communities * Nearly 80% of our startups get a contract * Govts get real data before purchasing a solution

Since our pilot using Google forms and Wordpress, we just launched a cohort-based digital platform using BulletTrain (https://bullettrain.co). It works as follows: governments identify problems from the public and staff, convert into a structured challenge brief, startups apply and governments formally score, best applicants invited to 16 week demonstration period, formal evaluation and then contracting.

Over 20 governments have published 60+ startup-friendly contract opportunities using STIR (https://www.cityinnovate.com/challenge).

At the moment, we're only in N America but we hope to expand next year.

We'd love to get any feedback/questions!