From zero to first wins: how N2 Holding broke into public procurement

At first, public tenders were a side topic for N2 Holding. The company knew the public procurement market existed and that it might hold some interesting contracts, but it had neither the process nor the experience to compete there seriously. The basic questions were still open: where to look for tender notices, how to judge whether a given procedure was a good fit for the company, and where to begin in the first place.

Two months later, the picture looked different. N2 Holding had won its first public tenders and had a concrete way of working with public procurement. This is the story of how a company with no tender experience turned an unfamiliar market into a new sales channel.

The starting point: public tenders as an entirely new market

Before N2 Holding started using Minerva, it was not actively bidding in public tenders. The company was familiar with the subject in general terms, but it had no structured process for handling public procurement.

The biggest challenge came right at the start. The public tender market consists of thousands of notices scattered across many sources: Poland's Public Procurement Bulletin (BZP), TED, e-procurement platforms and the websites of individual contracting authorities. For a company without experience, every day began with the same question: which of these procedures are even worth reading?

Without a process, two mistakes come easily. The first is spending time on tenders that never matched the company's profile. The second, and more costly, is missing well-matched public contracts hidden among hundreds of similar notices.

N2 Holding was looking for a faster way into the process, one that would not mean manually searching multiple tender portals from scratch.

Why N2 Holding chose Minerva for public procurement

It started with Minerva's ads, which reached the N2 Holding team. After a few conversations, the company took a closer look at public procurement and saw a real opportunity to win new clients.

Above all, N2 Holding expected two things from a tender tool:

• finding public tenders that match the company's profile,
• cutting the time needed for initial research and assessment of tender notices.

Minerva covered both needs. The platform monitors more than 4,500 sources every day and uses semantic search to match tenders to a specific business profile, instead of relying on CPV codes alone. For a company just entering public procurement, finding notices was only part of the value. What mattered most was quickly separating the procedures worth working on from the ones that made no sense.

What changed in day-to-day tender work

Once Minerva was in place, the N2 Holding team started working with a larger number of relevant public tender notices.

The platform brought scattered tenders together in one place and surfaced the ones that matched the company's profile. In practice, this meant less random browsing of the market and more time spent on specific procedures.

The matching improved over time. The more precisely the team described what it was looking for, the more accurately Minerva pointed to public contracts worth a closer look. Instead of starting every day from scratch, N2 Holding worked from a ready, pre-filtered list of tenders.

The platform did not take all the work off the team's hands. The bid still had to be prepared, the requirements in the tender documents still had to be analysed, and the team still had to decide whether bidding in a given procedure made sense. But the first stage, finding and pre-selecting public tenders, became much simpler.

First tenders won after two months

The most important result came quickly. N2 Holding started working with Minerva with no public tender experience at all, and about two months later it had already won its first procedures.

Several things came together on the company's side:

• fast access to relevant public tenders,
• regular work with the platform,
• a growing understanding of public procurement requirements,
• strong team commitment to preparing bids.

The N2 Holding team is open about how much work those first successes took.

Minerva is one of the things that helped us. The way it aggregates tenders and matches them to our needs is very good, but on our side it honestly took a great deal of work, a lot of preparation and many sleepless nights.

This is an important part of the story. Minerva did not replace the team. It helped the team find the right public tenders faster and organise its work from the start, and the people did the rest.

The biggest value: entering public procurement without the chaos

For N2 Holding, the greatest value was being able to enter public tenders without starting in chaos.

The team did not have to search multiple portals on its own through trial and error. Minerva gathered public contracts in one place and matched them to the company's business. As a result, N2 Holding could move faster to the most important part of the work: assessing each procedure and preparing the bid.

For a company that is new to public procurement, this makes a huge difference. The first weeks were not spent simply getting to know the market. From the very first days, the team could work on concrete opportunities.

The takeaway for companies considering public tenders

N2 Holding's story shows that entering public procurement does not have to start with years of experience. What it takes is a process, consistency and a willingness to work through tender documentation.

Minerva helps with the first and often the hardest stage: it finds well-matched public tenders and makes it quicker to judge whether they are worth pursuing. The rest depends on the team, its preparation and the quality of the bid.

“There's no reason to be afraid, you just have to try.”