Toby Egbuna
May 16th, 2024

Hello! Welcome to my newsletter - Finessing Funding💰. Every other week, I’ll be sharing stories, strategies, and ideas about funding for your startup. Get Finessing funding delivered to your inbox every week 👇🏾

To date, we’ve won over $275k in grant funding for Chezie.

I can say with 100% certainty that Chezie wouldn’t be where it is today without this funding. It gave us the foundation to go full-time, hire our first employees, and get our first couple of customers.

While grant funding is definitely not all roses, I’d encourage every founder to pursue it for multiple reasons, not the least of which is that it’s free money.

Here’s the ultimate guide on how to get grant funding 👇🏾

Pros and cons of grants

While grant funding is generally a win, there are some downsides to be aware of.

The good

Let’s start with the obvious. Grants are good because they give you free money. By that, I mean that grant funding is non-dilutive, so money from grants doesn’t cost you equity.

The bad

The two main challenges with pursuing and accepting grant funding

1. It’s time-consuming - applying for grants isn’t quick. Some applications have as many as 50 questions about everything from your business model to your team. Applying to them can take 2-3 hours and multiple editions, depending on the application. This is when you’re not talking to customers or building products.

2. It (usually) requires a commitment to a program - all of the grants that I’ve received have come as part of a program:

   • NPR - How I Built This Fellowship

   • Amazon - Impact Accelerator

   • Google - Black Founders Fund

   These programs are structured with multiple 1-2 hour sessions/week where the founders discuss things like the best legal structure for their companies and how to think about culture as an early-stage startup.

   While the content of these sessions can be helpful, I’ve found that the programming can also be a big time suck. The content gets repetitive, especially if you’ve completed an incubator or accelerator in the past. I’ve been on multiple cohort calls where I’m fully immersed in working on something else, but I have to join just so they see me online.

Is either of these items a big enough deterrent to keep you from applying for grants? No. But if you’re applying for them regularly, you should know these drawbacks.

How to apply for grants

Like everything else when building a company, applying for grants is easier if you have a system. Here are the things I did to win our grant funding.

Keep a repository of common application questions

90% of pitch competition and program applications are the same. Almost everyone asks about your problem, solution, market size, competition, etc.

Don’t reinvent the wheel. Instead, keep a Google or Notion doc with a list of your responses to these common pitch competition application questions so you can copy/edit/paste them into the application. If you’re good with ChatGPT, you could create a custom GPT by uploading a list of answers to common application questions and running any new applications through that GPT. Just a thought…

Here’s a link to a grant application question database that you can duplicate for your use.

Focus on milestones

The review committee wants to know that their money will help you reach your goals, so tell them.

Break down how the funding will help you reach milestones you wouldn’t otherwise achieve. This could be a new product launch, a marketing campaign, or hiring another engineer.

Be realistic, though. If you’re applying for a $1k grant, don’t talk about how you’ll use the money to hire an additional engineer. Instead, in this case, tell the reviewers that the money will go towards hiring a part-time community manager to help you launch your customer Slack community.

Tailor your application

Not all grants are the same. Some focus on how your company can make the biggest social impact, while others are interested in how you benefit a specific demographic or affinity.

Spend 5-10 minutes reading the About section to understand what the reviewers seek. This takes some more time, and you’ll have to edit some of your responses from your question database, but it gives you a better shot of standing out to the application review team.

Avoid mentioning competitors

Think this through. If you’re applying for Google for Startups, don’t mention you use AWS for your cloud hosting. ****

Instead, talk about the provider’s tools you either use or hope to use shortly. If you can, talk about how you hope to leverage that company’s expertise. For example, when we applied to the Amazon Impact Accelerator, I told them that we needed help building our technical architecture as we planned to move from no-code to a full-stack application.

Similar to tailoring your application, the reviewers want to know how they specifically can help you succeed.

Nurture ecosystem growth

The grant hosts want every company in the program to succeed, but they also want to build a community. The ideal situation is that every founder stays in touch with the other founders.

I believe that we stood out because we openly talked about how we wanted to build the ecosystem for the grant providers by leveraging our expertise to help our fellow founders build more inclusive workplaces from day one. Don’t be afraid to talk about how you plan to contribute to the development of the other companies in your cohort or the program as a whole. Here are some ideas on how to do that:

• Come back and speak with next year’s cohort

• Offer your startup’s services to the program or participants

• Become an informal brand ambassador for the program by talking about it on your social media pages

Where to find grant opportunities

Grants can be hard to find, but here are a few resources.

1. Funding newsletters

   Shameless plug - I share non-dilutive funding opportunities at the end of each newsletter. Check them out below!

   Additionally, Lolita Taub runs a monthly newsletter discussing VC topics and highlighting founders who’ve recently received funding. She also includes a section with a list of grant funding opportunities for underrepresented founders.

   Subscribe here.

2. Hello Alice

   Hello Alice is a working database of funding opportunities (including grants) that founders can tap into. Check it out here: https://helloalice.com/

3. Google searches

   Simple but effective. Here’s what I found after a quick search today, May 15th:

   • CNN

   • Nerdwallet

   • Bankrate

   • NAACP

Above all, remember this: grant funders are not VCs. They probably won’t give you a grant to fund your idea. If you have some traction and can prove to the review committee that its money will meaningfully impact your business, applying for grants can be a great way to fund your company. If not, consider holding off until you’re ready to really fuel growth.

Opportunities closing this week

1. Good Soil $eed Capital Competition - Engage in the competition for a chance to win from a prize pool totaling $500,000, including a grand prize of $200,000 designed to enhance your business trajectory significantly.

   Apply here: https://s.surveyplanet.com/p6v26uui

2. Impact Prize - The Impact Prize is a new $1 million open call-seeking organization with a proven track record of improving economic mobility for people in the United States through innovative workforce and technical training initiatives.

   Apply here: https://rockpa.fluxx.io/apply/impact_prize

3. Retail Brand Accelerator - The Retail Brand Accelerator, made possible by funding from Walmart through the Walmart.org Center for Racial Equity, provides tailored education, mentorship, and resources that prepare diverse founders to break through and succeed in mass retail. Ultimately, we aim to leverage the power of business ownership to build a more inclusive and equitable economy.

   Apply here: https://seedspot.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_dpyaoFPePUcxmXI?source=WAL