In this interview, host Charles Cormier talks with Peter Hurd Waller, CEO and co‑founder of Impact Applications, about the Canadian grants ecosystem and the company’s full‑service, contingency‑based grant‑management business model. Peter explains how his background in software led to a pivot toward grant services after encountering funding challenges and an illegal blockchain voting product. He describes the abundance of Canadian grants, especially post‑COVID, and outlines the types of programs (e.g., IRAP, IDEAS, My Tax) and their typical sizes, ranging from a few thousand dollars for student hires to multi‑million‑dollar innovative projects. The conversation covers the philosophical rationale behind government grant programs versus venture‑capital‑driven Silicon Valley models, and uses game‑theoretic reasoning to argue that founders should actively pursue grants. Peter discusses the role of AI tools like ChatGPT as supplemental aids rather than replacements for grant writing, and details Impact Applications’ fee structure (approximately 20% split between approval and disbursement) and their high success rate (~99%). Client acquisition is driven by word‑of‑mouth, referrals, and a partner network, while the company also hires interns—particularly from humanities backgrounds—to handle the “boring” grant paperwork. The interview touches on the historical timeline of the Canadian grant “gold rush,” noting a surge around 2020‑2021 and a slight slowdown thereafter. The episode ends with a brief invitation for listeners to learn more about Impact Applications.
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Another founder wisdom Pod. Today with us, Peter Hurd Watler. He is CEO and co founder at Impact Applications. So we're going to talk about grants. I've long considered Canada to be the land of grants, for better and for worse. And I guess we want to talk about the better of it and how to take advantage of all these grants that will allow you to grow. As we've known, the government has dropped a bunch of these grants, the Canadian one and starting 2020 with COVID and all of these free money packages, some of them were loans. So Pete's gonna help us to understand the difference here and what's attractive with the low hanging fruit as of now. But before he does, Pete, briefly introduce yourself and tell us a bit more about Impact Applications.
Yeah, for sure. So my name is Peter Hurd Waller. I'm the co founder and CEO of Impact Applications. A bit of background for myself is I originally was in the software space and software requires a lot of money to pay all of your developers. So I'm like, we need to get some grants. So I applied for the grants but that brought the problem of now I'm focusing all my efforts applying to this grant and the software took a bit of a dive. So that's where I came up with the idea of Impact Applications. Working with my co founder Chase, and that's what we're doing at Impact is, you know, helping our customers get non dilutive grant funding with speed communication and integrity so they can focus on what they do best, building the product and selling it while we work hard to get them funding. And that's what we do.
So you started in software. What lessons and insights did you get from there? And why did you transit to grant? Is it because there's a gold rush in grants right now? I've seen a lot of people pivot to that.
I think there's definitely a little bit of a gold rush in grants. As you mentioned, Canada is the land of grants. It's always going to be there. With COVID we noticed a lot of grants. For example, there's one called My Tax, which is a research based grant during COVID just for Covid. Instead of 50% subsidized, it was 75% subsidized for hiring a PhD student, for example, to do research for your company and help you develop your product. But from the software space, the reason why I pivoted was a few reasons. The first software idea I had was blockchain voting, which was a great idea and we were developing it and several municipalities actually approach Us several cities to run their elections with our blockchain. However, provincially voting online in Alberta, unlike Estonia, where I'm calling from now is illegal. You can't vote online. So we're like what are we going to do if our business model is illegal? We got to pivot. So we, about a year ago, year and a half ago we pivoted to a survey insights engine idea, kind of a text summarization and with that idea it was good. But the lesson learned is, you know, you don't want to build a product that people don't need and that survey insights isn't as big of as a problem as well as chat GPT now can, can do that. So now we're kind of, well if we can't beat them, let's join them. So we're doing our impact applications, grant management, full service grant management and we're leveraging chat GBT and creating a bit of a grant writing GPT to help us advance our grant ready abilities, serve our clients better and serve more clients.
In my online grants I'm sometimes conflicted because can you tell Canada's philosophy behind grants? Because it seems that the startups that really make it again, Silicon Valley with that land of success, they don't have much grants, they have VC money, they don't have much cushions or safety nets as per se and it's really hardcore, it's really like dedicate your whole life to it. And this, this scarcity quote unquote, and I might even be mistaken by calling it scarcity because they still have VC money which, which is not theirs but that, that scarcity could bring innovation and very high competitiveness. So what's your take and opinion on first the Canadian government strategy and second, the moral or ethical side of things?
Mm, yeah. So the Canadian government strategy, there are a lot of grants, for example IRAP that they really care is this, is this good use of the taxpayer money. So for instance another grant is the IDEAS program with the military. So they will post a challenge and say hey we need, this is our problem. And then companies develop MVPs and proposals and the winner gets the grant. So I think something like that is excellent. These challenges, I think that's kind of the best of both worlds where yeah, it is government money, but it's also challenges and more free market rather than the government just develop the solution themselves which is probably not going to be that great. So I understand a bit of the philosophy of the Canadian government, but there are some downsides too. But I will say I'd I'd rather the government be handing out grants than spending that money on other things that we won't get into politics. But trust me, the government could be spending the our taxpayer dollars on far worse things than, than business grants that at least create jobs.
I agree, I fully agree on that one. So I love your takes there. The next question is from the game theory side of things. So let's say that I'm retentive and I'm like this stubborn headed founder and I'm like, I don't believe in help or in grants and I want to be all by myself. Is that a loser's mentality or. Because when you get grants it's like, oh, if the competition, they took that grant, I should go get and get it. Is that the right mentality according to game theory?
Oh, absolutely. You should. Yeah. If you think about game theory, the prisoner's dilemma, it's, it's better to, you know, snitch on, on your, your friend for the prison, so that way you know to confess. And the same thing with the grants. Name one billionaire who doesn't leverage grants. If you think about Tesla and Elon Musk, the price of a Tesla, he's getting like $10,000 per car at least in environmental grants and things like that. So you have to take them, you're losing out. And at minimum the reason why you want to take them is to recuperate your tax dollars or maybe your parents tax dollars. So, so you definitely want to take advantage of them.
Fully agree. I'm convinced. You, you're good at convincing me. Just not true. Because me, my startup is incorporated in hk, so I don't think I'd be eligible for these. On your side, the business model is it that you take 10% of a grant. So let's say that you get me 50k and through my doors, well, you'll retain 5k out of that. Is that how it works?
Yeah, it's pretty similar how it works. The percentage varies. The industry average is 20%. So how it works for us is depending on the amount, but let's call it 20%. We only get paid when you get paid. So once the grant has been approved, then we take our first 10% and then once the money has entered your bank account, then we take our last 10%.
So how long does it take you an average to fill all these forms? And what's the average grant size? Is it 50k? And does it take you 10 hours per grant?
It really depends. It really depends on the grants. So some grants for example, are to hire student interns. Those don't take as much time, but it's not as much money. Maybe it's only five to ten grand to hire a student for a semester. Other grants can be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars. These big innovative projects, you need a team of developers and other technical brains and that's in the millions of dollars. And that takes hours, hundreds of hours to do. So that's, that's kind of the balance. It really depends on the grant.
Right. And then I can't help it. You and I, we talked about GPT pre call and I'd be like, huh, that million dollar grant, it might take me 100 hours, but what if I feed GPT all of my data, I tell it, scrape all of my stuff and write in my style and fill that whole document and have that 1.2 million filled in three hours, lo and behold. And I'm getting paid, yeah, 240K to do that. Is that far fetched or.
Yeah, that's far fetched. I really wish it did work that way so I could make 240 grand in three hours. I do wish it worked that way. But think of GPT is. ChatGPT is just another tool. It's a great tool. A hammer will help you. Like a hammer. A hammer will help you build a house, but it won't build you the house. So GPT will help you with these grant applications, but it won't get you the grant. It's a tool, but if you don't know what you're doing, like with a hammer, you won't be able to do it. And it does save some time, but not as much as, as you said.
Right. So must be quite unfortunate though to spend like that much time filling grants. I did fill a grant with one of my startup back in the day, my nootropic startup, I think we've got forgot the name, but it was an innovation grant and it funded a research that we did on or, or nootropic. That one was quite helpful indeed. It did propel the project. Now did it add value to product? Not enough because we had to close that startup down. But it was so boring to fill this, these, these papers. So how do you avoid the boredom? Like do you have employees that do that for you?
Part of it to avoid the boredom. That that's why our business exists, because it is boring. You know, it is boring and companies don't want to do it. It distracts them from their core operations. That's where we come in at impact applications, there's several ways to, you know, conquer the boredom. The first is I do like writing, I do like words. I also like developing our chat GPT. So that's pretty exciting. We do have interns that we're applying and one of the things that we're looking forward to is hiring more interns, especially those in the humanities. Because I know that's a big problem for people at universities. Those who get degrees in the humanities don't necessarily get jobs after university or they get jobs that they could have got out of high school. And this is a nice thing that we're offering is with grant writing, this is a great way to apply your history degree, your English degree or something like that and actually get you a job in your field. So that's, that's what we're leveraging as well.
So your co founder, he's in charge of ops and you're in charge of sales, is that my understanding?
It's the other way around actually. So. So he's in charge of sales and I'm in charge of operations.
How do you get your.
Usually most of our clients are through word of mouth. So he, he has a company that's a digital marketing agency and that's how he was able to get our initial clients. And then we also have a referral program for our existing clients as well as a partner referral program. So that's something you and I can discuss because, you know, a lot of startups and a lot of companies and we could discuss that referral program. It's most of it's through word of mouth and that's, that's something we would value is we're not in the grant writing business. We're in the relationship business. We're in the relationship management business. And that's really what we're doing is holding our clients hands every step of the way, taking on all that grant writing and applying stress for them. And that's the business we're really in is the relationship management, not necessarily the grant management.
Right. And I've got a lot of outreach myself lately with companies offering me these things, you know, pointing out specific grants, that can be cool. But the strategies I guess would be to, well, how many types of grants are there first, like thousands in Canada.
Oh, there's so many. Like, there's so many. And that's, There is literally thousands. Yeah, there's, there's literally thousands and wow. That, that's why they hire us.
Is there a database like that's active to See if ones are still active. Yes. The ones that are not. How do you manage that?
Well, that's where we come in. So there, there are several databases, there's ways to search for grants, there's even a Government of Canada search website. But that's where we come in. Because if you're going at it alone, there's just so many options. And let's say you find one that you think you're eligible for and then you apply. You invest all these hours, maybe you take two or three months off your core operations to apply and then you get rejected. Well, that's just that, that really sets you back as a founder, especially a startup founder, because things are moving quick. Whereas what we do is we've, we've done it before, we've applied to many grants before. Our success rate is 99%, almost 100% and we take the risk for you. So we, we don't get paid unless it's approved. And that's, that's where we come in. We, we, we know which ones to apply for, we know which ones you're eligible for and we know those more targeted ones and, and more importantly how to apply and doing the work to apply.
When did that gold rush started? Was it in the 2000s, 2010s and then it drastically accelerated in 2020 or
I think for Canada it's been around for quite some time and even, I think it even exists in the US as well. The unfortunate thing with the US is in a way, the United States arguably has more grants, if you think about the bank bailouts in 2008 and all those other bailouts. Whereas in Canada, what's nice is the eligibility requirements for grants have gotten lower. So more startups or, or early stage companies, which is quite nice. It's nice to see that the money is more accessible, at least in theory, to everyone. I would say that gold rush really started probably the beginning of 2000s, like early 2000s. And then with COVID it did accelerate, but it has been brought down since COVID Like 2020. 2021 was the best time to apply for funding and we're glad that we did. For some of our customers we took advantage of that, but it has gone down a bit. The sink has gotten a little bit tighter, but there's still plenty of them there.
Well, your business does have my stamp of approval. I think it's nice on cash flow and nice model, good niche. Yeah. Let's further convo because we're already out of time today, but was was a brief intro, a cool one as well. I'm bullish on the idea of it. Peter, where can we find out more about you and your business?
Yes, you can find me on LinkedIn. Peter heard Watler CBE. You can go to our website ImpactApplications CA. And you can also email me Peter at ImpactApplications CA. If you could write that in the description of the video. Really appreciate that, Charles.
