In this YouTube presentation Dr. Stacy Chin, a polymer‑science PhD and founder of KeepYourEquity.co, explains how science‑ and technology‑focused startup founders can secure non‑dilutive capital through grants such as SBIRs, NIH, NSF, state, nonprofit, and industry programs. She contrasts grant funding with equity‑based financing, outlines the spectrum of grant sizes and application lengths, and stresses that grant proposals must be treated with the same rigor as a traditional fundraising deck. Chin walks viewers through practical ways to discover relevant grants (Google searches, grants.gov, state and nonprofit databases) and how to match opportunities to a company’s stage and funding needs. She details the grant‑writing process: crafting a compelling story that aligns with the funder’s mission, using templates, adhering to required sections (team, market opportunity, IP, commercialization plan, financials), and allocating realistic timelines (weeks for small grants, three months plus 4‑6 months review for large SBIRs). The talk emphasizes persistence, iterative improvement after rejections, and leveraging available resources to increase success rates.
Chapters
Hey, super excited to be here. I'm Dr. Chin from KeepYourEquity.co, and our mission is to help startup founders just like you secure non-dilutive funding. So although we specialize in science technology grants, and in particular grants called SBIRs, or Small Business Innovation Research grants, we've done a lot of other grants including nonprofits, smaller business grants, state grants, industry grants. My technical background is in chemistry, so I have a PhD in polymer sciences. I also went through the Startup Wellness Spell too and realized there is a lot of grant opportunities for early-stage a lot of early-stage founders, especially in science and tech, but there's not a lot of people that know how to go about these grants. And so if you don't come from an academic background or you're even trained under an environment that even know how to write these bigger grants, it gets very challenging. And again, the same concept, the strategy can apply to other types of grants as well too for many different businesses. And so I started helping a lot of founders and scientists try to figure out, you know, how do we get these grants? Why do you want to have grants, right? So there's two different types of fundraising strategies. So in one way, founders can go and raise money through traditional routes like looking at venture capitalists, angel investors, or banks. However, in terms of just outside raises, you do have to give away your equity, and some investors really want to take a nice pretty chunk of that of your company. And so a great way to mitigate that is to go through grants. And so for the grant applications, Some can be as easy as 1 or 2 pages. Other times it can be over 100 pages long. Again, usually the bigger grants that are in the $1 million range are those longer grants. Smaller grants, you know, go for a couple hundred dollars to a couple thousand dollars. Either way, even though you can apply for these grants, you wanna treat grants just as competitive as a traditional raise. And so everything regarding what you do in a traditional fundraising strategy, like putting together your market plan, business plan, what's your innovation if you have that, What's your short and long-term plans? Who your team is? What's your value proposition is? That's the exact same thing you have to figure out before you go for a grant application. Many different ways to go about finding these grants. So a lot of people are finding them just a simple Google searching. There are organizations that can help you find these grants. If you're going for a bigger grant, grants.gov is also another way to find grants as well. Even though there's so many grants out there, you want to make sure you strategically find the grants that number one, fits you and your company and reflects the stage that you you are currently in. So if you're an early entrepreneur that just filed your LLC a couple of days ago, there are grants that might be smaller but also suitable for those really early stage or those seed funding grants. However, if you're a company that is much bigger and are looking for growth, there are very different grants out there that also have a bigger amount to reflect the progress that you are currently in. So you want to make sure that you find a grant that complements the current stage your company is at. So again, Google searching is the best way to find a grant. Don't forget to look at state grants and a lot of nonprofit grants as well too. Again, they're just as competitive, but that could be another way for you to get non-diluted funding in that realm as well. Even though you should go for all the grants, you also want to just make sure the grant is also applicable towards you and also what your strategy is as well too, to give yourself the best chances of success. So how do you prepare a grant? There's a lot of steps that have to go into preparing a grant. Everyone goes, "Oh, this is only 2 pages," or, "This only requires a couple sentences. I'm just going to spend 20 minutes on them and That's not how you want to go about a grant writing strategy. Although some grants require a form where you have to include 400 words here, 400 words there, 200 words there, sometimes those grants are the hardest ones to actually go after just because there's a lot of time and thought that you have to put into each response, and you have to make sure you're concise enough so that everything that you want to convey about your business comes through in those responses. Another thing to keep in mind when preparing a grant is that you want to tell a story. You want to make sure the grant also reflects the mission of the organization that you're applying for. So for example, if you're going and applying for a grant for a nonprofit making healthcare more accessible to global communities, you have to make sure whatever you're proposing in there is also aligned to that mission. A lot of times state grants are out there just to spur the economy or to encourage more different founders out there or to encourage economic growth. And so you want to make sure whatever you're proposing highlights some sort of those realms that you can go for. What are some good search terms to make sure that you're finding grants that are good for your business? You want to highlight, you know, are you a Are you a for-profit company or a nonprofit? Two, what stage are you in? Are you a very early stage? Are you trying to get something up and running? Are you looking for seed funding? That's another way you can try to figure out what stage of grants you're looking for. Typically, those early stage grants, less than $10,000, whereas those that are further along could be a bigger grant as well. What are some good databases for grants? So again, good old Google searching will definitely help you to go about that. It does take time to find the right grants for you guys. You want to make sure it's the best fit for you and your startup or your company. Versus what your needs of that company as well too. Don't go into the grant writing process, you'll submit the first application and get that accepted. It took me 16 tries just to get my first grant. So there is a bit of an art to grant writing that you also have to learn as well too. And so typically, do the best you can for the first grant application, and then as you learn more about what reviewers are looking for, continue to revise it, and then go back and pitch again. The message is don't give up when you write grants, just keep finding a home of it, keep making the grant better and just keep going for different opportunities. Are there available templates online for preparing grants? There are available templates online for preparing grants. So again, depending on the grants you want to look for, there could be standard templates that are available. On our website, keepyourequity.co, we also have templates online as well too. If you're looking for an SBIR grant, we do have opportunities if you're going for the National Institute of Health or the National Science Foundation. Templates are very helpful, but also you want to make sure that the outline and the storyline that you want to propose fits the needs of your business and what you want to propose in your application. So not one grant will look the same, um, and that's okay. You want to make sure you tell your story and present that in the best way as possible. What does a typical schedule look like finding, applying, receiving grants? Great question. You want to make sure you give yourself enough time to complete that process. Finding these grants will take perhaps maybe just a week or two on Google. Sometimes these grant opportunities have different deadlines throughout the whole year, so you want to keep that in mind. And preparing those smaller grants might It might take you a couple weeks. Some people can bang it out within a day or two. These are also very competitive as well too, so you're not quite sure once you submit the grant who's on the other side of the table reviewing that. You always want to make sure you have multiple applications in, especially getting the first grant. Now if you go for the bigger grants like an SBIR, these are very, very long applications. I typically tell clients spend at least 3 months. If you're going for over $100,000 or $200,000 grants, you want to make sure you have all the pieces in play. So that means what is the commercial opportunity, what is the R&D plan, what team do you have in place, and what research do you want to do? So you want to propose a really good plan as in what are you going to do with this money. And sometimes it does take quite a bit of time to talk to the right people to figure out, is my plan valid? There are going to be many, many revisions within that grant application process and you want to give you enough time to make sure you consider all the different factors and milestones you'll need to hit in the short and the long term if you were to receive this. After you submit a grant, typically for bigger opportunities, you won't probably hear back from 4 months to even 6 months. So that's unfortunately one of the downfalls of writing grants. So the timeline for award, or even just to know whether you accepted or not, does take a bit of time. So you want to make sure that timeline is also aligned to your business goals as well. For the smaller grants, you might hear within a month. So again, not overnight, but it does take some time to still hear back for these opportunities. Do you have any resources you recommend putting together a business plan that is good for grant applications? Depending on the grant you want to go for, they will walk you through exactly what they want in your business plan. And if they say we want the market opportunity, they want to know about the customers, and then we want to know about the competitors, and then your short and long-term goal, and your finances, make sure you give them exactly just that. If that's what they're asking for, put that in your grant. I've worked with founders that do not follow a suggested structure, and it just makes it more difficult. The grant application tells you exactly what they're looking for in that business plan. Make sure you follow that to the T. Now, if there are grant applications that are more open-ended, there are dozens of free templates online that you can just use. But typically, in any grants, whether you're going for the big R&D grants or your own smaller grants for any other business, the common things they're going to look for in a grant is What is your company? What is your team? Where's the market opportunity? What's your IP? How you plan to market or sell your services or product? What's the competition? Why does your product, service, or innovation stand out? They're going to want some financials, whether it's a pro forma, your fundraising strategy, or revenue generating strategy.
