In this instructional video Stacy Chin answers a series of practical questions about obtaining non‑dilutive grant funding for science and technology startups. She explains how to interpret and act on reviewer feedback from rejected or accepted grants, outlines the typical questions grant applications ask (including market gap, pain points, and mission alignment for specialized grants), and advises founders with no business plan on how to start the grant‑seeking process. Chin details how to hire and evaluate grant writers, comparing agencies versus independent freelancers, discussing pricing models (hourly rates up to $300, fixed fees, success‑fee arrangements), and highlighting red and green flags to watch for. She discusses when pursuing grants may be inappropriate due to timing or stage constraints, and the trade‑offs between local/state and national grant programs. Finally, she summarizes her company’s end‑to‑end services that help hard‑tech founders navigate SBIR Phase I and Phase II, from registration and strategy through writing, submission, and resubmission, covering sectors such as medical, digital health, environment, military, software, hardware, and energy.
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The next question: do you generally get feedback from grants that weren't accepted? Yes, and sometimes this feedback, depending on the agency or the organization that you go for, very specific, or they can be very broad. If you apply for a grant and it got rejected, or even just accepted, most likely you'll get feedback from the reviewers. Sometimes the feedback is very specific, like they provide critiques on every little aspect of your application. Sometimes they go, hey, we're just not interested in this application. If your grant got rejected, make sure to take that feedback to understand why the grant got rejected. How can you strengthen your grant application for a better chance of award in the next time? If you get a rejected application, ask the agency if you can jump on a call, and you might learn something new from talking with the agency, and they might even give you more advice. I can even help you to strengthen your business plan or point out gaps that you might not even recognize in the first place. Read the feedback, Learn how to strengthen your business and your grant, and then try it again. What are some standard questions that grant applications have? Alright, great question. You know, one, introduce yourself or introduce your company or technology. What's the gap in the market, and what are some pain points that customers are experiencing, and how can you solve that gap? If you're going for either a female or a minority-based grant, there might be questions that, well, how can this grant help you as a female founder to progress your business. And so again, those are some of the more specialized questions of going for a more specialized grant. Sometimes from a, some nonprofits with a mission statement might ask you questions as in, how does your business align to our mission within the nonprofit? So those are some questions you might get depending on what type of grants you go after. So this sounds great. Honestly, I'm not too sure, uh, where I'll start. If we have nothing prepared, no business plan, no grant opportunities, where do we start? What are those first steps? It does seem very daunting, especially for first-time business owners to go for the grant applications not knowing where to start. So a lot of people hire a grant writer online, or two, you can start Google searching and just finding what opportunities are there for you guys. And to do so, things that you need to know as a business owner is where do I stand in my business, what funding mechanism do I need, what am I going to use these funds for. Talk to a lot of people, get advice from everyone, and just start kind of writing down and revising that to, to the best of your ability. Can you talk about what it looks like to hire someone to help with grant research and prep? What are typical costs? What are things to look for? Red flags? Green flags? Great question. It is hard to find a really good grant writer that can give you what you need. Before you even jump into finding a grant writer, the first thing you have to figure out is, um, what type of grant do I want to go after? If you are a for-profit business, there are very different grant opportunities versus those for nonprofit companies. So you want to make sure, again, you find a grant writer helping in those different areas. Strategy and Narrative for a nonprofit grant application can be vastly different than that of a for-profit. To find a grant writer, there are a couple ways you can go about that. These are independent freelancers, and there's also agencies as well. So for grant writing agencies that work with many different companies, they leave— these companies might assign you a lead grant writer or a project manager and then help you to write that grant alongside you as well. Now, if you go for an independent freelancer, they typically can do the exact same thing as the agency. They might give you a more personalized approach versus a grant writing agency. Systematic way of how to go about the grant writing process. So again, it really depends on what's a good fit for you. Grant writing agency might take a success fee if they were to get the grant, and that's a great way to incentivize either an agency or grant writer get you support to write a proposed grant. You can also negotiate hourly contracts or a fixed rate. Some agencies prefer mostly a fixed fee contract. Freelancers can have more flexibility in their pricing. Some would prefer a fixed fee, others might prefer hourly. Depending on the skill sets of that grant writer, some can go as high up to $300 an hour. Um, bigger multi-million dollar grants, I've seen agencies charge companies like $20K to do. So again, it really depends on what makes sense for you. I have also seen grant writers that, you know, are more affordable for, uh, $25 an hour. In this sector, you do you get what you pay for. Talk to multiple different grant writing agencies, talk to different grant writers out there, and see who's the best fit for you. Best way to figure out whether the grant writer is a good one or, or high quality grant writer is to evaluate whether the grant writer is also asking you questions as well. A really skilled grant writer knows there's so much time, effort, and energy they also need to invest in writing that grant with you guys. And so if they're not in the questions and learning more about you, your startup and your short and long-term goals, may not be the right grant writer for you. Getting one of these grants is super, super competitive. And so if you met anyone that say, "Yes, we can get you the grant right away," run away from that person. Are there any circumstances where you don't think it's a good idea to go after grants? Yes. Raising money through grants is not a good fit for everyone, and that is okay. So the timelines are really long, and as an early-stage company, time is king. So you want to make sure the fundraising route is aligned to what you need at that time. It depends on the stage that you're in. It's not a good idea to go for a grant if you need money sooner. If you are in a growth phase, you might want to consider outside investments that can come in a little bit quicker. Whenever you submit a grant, there's no guarantees whether or not a grant would get awarded, despite whether you wrote the most perfect grant in the world. There's just a lot of factors behind the scenes that you're just not familiar with that would indicate whether or not a grant gets awarded. It might make sense to look for investors in parallel and submitting grants yourself. If you give a success fee, does that mean you don't pay unless you get it, or do they get paid hourly as well? And these success fees are typically for grant opportunities that are for for-profit organizations that are going for the $100K or over, $1 million grants. Some organizations, um, accept a success fee that lowers the upfront cost. Sometimes the bigger agencies require you to pay either a monthly retainer and/or an upfront cost just to start their service would take a portion of the success fee if the grant gets awarded. Sometimes some agencies or freelancers that don't accept the success fee, sometimes their rate can double or triple that way as well. Do you recommend local grants or national? Uh, does it depend on the local area or do most states have local ones? So a lot of states like California, Massachusetts, or Texas has a lot of state grants available for both for-profits and nonprofit grants. The competition pool or state grants is different than the national grants. So for the local state grants, you might be competing with other companies or nonprofits within your area. For federal grants, you're competing against everyone across the US. I recommend going for both local and national, again depending on the stage that you're in and also what type of grant opportunities you're looking for. Alright, to wrap up, can you take us through what your company does? We help science and tech founders get non-dilutive grants for science and tech startups to get innovation to the market. So we've worked with a lot of founders and startups in medical, digital health, environment, military, software, hardware, energy, and many more. So we're mostly focused on hard tech and high-risk innovation. We've helped founders through the SBIR program go through Phase I proposals and Phase II proposals. So Phase I is mostly about R&D research, whereas Phase II is about commercialization. And so we walk companies through everything from the registrations to the strategy, the writing, the drafting, all the way towards submission. And then we can help with resubmissions and also strategy to find other grant opportunities as well.
