Must Have Platforms for Grant Writing Secure Competitive Small Business Grants | KeepYourEquity

In this video, I'm going to share the top 4 platforms that I've used for free that has helped me to secure millions of dollars of non-dilutive funding and that can help you secure a competitive small business grant. Hey guys, welcome back to the channel. I'm Stacy Chin from keepyourequity.co, and our mission is to help startup founders just like you secure non-dilutive federal grant funding so that you can bring your innovative ideas to the commercial market. So if you've ever written a grant, you know that grant writing is a tedious and difficult process that can take weeks or even months to complete. And this is especially true if you're going for those high-value grants in the $100,000 or even $1 million range, since these applications can be over 100 pages long. If you're new to this channel, we specialize in federal grant programs called the SBIR and STTR. After writing these grants for clients and myself for over 10 years, I found the best technical solutions that makes this entire process easier, faster, and definitely less stressful. However, these platforms that I'm about to share with you can be used across across all different types of technical writings, including academic journals, dissertations, white papers, and so many more. If you're interested to learn more about the SBIR and STTR program, I'll leave a link in the description to another video that you can check out. But before I reveal these platforms, please like this video and subscribe to this channel so that you won't miss any tips and tricks on how you can secure non-dilutive funding so that you can keep your equity throughout your fundraising journey. And don't forget to check out our website at keepyourequity.co where you'll find lots of other advice, resources and templates to help you secure grants as well. First technology platform is Grammarly. When writing really long grant applications like the SBIR and STTR, I typically tell clients to spend at least 3 months to prepare a really strong application. And within those 3 months, our goal is to draft a really strong technical narrative that can be anywhere from 6 pages to even 15 pages long. And this is the document that gets the most scrutiny from the reviewers, so we want to make sure this guy is in tip-top shape. So that means many, many, many changes changes, revisions, and edits have to be made over and over again on that draft within that 3-month period. It is not uncommon to revise the same document over at least 10 different times before we submit the application. In fact, for my last project, we actually had version 36 ready to go before we were able to finalize and submit that proposal. So I'm sure you can imagine, with so many changes and revisions happening in that same exact document, the punctuation and the grammar gets a bit messy. And let me tell you, as you keep editing and reading and revising the same document over and over over again, it gets harder and harder to pick up those nitty-gritty grammatical errors like different word tenses, subject-verb disagreements, preposition, punctuation, you know, all that good stuff. And after working on a proposal for over 3 months, you're going to be tired and exhausted, so fixing those little grammatical errors is probably the last thing on your mind. But these errors are something you have to fix. Submitting an application with poor grammar hurts your credibility and does not make a good impression on the reviewers at all. And these grammar, spelling, and punctuation mistakes actually makes it harder for reviewers to understand the key points you want to get across in your application because it affects the readability. And from my experience serving as a reviewer for several of these federal agencies, when I come across an application that is poorly written, let's just say the outcomes don't really turn out too well. But luckily, this is where Grammarly can come in and save the day. Grammarly is an online writing assistant platform that helps to review spelling, punctuation, grammatical errors, and much more. Grammarly can also analyze your writing and help improve the engagement, the clarity, and also delivery as well. It's also a great platform to help you write in a particular style or tone, like educational, informal, formal, or business-like. This all can be done within less than a minute. Yes, it is that easy. But I found Grammarly to be the best solution for me. I can't tell you how helpful this has been, especially to edit a grant at the 11th hour right before submission. So to use Grammarly, you simply just run that extension and have Grammarly do all the work to identify and help you fix all the grammatical errors, the spelling mistakes, the punctuations, and all that stuff. So next time you write a grant application or a dissertation, a publication, a fellowship, or whatever technical writing piece you may be working on, just install Grammarly and use that when you're right about to wrap up so that you can make sure it's in tip-top shape before you submit it. The second technology platform is Otter AI. So when I work with new clients, one of the first things I have to do is understand whether they have anything written down about the technology, their strategy, the innovation, and their business plan. And in many cases, sometimes they don't have anything. So then my next goal is to figure out what can we do to get the client to give us all the materials and enough content so that we can use that to prepare a really strong grant application. And depending what we're asking for, some clients would prefer to provide as paragraphs or something in written form, but other times clients that are stronger verbal thinkers like to talk it out or articulate that through speech. So in those latter experiences, before I knew about Otter AI, what I would do is jump on a brainstorming call with them, and then as they were talking, I would quickly write my notes down throughout our discussion. And unfortunately, I found this method to be super exhausting and challenging because as I'm trying to hear the client and understand what they're saying. At the same time, I'm just trying to write it down quickly and making sure I capture all that they said. And unfortunately, sometimes I miss some things. I might make a mistake or that the articulation didn't come through thoroughly. And so that's when I was searching for a tool that can help me with this huge bottleneck, because instead of spending my time and efforts trying to ask the right questions and getting all the information from my clients, I'm spending most of that just trying to make sure I can catch up throughout the call. So once I discovered Otter.ai, this became a huge game changer for me. So Otter.ai is a platform that takes voice media notes and real-time transcription. I've tried other built-in transcription platforms before, like the ones from Microsoft Word or Google Docs, but I found the transcriptions were full of mistakes and they didn't work too well. So what sets Otter.ai apart from all these other transcription tools is that it uses artificial intelligence to transcribe the speech. And although it's not 100% perfect, I found this tool captured a lot of the difficult words and complex technical phrases that we typically use for these types of proposals that I work. So you can just simply sign up for Otter.ai online and then just hit the record button whenever you want to start transcribing. And once Once the conversation is done and you end the recording, the system would process the conversation and then let you know whenever the transcription is fully ready. And then I can just take that transcription, pop it into Google Docs or my Microsoft Word, and just use those notes when I write my grant. If you're interested in giving Otter.ai a shot, I'll leave my referral code in the description below. Now, the third technology platform that I love to use for grant writing is Mendeley. So if you've been following this channel, you'll know that we specialize in federal programs called SBIR and STTR, where we help science and tech startups secure non-dilutive funding. And when we work with clients, we encourage them to really hash out a rigorous R&D approach and also write a statement of why this innovation is needed, what's their hypothesis, and how they plan to go about that with experiments and scientific findings. And a great way to support those statements is to include references from peer-reviewed journals. And this is a great way to prove the validity and to justify the need for your proposed innovation. So to do so, you want to find references from peer-reviewed journals and scientific articles, and I'll recommend going to Google Scholar into finding these sources. And then in your proposal, you typically want to upload a separate document that has a list of those references for the reviewers to refer to if desired. And it is good practice to include a number or a citation next to the statement that you want to make referring to that journal article. And that just makes it easier for the reviewers to find additional information if they need it. So when clients are preparing for a Phase I SBIR application, I typically encourage them to find at least 20 to 25 different references. And then for Phase 2, at least 40 to 50. Now, as I've said, technical narrative of your proposal can undergo so many different changes and revisions. The content will get deleted, things will get moved around, and new material can be added in random places. And these changes can screw up the citations in your grant, sometimes really, really badly. So if you're preparing a 40-page proposal that cites over 50 references, you can imagine that reorganizing everything in numerical order, it's not an easy stroll in the park. And between you and me, this is actually one of the worst parts of the job, especially if you had to redo the references all by hand. And before I knew about Mendeley, when I used to do this by hand, it would take me hours just to redo entire reference list and to redo the citations in chronological order. Let me tell you, it was just a horrible mess. So to prevent me from pulling my hair out, I use Mendeley. Mendeley is a free online reference management software platform that helps to keep track and organize all my references. And not only Mendeley can help me to keep track of all the references and citations within a proposal application, but it can also do so across many different applications and projects. And what I really like most about Mendeley is that it is super easy and super user-friendly. So in Mendeley, you can search up for review articles or book chapters that can be added into your library. And then once you install the Mendeley plugin into your Microsoft Word, you can simply just pop that citation into your application referring to that references. Mendeley also makes it super easy to reformat references in different citation styles, and it can help you to compile a bibliography or list of references at the end of your application. Now, during any revisions, if all your stuff gets moved around, Mendeley can help reorganize all the references in chronological order again by simply just clicking a button. I currently have thousands of references stored in my Mendeley library across so many different proposal application projects, and I can't tell you how much time is saved, and also my sanity, by using Mendeley to help me fix, organize, and manage my references. And finally, last but not least, file technology platform that has been tremendously helpful throughout my grant writing journey are File and hosting services like Dropbox and Google Drive. So as I mentioned, sometimes these grant applications can be over 100 pages long and composed of so many smaller technical and supporting documents. The technical narrative alone can take up so much space to store on your hard drives since these are super dense documents filled with lots of text, colorful figures, tables, and so much more. As an example, for my last NIH SBIR project where I was helping my client to prepare a Fast-Track application, the research strategy itself is 12 pages long. It took 5 megabytes to store on my hard drive, and these large files can be super difficult to email back and forth between myself and clients just because of how large they are, and that there's a limit size to these attachments. And since preparing a large application requires different inputs from different team members, it can be very hard to share these really large files. So for these reasons, you want to have access to a secure file and document hosting service like Google Drive or Dropbox. Dropbox. And these platforms make it so easy to store and organize all these different documents in one place. They also make it a breeze to share all these files via email since I can just simply pop in a link and send that to a client to direct them where they can find the latest draft. There are no more struggles now of trying to attach big large files or compressing large ones in order to send that through email. And these platforms also make it super easy to organize these really big applications with all these different moving pieces coming to play. Comment below if you want me to share how I use Dropbox or Google Drive to help me organize and track of all the different pieces within an SBIR application. So with that, thank you so much for watching till the end of this video. If you found any of these tips helpful, please give this a like and subscribe to this channel, and leave a comment below of what other types of platforms or tools you use that could be helpful for the grant writing process. And of course, don't forget to check out our website at keepyourequity.co where you'll find lots of other helpful tips and tricks so you can learn how to keep your equity within your fundraising journey. Thank you so much, and I'll see you in a video very, very soon. Thank you.