Instrumentl (YC S16) Is Building a Database of All the Grants in the World | Hacker News Reader

Instrumentl (YC S16) Is Building a Database of All the Grants in the World

themacro.com

64 pointsstvnchn12 comments

Very cool!

A killer feature, if you don't already have it, is to have researchers answer a set of questions then leverage their answers to apply for many grants at once or pre-populate 70% of an application.

We've been working on the other side of this problem, improving how research labs track and spend their funding effectively.

https://labspend.com/

Feel free to reach out as we're both trying to reach a similar set of people.

Angela here, one of the cofounders of Instrumentl. We'd love to hear your feedback about what we're building to bring efficiency & transparency to research funding. Have a grant horror story? Let's hear it!

How will Instrumentl generate revenue? Taking the person from Italy that found a grant through you, what did that mean for Instrumentl in terms of income and how?

How will those looking for grants find you?

Our customers pay us ~$30 per seat per month just like other saas models. Customers range from individual researchers to entire research organizations. Couple strategies for user acquisition: SEO, direct sales to universities, content marketing. Thanks for the Qs!

Down the road, we're looking into charging based on the dollar amount that we help researchers win, but for now we’re charging a monthly subscription.

why not try to charge universities more and then provide a open list?

this way i can't avoid the feeling that you work against freedom of information.

At a glance it looks like you might also do some management of grant proposals. Do/will you help proposers publish those proposals? See eg http://riojournal.com and http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jour...

Yes, we plan on encouraging researchers to share their proposals and help one another. Great article - thanks for sharing!

might be of interest: https://www.usaspending.gov/Pages/Default.aspx

Thanks - that is a lot of $$$

are you guys open to intros from orgs? We have a couple institutions we work with in NYC who would love this

absolutely - angela@instrumentl.com

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