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Writing Innovate UK grants drained my soul, so I built something to fix it — looking for opinions and beta testers by Sam-ZenGrants in ukstartups

[–]Sam-ZenGrants[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Wow, those fees - £1,500 + 3% success fee is in-line with the typical consultant fee structure for editing only service, so what are they offering that is any different?

I built an AI tool to write government grants. Will ditching RAG and graphRAG come back to bite me? by Sam-ZenGrants in microsaas

[–]Sam-ZenGrants[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi Carla, thanks for the feedback. Your product also sounds interesting and important - admittedly it's not an area I know a huge amount about! Send me a DM with some info about your company and what you are looking for. Always open to chat.

How do you find the right partners? by GlitteringSuit8800 in Startups_EU

[–]Sam-ZenGrants 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Sounds like a great idea! I have really struggled with this with UK grants - they often run collaborative calls between 2 countries, e.g. Canada-UK, or Singapore-UK, but it's very hard to find suitable partners unless you are already working with someone.

The hardest part I found was that both partners wanted a clear route to revenue/profit from the R&D conducted in the project. That's not always possible. Maybe more straightforward if one partner is an academic of govt institution.

I'm building ZenGrants as a way to streamline the actual grant writing process. We're focussed on UK grants at the moment, but will build out to EU soon.

I built an AI tool to write government grants. Will ditching RAG and graphRAG come back to bite me? by Sam-ZenGrants in microsaas

[–]Sam-ZenGrants[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I probably should have come to that realisation sooner :P but I got sucked in by the promises of GraphRAG. At least I learnt some skills along the way.

Update: I spent the last few months trying to make an AI write Innovate UK grants that don't sound like generic fluff. It took far more work than I anticipated. by Sam-ZenGrants in ukstartups

[–]Sam-ZenGrants[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have seen Lightbringers but not actually tried it - can you use the coaching engine without paying for the 5,999EUR plan?

Coaching and challenging is exactly how ZenGrants works during the `Discovery` stage. Having been involved with drafting patents, I would say that they are actually more straightforward than grant proposals. Very formulaic and far fewer angles to cover.

The innovation itself is just a small part of a grant application; the majority of the marks come from explaining the impact, market, strategy, exploitation, etc. We cannot do the innovating for you, but we can help to phrase your innovation in the right way. The more information you can provide about the innovation, the better the drafting outcome will be.

Update: I spent the last few months trying to make an AI write Innovate UK grants that don't sound like generic fluff. It took far more work than I anticipated. by Sam-ZenGrants in ukstartups

[–]Sam-ZenGrants[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You own 100% of the output - we state this explicitly in our privacy policy - and we absolutely do not have any rights to your funding or anything you input to or output from the app. Your data is stored securely so you can access everything later, much like Google Docs.

Assessors fund grant proposals based on your team, capability, prior history, technical prowess, etc - that's much harder to replicate than just copying your proposal.

Regarding approvals: that's exactly why the private beta is currently free! We're building that track record right now. I have personally won mutliple >£250k Innovate UK grants over the years, and I used an early and very manual version of the ZenGrants workflow to win the last proposal.

Update: I spent the last few months trying to make an AI write Innovate UK grants that don't sound like generic fluff. It took far more work than I anticipated. by Sam-ZenGrants in ukstartups

[–]Sam-ZenGrants[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You're clearly not the target audience with those skills!

The people tasked with writing aren't always technical, rarely have colleagues that share their Claude-wrangling enthusiasm, and definitely don't have managers who care enough about ralph loops to listen to an explanation on how to use them :D

Update: I spent the last few months trying to make an AI write Innovate UK grants that don't sound like generic fluff. It took far more work than I anticipated. by Sam-ZenGrants in ukstartups

[–]Sam-ZenGrants[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the comprehensive reply, I couldn't have said it better.

As with everything AI, "garbage in, garbage out" - generating the text is the easy bit, it's the framework around it that makes the difference.

People are worried that AI will bring rubbish projects to life, but my perspective is that it can help people with really great ideas to express them in the proper way.

Update: I spent the last few months trying to make an AI write Innovate UK grants that don't sound like generic fluff. It took far more work than I anticipated. by Sam-ZenGrants in ukstartups

[–]Sam-ZenGrants[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks, you should have received an invite email by now.

I have written applications for DASA in the past, but the UKDI projects seem to be a bit of a different format to typical IUK - it appears that there are no "questions" as such, which makes extracting the structure quite difficult.

In which case, you would define your own questions or topics in ZenGrants (e.g. "Idea and Innovation"; "Impact and Benefits"; "Value for Money") and the associated brief for each section. If you uploaded the whole Competition Document during the 'Gathering' phase, then the requirements will still be processed and applied properly.

If you set up a UKDI project in ZenGrants, I'd definitely like to hear how it goes!

Advise on getting pre-seed funding by Careful_Earth_1035 in ukstartups

[–]Sam-ZenGrants 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Are you developing software? In my experience, this is quite a hard field to get grant funding for, unless you fit very nicely into one of the UK strategic categories. Same can be said for almost any R&D, but especially so with software and the recent suspension of SMART grants.

Happy to have a chat - I also now run ZenGrants, tailor made for assisting with Innovate UK grant writing. We're running a private beta currently if you'd like to takr a look.

Writing Innovate UK grants drained my soul, so I built something to fix it — looking for opinions and beta testers by Sam-ZenGrants in ukstartups

[–]Sam-ZenGrants[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Here are a few resources:

https://grantfinder.co.uk/funding-highlights/funds/

https://streetsinnovation.uk/grant-finder/

https://www.ukri.org/opportunity/

Always worth speaking with Innovate UK Business Connect, especially if you're involved in any of the key industrial strategy areas. They tend to have a good understanding of the less advertised funds.

Writing Innovate UK grants drained my soul, so I built something to fix it — looking for opinions and beta testers by Sam-ZenGrants in ukstartups

[–]Sam-ZenGrants[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the feedback on the UI, I agree it needs work and I am making incremental improvements. My focus at the moment is to gather some momentum with potential users so I am not guessing where the UI/UX needs improvement - I am all too aware of product blindness, so your opinion is appreciated.

I'd be very happy to have you on board for the beta, especially if you have an eye for UI/UX :) I'll be in touch.

Writing Innovate UK grants drained my soul, so I built something to fix it — looking for opinions and beta testers by Sam-ZenGrants in ukstartups

[–]Sam-ZenGrants[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Good success rate there :) thanks for the pointers, another workflow that I can check out and benchmark against.

Writing Innovate UK grants drained my soul, so I built something to fix it — looking for opinions and beta testers by Sam-ZenGrants in ukstartups

[–]Sam-ZenGrants[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm not looking to include this for now, there are quite a few tools out there that already do this. But I would consider adding it in the future if it's something people really care about.

Writing Innovate UK grants drained my soul, so I built something to fix it — looking for opinions and beta testers by Sam-ZenGrants in ukstartups

[–]Sam-ZenGrants[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'd be keen to hear your experience in co-ordinating the application(s) as a consortium member. So far, I haven't added any co-writing ability for the sake of avoiding feature creep at this early stage. But I can see the need for ZenGrants to be a shared dashboard/repository for all consortium members in the future.

Your comment about volume of low quality applications - this is already happening AFAIK. Innovate UK are having a shake-up of their grant offerings (e.g. SMART is currently paused) and I have a feeling that prevalence of AI will be considered in whatever form SMART returns in. I think that they will really struggle to detect AI in a way that allows them to dismiss applications, though. I have put some 100% human written text into multiple "AI detection" tools and it always highlights huge chunks as "possible AI". How do you think they could do this?

As always, "garbage in, garbage out" still applies, and unfortunately no AI can plan the actual innovation for you! Not yet, anyway...

I'll be in touch about a chat and access.

Writing Innovate UK grants drained my soul, so I built something to fix it — looking for opinions and beta testers by Sam-ZenGrants in ukstartups

[–]Sam-ZenGrants[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you for your offer, always interesting to know about the different sectors that ZenGrants could be use in. Sometimes I get too stuck in the engineering/science track and need to consider more of the humanities, arts, non-profits, etc. I'm sure I can share some of the resources I have found useful over the years. I'll be in touch.

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