Deepa · GrantOrb

[0:08]Welcome, welcome everyone to our first edition of, of Better Call Zaal Yaps. And I have, uh, Deepa from Grant Orb here with us today, which I'm super excited to chat. How are you doing today, Deepa? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me for this. I'm so excited to tell you about Grant Orb. Awesome. So I'm gonna just start off with just a couple quick words about what we do, why we're here, because this is the first time we're chatting, so I'm very excited to also share with our community.

[0:42]Some of the things that I've seen that you guys, what, what you've created essentially. So at the Zow here, we're committed to bringing the profit margin, the data, and the IP rights back to creators. And we do that by having weekly meetings where we share our contributions to the space as a whole, whether that be collaborations, innovations, onboarding, and uh, your own contributions.

[1:08]And throughout that we distribute out a. Form of, uh, a token that's illiquid and soul bound. Illiquid means you can't buy and sell it. Soul bound means you can't trade it. So it's our form of respect in the space, and our goal is to help musicians learn how to build their respect and reputation. Within the space.

[1:28]So I'm really excited because we've seen a lot of musicians and other creatives, um, look into the grant space, but be really frustrated by a lot of different things, um, and challenges with that space. So I think there's a lot of opportunity here. But before we get into grant orb, I would love to know a little bit more about yourself and how you got into Web3.

[1:51]Yeah, I got into Web3 in 2021 when the, the NFT scene was pretty crazy. Um, and, uh, it was like everywhere in the newspaper, New York Times and like it was so mainstream at that point of time. Uh, and so it was out of curiosity, uh, that I got into. Web3. I'm, I, my background is, what outta curiosity, was there a specific like brand or like thing that was, it was a specific campaign.

[2:16]So the gon uh, founder, you know, the Polygon founder, he, he initiated a campaign to fundraise. For India's COVID relief. COVID was very bad at that point of time. And there was a, there was a massive outbreak in India and people were literally mm-hmm. Uh, dying because of lack of oxygen. They didn't have the infrastructure.

[2:36]Okay. So he said, I'm done. You know, his words were literally like this on Twitter. He put a tweet out, I'm done sitting around. I'm gonna raise money in crypto. And, um, whoa. Interesting. And yeah, and I was like, oh, I didn't know that that happened. Yeah. And I was curious, right? I'm like, how does this cryptocurrency translate into real life, uh, impact?

[2:54]Like, can it buy oxygen? Like, that was my real question, like can it go and save lives? That was my question. And so I got started with that. That was my entry point into crypto. Uh, I started a substack on that very day, and I'm like, I wanna. Talk about cryptocurrency, how cryptocurrency can save lives. And so that was my entry point.

[3:12]And then I tracked a lot of, uh, NFT campaigns in, uh, 2021. Like, um, a lot of them were trying to differentiate from each other by donating money to causes. So I, I wrote a lot about those kind of campaigns. So it was mostly tracking the social impact side of crypto. Interesting. That's really cool. We have a lot of folks in our community that work on different social impact, um, pieces.

[3:39]So it's really cool to hear, um, that that's how you got into it. 'cause I think, um, a lot of people find crypto for one ethos or another, for one reason or another, but come to that kind of same ethos that like, there's a lot of good that can come from this technology that's been created that. The internet has left wide open for security guardrails and like privacy in a lot of different ways.

[4:04]Right? So, yeah. Um, that's really cool. There's a lot of good it can do. Like it just literally created money out of nothing. You know, it was, uh, with Alec Butrin donated like a billion dollars worth of Sheba coin to that. Campaign. Yeah. And it created like half, half a billion dollars for, for crypto relief India Crypto relief fund.

[4:24]So it was literally out of nowhere, you know, so it, it has. Tremendous power in generating stuff that don't exist and, uh, being able to translate that into impact. Yeah. I think what you explained there also is like the mimetic power of it as well of like, just because he shared this token, whatever value is that before it was valued at higher because of all of the.

[4:49]Impact and like attention and awareness. Him just sending that does to the token, other people are coming in, buying this token that price goes up during that thing, right? Like there's, that's the whole mimetic nature of crypto, of uh, kind of. Putting money on influence and, and, and, and like that attention and awareness.

[5:12]So I think that bring just by him, like sending, attaching it to a cause. Yeah. Yeah. Attaching anything to a cause just brings more awareness. Yeah. So it's, it's really cool where like now we have the ability to have a social. Layer on top of the financial layer of the internet so we can see what other people are doing and kinda like, okay, now I can go.

[5:37]Um, I have a friend, easy and Crypto, and he does a lot of concerts that are geared towards impact, uh, projects and bringing those together. And because of that, uh. Push, he kinda has found ways to support, bring his attention and awareness with music and bringing that support. And like, that's kind of like the, the range of everything we've been kind of looking at is on chain music.

[6:11]Um, and I think that sh. There's a lot of people in the entree music world that are in the position of wanting to do more with their music, but not potentially having the capital. Um, to do it. Mm-hmm. So I think that's kind of a great place where grantor comes in. Where did you kind of come in? Where in your journey did you kind of start building that, thinking about that?

[6:34]Yeah, so it was, uh, I got into Web3 with this whole curiosity thing and went down the rabbit hole of Social Impact and Web3. And, uh, when in Web3 I realized that grants are very big in Web3, like I never imagined. Web3 will be a space that's so big on grants. Like I feel like. Grants Power Web3 because, uh, you know, people fundraise, then they can pay each other in those tokens.

[6:58]So it, it kind of creates like a circular. Economy, you know, like mm-hmm. Uh, like I never, uh, my first, uh, crypto that I ever earned was actually, I volunteered somewhere and they just gave me, uh, some e but besides that, I fundraised in, uh, in web and that's how I earned my first cryptocurrency. So it's, uh, it's basically, uh, it's big.

[7:20]So grant's a big part of it, and, uh mm-hmm. And somebody who comes from a nonprofit background and has, uh. Ridden grants and has given grants out. Yeah, I was like, uh, reading people's, uh, grant proposals on Gitcoin. Like, you know, it's a platform where you can go and, uh, it's a crowdfunding platform. You can fund fundraise.

[7:38]Uh, and I wanted to donate to a few projects, and I'm trying to figure out what is it that they're asking money for? Like, they're not able to communicate the ideas clearly. Like, whoa, what is it? Like, I, I don't get a gist of it, like. What are they asking money for? So, and I'm not satisfied, like, I don't feel like donating anywhere because they haven't made a compelling case.

[7:54]Like I, yeah, I feel like so much of the, the thing that I as a donor wanna know is missing. So I was like, wow, this is like a real skills gap, you know, here, like, uh, a hundred percent people don't know how to communicate the idea as well. And so that was my starting point. And in, uh, 2023, AI was around, uh, but very early, like.

[8:16]Chat. GPT dropped November, 2022. And so in 2023, like I happened to use a few tools and I was like totally blown away with the fact that you just have to do like two or three line description and it can blow it out into like, uh, multiple pages. And I was like, how can we apply this technology for the nonprofit space?

[8:37]Yeah. And, uh, uh, let's start with, with within Web3. And so Gitcoin was a starting point in 2023. They were having their, um, uh, round, like they have like. Specific grants during the year. Uh, and, uh, it was in November, they were having one of the fundra, you know, you could raise money on Gitcoin platform. And I just cr uh, created like a very simple tool like it with a little, uh, uh, text box.

[9:01]You know, just come and dump your, uh, thoughts about what is it that you're trying to raise funds for. And it's okay if it's not in perfect English. Like you can be like, ah. This was the first example that we tested out and I was totally blown away with it. It was, yeah, this person from, uh, uh, Turkey, like refugee Turkey, start crypto wallet, educate other refugees, uh, use NFT raise money.

[9:22]You know, it was literally, yeah, these, these words, it came up with the most. Beautiful proposal and I was like, oh my gosh, it can do that. Like, it's, yeah, great. Like, all like the barrier to language to be able to communicate. It kind of gets rid of everything. You know, you can just focus purely on, on the keywords of your project and it'll, it'll, it'll generate that proposal.

[9:43]So that was a starting point. Uh, 50 people came and used it and it was, um. Amazing. It was a great experience for us, like people from US and Canada and uh, UK used it, it as well. And I'm like, okay, so these people also don't wanna write brands because my people in like, um, uh, south America or in, uh, middle East, like Turkey or people with real language barrier or, you know, yeah.

[10:07]Might to use it, but every like Africa or those people. People in like English native countries also used it. So I'm like, okay, nobody wants to write grants. Yeah, nobody looks forward to writing grants. Let's build this out for the entire world. And that's how Ran are got started. That's really cool. I love that.

[10:26]I, my favorite thing about that is the, like nonprofit background for me. My like diving into Web3 happened in Portland, Oregon, and when I was there, the. Culture in Portland. Oregon's a very different city. I was, again, I was still in the suburbs there, but um, the crypto people that I met there had weekly or biweekly meetings through a dao, but then also monthly meetings where they just like had random people also showing up.

[10:55]And the culture there was so like region heavy. Mm-hmm. So like getting into the crypto space. I came in in in 2020 3rd of February, a little bit after kind of the time you jumped in where like, I kind of came in during the bear where there was like a lot less folks period. And um, there was. A lot of people there that were focused on like, okay, like this doesn't really make a difference because like there's so many things that we can do right now that are impactful to our local organizations and like that's just like the mindset I came into and seeing that as like an opportunity and like.

[11:34]Not enough people in the greater Web3, but nevermind crypto ecosystem even know that some of these things are even possible, right? So I think it's really cool that you've created something where one of my goals and things that I want to do for musicians is create tools and opportunities and ways that we can leverage this technology to make them be able to make their music.

[11:59]And do that for longer, right? So like, take time outta doing the other entrepreneurial pursuits that they need to do to be a successful musician, but like continue to make music. So I think this is a phenomenal additional thing that, uh, musicians can leverage and a tool that they can add to their tool belt that makes it a lot easier to be, uh, to, to do the grant process.

[12:23]Right? Yeah, it definitely, like it cuts down time. Uh, like, I don't know if anybody like artists, lots of artists depends on, uh, grants. Like even in, uh, like where I am in Canada, there's Can Canada Council of Arts and they have tons of grant programs. E uh, not you, not necessarily you have to belong to like a museum or anything.

[12:42]There are grants for individual artists and stuff like that. And I bet there'll be grants at a more local level. Like, you know, there's Mural Festival or um mm-hmm. You know, there are so many grants, right. Like for, yeah. And, but every time, uh, to unlock those grants, you need to submit a proposal because the funder wants to get to know you better.

[12:58]Right? Yeah. So, so grants are just a way for, uh, the funder to get to know you better and the project that you intend to do. Uh, but sometimes writing those things can be so time consuming and, uh, it's something that you don't look forward to doing. Like, because it's not Yeah. What you, you're designed to do.

[13:13]Right. Exactly. Like it's your, you. Not, it doesn't come out of passion. Like, ah, today I'm gonna sit and write grants. You know, so it's something you procrastinate even, even to date, like even though I've like designed the system, but because grants have been so in my blood, like, I'm like always like procrastinate.

[13:31]I'm like, even if I know I can, it just takes five minutes. I'm like, oh my gosh. You know, it's. Something like you procrastinate. It's so this thing, but it's become very magical now. It's, it's one of those things that you have to do, but no one ever wants to do it. Yeah. So, but now, yeah, faster. It's so magical.

[13:46]I see my, I see my customers, uh, use it and they don't even think to, I think to, I, like, I'm gonna, uh, you know, because I know like, uh, I have that old, uh. Things still stuck in my head, but they come but it's in daycare. Yeah. They come, they generate and they go, you know, it's like that. It's like, come, generate, go with the proposal.

[14:06]That's awesome. That's really cool. Um, one of my, uh, I, I would be remiss if I didn't ask this hurricane's favorite question during, um, during meetings is how do you make money with your product? Yeah. So from, uh, the beginning, uh, so I, as I said, I come from the nonprofit space and I'm so used to doing things or getting things for free, like free, free, free.

[14:30]But I've realized, uh, with this, and, and I would highly recommend to people never try to give anything for free. It doesn't work out in the long run be sustainable. And so, uh, I, uh. From day one, made grantor, uh, like a priced product. Like it's, it's not free. You can try it out. You can create an instant proposal outline that's free.

[14:52]You can see the magic of, uh, the, the product. But, uh, to be able to generate a full proposal, you need to pay. But at the same time, I was very conscious that I wanna make it accessible and affordable because that's. My thing, you know, like I don't want to rule out people who can't pay like people in Africa or India or some places.

[15:11]Um, it should be at a price point that's, uh, accessible to all. So that was the, the second thought behind it. And sustainability is very important because, uh, it gives us joy every time somebody, uh, advise it. And, and then I feel like, uh, that person is also serious about using your product, right? Like in, in the beginning I did make, uh, I did give out few, uh, like.

[15:33]Free. And I felt like a lot of the ones that I give out free credits to them, they never used it. So I feel like people when they pay Interesting. Yeah. They value it more. They a hundred percent. Yeah. They value it, they wanna use it. They, you know, and, um, and it's, uh, sustainable for us because we are putting in so much effort.

[15:51]Like we are making the whole grant thing so magical. Like right now it's grant writing, but next week we, we are also pushing out, uh, uh, an agent. To scout grants for you so you don't have to spend time, uh, looking for grants. Yeah, I was gonna say like, there's so many pieces to the grant process that like you just creating like a lot of people.

[16:13]In the ai, this like AI bubble we're in. Create a chat, GPT wrapper, call it a product, and go from there. Right? Like, and let's say, call it, call it quits, right? That's a product. But like from create, taking the LLM, taking that, building something out of it, and then like also. Then like trying to tackle other pieces of the grant process and automating those pieces as exactly as well.

[16:35]Exactly. So it's not a, it's not a, it's agent, it's all agentic because child GT can't, like, you can still use charge GBT to write your grants, but your whole process will still take time and you will have to be engaged in back and forth conversation with Charge G gt. Exactly. There might not be any consistency in your proposal charge.

[16:53]GBT could have, uh, could forget the context. Things like that. There are a hundred issues that you need to manage, but Grant orb is an agent system. Uh, you describe your project, you review the outline, and after you say generate the proposal, you can literally shut your laptop and go. Interesting. You'll get an email saying your proposal has been generated.

[17:12]You come back, review it. You wanna say, make any changes, you can update with ai. It takes two minutes and writing the whole proposal takes about, um. Three minutes take, uh, from the time you describe your idea. So it's so fast and, uh, it's, it's amazing. So, uh, tragedy can't do stuff that, uh, grantor, uh, does in fact on LinkedIn.

[17:34]Like, there's been a bit of a chatter around foundations and people being, um, you know, like getting, uh. Flooded with chat GPT proposals and they're literally AI lop if if, yeah. Oh no, a hundred percent. You know what I'm mean? You know? So most people don't know how to prompt it well enough for work. Yeah, exactly.

[17:52]So this is like a no-brainer product. Uh, they don't have to prompt so towards it. Yeah, they parameter. It's, it's so cute. So like that's really awesome. I love that. I love that. Um, so I guess the next couple questions I would say are more on the product side. Uh, so you're the founder, how big's your team and then like on top?

[18:15]Yeah, three people. So I have two, two engineers. Uh, and it's me, um, and, uh, my. Uh, engineers are heavy into AI engineering. Like they, that's what they do. They read research and they, they make sense of things. And, um, I am managing everything else. Like I'm the face of it basically. Uh, all the, the reach outs to the nonprofits and, um, all the, you know, being on the podcast and things like that, like, um, that's what I do.

[18:45]And product, you know, product. Like I talk, I spent enormous time talking to people who are using grant orb. Like I literally, sometimes I'm on a call, like a Zoom call with them while they're generating the proposal. Yeah. And then they have to take it and submit it to the, to the foundation and they have to open another website where they actually take the stuff and paste it there and summit.

[19:04]And, uh, I just want to understand all the pain points and solve each one of them, you know, so I love that. My, my goal is that. Soon as the technology evolves, I wanna give them a submission agent as well, where they can, uh, you know, uh, an agent opens the browser of the tab of the, of the, they literally just like press the, yeah, yeah.

[19:25]They literally just have to check the work of ai. Like, okay, all the sections have been filled, all the documents have been uploaded, and then just hit some. That's amazing. I love, so my background's in automation engineering, so I love, like anything that we can do to automate a process. The reason I got into automation was one of the people who was a mentor of mine suggested automation because it's like in this world of more in specifically I was in at that point, um, industrial.

[19:58]Um, and manufacturing, um, specifically, um, he was saying like, you know, the future is robots, but then like, just automation as a whole. Going into that space was like, okay, like everything I'm learning for this industry's automation also applies to every single other industry because you can apply these automation thoughts and processes and concepts to anything else.

[20:21]So like when you. Bring AI into different processes. Finding a place that's a huge pain point, like you said, where no one wants to do it and it takes time to like big friction points for artists and removing them, like it gives artists a crazy different outlook on the grant writing experience. I would imagine it'll remove that friction.

[20:43]Yeah. My goal is to remove the friction, you know? Boom. I love it. That's the goal. So we, as I said next week, we, we gonna have like a grant. Scout agent like that is actively, proactively searching grants based on your profile. So it'd be highly tailored to what you do. It won't be, right now, the grant search is so exhausting.

[21:02]I can't even tell you. Like you have to. Mm-hmm. Yeah, so you prob, even if they're curated list, like I know there's one person in on Substack that does a curator list for artists. Right. Like they will send, like monthly, it's a paid subscription and you get a list of grants that are available for artists, but then you might be, uh, sitting in Vancouver and you're looking for a grant based self in Vancouver, and you'll go through the entire list to only know nothing applies to you.

[21:26]Yeah. So you, the money, I feel that, you know, and, uh, this thing. So it is, all of this is pretty, uh, pretty time consuming. So we wanna make it highly tailored to you, uh, and, you know, grants that matter to you, comes to you and then you. Write them out. It's a no brainer completely. It's like five minutes. Uh, doing that.

[21:44]The only time consuming part is taking that information and putting into the grant, you know, whoever's giving out the grant into their system, and hopefully we aim to solve that as soon as we have, uh, this technology that evolves to like control the computer and, you know, open the tabs and things like that.

[22:03]Yeah, like those pieces are still missing right now in ai. Yeah. No, I totally get that. That's cool. Um, one of my last questions would be then on the aspect of the product and how it works with, like, do you guys use a specific LLM? How does your agent, like, what's the backend of that? What kind of, uh. What, did you build something completely from scratch completely with the engineers on your own?

[22:35]Like, or, or, and do you leverage LLMs that are out there, or like, no. How, how did you guys go about that? It's completely AI powered, so it's completely LLM powered. So we have multiple models working and uh, each model has been fine tuned. To do specific tasks that, so what I've learned from my engineers, because they read tons of research paper on how to make these models work, is that you need to give, uh, you need to get these models to focus on minute tasks, you know?

[23:01]Mm-hmm. Because if you get them to focus on bigger tasks, uh, they kind of lose context and, uh, it doesn't work out. So you have to like really train them on small, small, tiny, tiny tasks. So we have multiple. LLMs working on tiny, tiny tasks, so like one LLM to create forms one LLM to review the eligibility one l LM, to, to write the grant.

[23:20]One l LM to create an it. It's like, it's like a team of LLMs that are working and it's all being fine tuned for grants. So it has, it's a specialized product, it is not a generic product, so it is very specialized for grants. It's being fine tuned, trained on the grants knowledge. Very cool. Very cool. I like that.

[23:42]I like that. Um, okay, so actual last question and then it's been an awesome 25 minutes here with you Deepa and, uh, and we'll uh, end it off. Thanks for the, the couple folks that popped in on Naji be Candy. Um, but what are, where are you at now with. What do you need help with? Is there anything I can do for you to help you along way, get the word out?

[24:06]It's a beautiful product. My only, uh, uh, I would say, uh, limitation right now is getting the word out. Like we have bootstrapped, I don't have money to pay for, uh, anything like, uh, for marketing, basically, you know, whatever. You know, there'll be tons of bullshit. No, that's exactly the same way. Everyone in our, in our community.

[24:28]So that's. Perfect. I think there's a lot of people that we can connect you with that might be other people that like, I mean, I know at least three off the top of my head that would, uh, we could schedule a, an interview with that have awesome communities that could also ask question that would That'd be great.

[24:43]Yeah. Yeah. There's, I think that's how, that's how we'll we'll set it up. I'll, I'll connect you with a couple of them and one of them even had just popped in, so we definitely, I had it. My interview with him of his season of interviews this year, and that's kinda what inspired me to do this. So shout out to Anji.

[24:59]Um, but yeah, no, uh, that's awesome. That's easy. We can easily do that. Yeah. And, uh, awesome. Thank you. Thank you for time. Yeah, it's, it's a great product and we've just been growing through word of mouth, so one person learns about it, ELLs a hundred different other people and, you know, um, and so it's just, it's just that.

[25:17]But yeah, I would love so many more people to know about it because it will. Seriously remove all stress from the life and all the complexity around, uh, grants and just, you know, they can, they can raise more. You know what I want? Yeah. We're gonna try this out today. I know, like you should definitely share the link to my article because what I also said is, do you have it here?

[25:39]Uh, lemme grab it. Um, what I had said was that we need to, uh, you know, unlearn few things. Uh, like you can only do five grants for instance, because those are. We could be, we were limited by our own ability to write more grants. Right. But now we are in the age of AI and it only takes five minutes to write a grant.

[25:57]So you can literally hit a hundred grants if there are a hundred grants that are available. Applicable to you and available. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I was gonna, yeah, you change it to now your volume is way higher, so you can just like go like, okay. There is something I can do in this. Let's tailor this to that, right?

[26:16]Like, and go with a crazy eye volume and go really specific with the ones that do good. Yeah. So I'm gonna sh, how do I share it in the chat? Oh, um, there's a private chat in the bottom of Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. I see that. Yeah, I see it. Awesome. Okay, so I'm gonna share this with everyone here and I'm also gonna put it wherever we put a description, so, okay, great.

[26:37]This is awesome. I'm gonna definitely make sure I save this as well. Um, but yeah, no, I think, uh, I'm excited for the new era of grant writing. I think there's so many musicians in our community that I'm just gonna send this recording to. So I appreciate the time, Deepa. Yeah, thank you so much. Have an amazing rest of your day.

[26:58]Yeah. And have a great weekend. You too. Thank you so much. It was great chatting with you. Bye. A hundred percent. Bye.