Hi,

I’m feeling a bit disappointed today because my startup wasn’t chosen for a $5k grant from one of the startup funds at my university. Any advice?

After interviewing last week and answering a series of questions related to my startup, I was confident that we’d get chosen. My co-founder and I previously finished another incubator program at my university where we were granted $5k in seed funding.

In the interview, I spoke about how we’re currently talking to potential customers in our niche, getting them interested and building our mailing list (almost 200 emails). I spoke about how we’re launching our app first to build a customer base before releasing our device. We’re both technical so I’m building the app which will be finished in December and he’s focusing on the device engineering and we collaborate on both. I also mentioned some of our other wins such as being accepted into another incubator program where we’ll get additional funding ($7.5k) in the summer and securing a meeting with a VC for a 25k investment which is part of a larger $500k investment (I didn’t mention the $500k though, just $25k).

I felt like the interviewers (who are also students at my university) weren’t really feeling the business because I got the question “what makes your product different from products X and Y that already exists on the market”. This questions was interesting because products X and Y are completely different products than what we’re building. X and Y are treatment devices while ours is closer to an analysis and diagnostic device. I mentioned that we are working to incorporate aspects of products X and Y into ours to give users a reason to use the tool every day as opposed to when issues pop up for them and they need to get help.

I don’t know if oversharing during a startup grant interview is a thing but I’m feeling like maybe I said something that turned them off, they don’t think we need the funding since we have other opportunities (even though we do need it) or they just didn’t believe in our idea.

It sucks that we didn’t get chosen for the funding but the grind continues. Better luck next time we apply :)