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APPLICATION MUST BE COMPLETED AND SUBMITTED ONLINE.
NC IDEA Fall 2014 Pre-Proposal Grant Application
QUESTION TEMPLATE
This document includes ONLY the free-form questions that are part of NC IDEA’s Pre-Proposal grant
application and can be used to draft your answers offline, as well as monitor character counts.
*** Character counts include spaces. ***
At the end of this document, we have provided example responses for some of the questions
from real applications submitted by companies that ultimately won NC IDEA grants. Please
use these examples as a guide for what we are looking for in a response.
FUNDING
Funding Detail: Describe in further detail the funding sources listed above (reference to question in
application where asked for specific figures) and how the funds have been or are being used. (max
chars. 300)
Funding Needed Explanation: Please elaborate on the funding needs, as indicated in the previous
questions. (max chars. 300)
IDEA
Product/Service Description: In one or two sentences, describe the company's product or service.
Explain why your idea is unique. Please be concise, but also clear and articulate. Put in simple terms.
Assume that the reader is not an expert in the field. (max chars. 300)
Problem: What problem(s) does the company's product or service solve? Why is it a problem? Who
is affected by this problem? How large is the problem? Give us a sense for the magnitude of the
problem (why it’s important to solve). How is the problem being dealt with today? What motivated
the company to try to solve this problem? Be specific. If you are a clean tech company, your problem
is not "the energy crisis". Tell us specifically what part of the problem the company is trying to solve.
(max chars. 800)
Solution: How does the company's product or service work? How does the product or service solve
the problem? Help us understand how well the product or service solves the problem today versus
how well you expect it will solve the problem in the future. What part of the problem does your
solution solve? Does your solution completely eliminate the problem or does it solve it partially? Give
us a sense for the relative magnitude of your solution. (max chars. 1,000)
Competition: Who is trying to solve the problem today? List the company’s direct competitors,
indirect competitors, potential competitors and alternative solutions. Indicate if these competitors
have commercially available products or services, or if they are still in development. How is your
product or service differentiated from your competition’s product or service? Is it better, faster,
cheaper? (max chars. 600)
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APPLICATION MUST BE COMPLETED AND SUBMITTED ONLINE.
TECHNOLOGY
Technology: Briefly describe the company's technology. (max chars. 500)
Innovation: What is the innovation behind the company's product or service? How unique is it? Is it
improving another existing product or service or is it brand new? Explain why the company's
product or service is so much better than the current way of doing business. Is it revolutionary or
evolutionary? Why? (max chars. 500)
Stage of Development Explanation: Please elaborate on the stage of development (based on
response to previous drop-down question regarding current stage of development). (max chars. 500)
Intellectual Property: What is the company's intellectual property? What is the defensibility of this
idea in the marketplace? Is it speed to market, legal IP protection, etc.? Is the company's
idea/technology patentable? If so, has the company filed patents? If the company has filed or issued
patents, please list the associated number(s). What is the current status of the IP related to this
project? Who owns the IP related to the company's innovation? (max chars. 600)
MARKET
Market Explanation: Briefly describe the company's market. (max chars. 500)
Market Size: How big is the market the company's product or service will address? What is the total
market potential (TAM) and what is the segment(s) of the market the company will go after both now
and in the future? What is the size of the company’s opportunity? How much revenue do you think
the company could be generating in 1 year? 3 years? Please be specific and include figures and
sources of data. (max chars. 1,000)
Customer: Who is or will be the company's customer? What types of customers does the company
intend to pursue and what constitutes customer acquisition success? How many customers does the
company anticipate in 1 year? 5 years? (max chars. 500)
BUSINESS MODEL
(Only asked of companies that select the following industries: Biotechnology, Medical
Device/Diagnostics, Nanotechnology/Materials and Other)
Regulatory Strategy: Do you anticipate the need for regulatory approval before generating revenue?
If so, what organization(s) and regulatory pathway do you expect to seek approval from for your
product? This is an opportunity to demonstrate your knowledge of the regulatory environment and
appropriate company actions being taken to address regulatory issues.(max chars. 500)
(Only asked of companies that select the following industries: Biotechnology, Medical
Device/Diagnostics and Other)
Reimbursement Strategy: Does your product require reimbursement from an organized medical or
health insurance provider? If so, do you anticipate using an existing code or will you need to file for a
new reimbursement code?
Revenue Model: What is the company's revenue model? How does/will the company make money?
How does/will the company charge customers for its product or service? (max chars. 500)
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Selling: How does the company reach/plan to reach its customers? Describe how the company
sells/plans to sell its product or service. (i.e. direct sales, indirect sales, web-based, etc.) Please
explain. (max chars. 500)
TEAM
Team: Provide a short bio for each member of the company's management team. Emphasize
characteristics or backgrounds that qualify each individual to fill their respective role, including
startup experience, management experience and/or technical expertise. Be specific and list
companies where individuals gained their experience. Indicate when each individual joined or will
join the company, and in what capacity, full-time or part-time. (max chars. 1,000)
Advisors: List any individuals (and their organizations, if applicable) considered important business
and technical advisors, and who are actively engaged with the company (max chars. 400)
GRANT REQUEST
Use of Funds: What is the intended use of the above requested funds? What business questions are
you trying to answer and how will winning a grant help you find the answer(s) to these questions?
Please be specific. (max chars. 600)
Milestones: What are the significant milestones the company hopes to reach during the grant period
if it receives an award from NC IDEA? Include target dates for each milestone. Use measurable
milestones only. Milestone should represent goals that will increase the value of the company. Use
numbers to indicate how the company will measure success. (The term "grant period" refers to the
period of time during which the awarded grant money will be spent. This period is typically 6 to 12
months.) (max chars. 600)
GROUNDWORK LABS
(Conditional Questions if also applying to Groundwork Labs)
Groundwork Labs Explanation: Why do you want to become a part of Groundwork Labs? (max
chars. 500)
Groundwork Labs Accomplishment: What specifically are you looking to accomplish in 3 months
in Groundwork Labs? (max chars. 500)
Groundwork Labs Commitment: What will you bring to Groundwork Labs and the other teams in
the lab? (max chars. 500)
THIS IS A TEMPLATE ONLY AND NOT THE GRANT APPLICATION. GRANT
APPLICATION MUST BE COMPLETED AND SUBMITTED ONLINE.
NC IDEA Pre-Proposal Response Examples
IDEA
Product/Service Description
1. AnyCloud
AnyCloud aggregates consumers personal content and content shared with them that they
have scattered across multiple email, social, and cloud services. AnyCloud simplifies this
chaos into an extended social graph for easy access to all photos, documents, and other
relevant content that has been share with them.
2. Guerrilla RF
Guerrilla RF offers better microchips for the mobile data explosion. Our high performance
microchips allow wireless infrastructure equipment manufacturers (OEM’s like Cisco or
Ericsson) to offer better range/area coverage and/or higher data rates to mobile users.
Problem
1. AnyCloud
The growth in popularity of social networks and cloud storage services from major internet
brands has led to a hyper-fragmented market with consumers forced to maintain personal
accounts on multiple services. On average, online users have 3 different email accounts, 42%
use 2 or more social networks, and 20% have adopted at least one cloud storage service. It’s
common for users to send and receive email attachments from both personal and work
accounts, share photos in Facebook and Instagram, and collaborate with documents stored
on Dropbox and Google Drive.
The major players - Amazon, Apple, Box, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and
others - provide incentives to share within their siloed network. AnyCloud provides an ideal
way to link them all together.
2. Guerrilla RF
Smartphones and tablets are exploding the demand for high speed mobile data. Broadband
data carriers (like AT&T, Sprint, and ComCast) are looking to infrastructure OEM’s to
address this growing capacity gap in the “last mile”.
To answer the call, OEM’s are using newer wireless technologies such as Carrier-Class Wi-Fi
and wireless backhaul. These technologies universally demand maximum range/coverage
area and bandwidth, which are limited by the wireless microchips used.
The problem is that existing wireless microchip solutions don’t offer the levels of
performance needed or are too bulky and expensive. This limits the reach of the new
technologies, especially in rural areas. Having experienced poor data coverage and knowing
there is a better way, we set out to improve things.
Solution
1. AnyCloud
AnyCloud is a meta service - it does not store content - and therefore does not compete with
social networks and cloud storage services nor bear storage costs. AnyCloud is also content
agnostic - it can connect to any content including photos, videos, documents, music, and
other types.
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For consumers, AnyCloud provides:
 access to all personal and shared photos, documents, and more from multiple
accounts:
 Email: any email service, including Gmail, Yahoo!, Hotmail, Outlook.com, and
corporate servers
 Social: Facebook, Instagram, Google+, Twitter, and more
 Cloud: Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, Shutterfly, Flickr, Snapfish, and more
 a method to easily transfer any content directly to any of their cloud accounts
 a way to easily share any content directly to their social networks like Facebook,
Pinterest, and more
By interconnecting accounts, AnyCloud has authenticated access to users accounts to
provide a rich social graph and future data mining potential.
2. Guerrilla RF
Guerrilla RF will provide high performance, high integration microchips for wireless
infrastructure equipment. Our patent pending Low Noise Amplifier (LNA) architecture
allows our products to offer world class receive performance while simultaneously solving a
major problem that limits transmit power levels.
Specifically, range/coverage area can be increased from 20%-50% with no decrease in data
bandwidth with our LNA’s. In addition, we will offer high linearity Power Amplifiers (PA’s)
that can further boost transmit power another 4X. These products combine to offer huge
increases in the reach of broadband mobile data networks.
Competition
1. AnyCloud
There are a few startups that are building pieces of the AnyCloud vision but no one with the
scope of our service.
Jollicloud is an example of a service that's aggregating social and cloud accounts. Like others,
they only provide personal content, though, and don't expand into share content. Nor do
they do anything with email.
CloudKafe and Otixo provide cloud management, which allows consumers to transfer files.
Again, however, no integration with email. Kloudless provides a Chrome extension to see
cloud accounts and email attachments.
TECHNOLOGY
Technology
1. NIRvana Sciences
Our technology is a platform of synthetic bacteriochlorin dyes that will be developed into a
suite of dyes for several markets. The performance potential of these compounds have long
been coveted by industry; however, these molecules are synthetically challenging, their
spectra are not easily tunable, and can be thermally unstable. Nirvana’s dyes have solved
these problems and synthetic pathways have been optimized to provide high yields and easy
workups and are new-to-the-commercial-world.
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Innovation
1. NIRvana Sciences
Nirvana’s dyes have spectral signatures 2X-5X narrower than current dyes. This attribute
creates the opportunity to triple the number of biological markers analyzed in several major
diagnostic and imaging platforms. It also vastly simplifies experiment design and postprocess analysis, which becomes exponentially more complex as one adds more dyes to a
test. Additionally, our dyes are very tunable which means that they can be modified to align
with lasers and detectors on current instruments.
2. Guerrilla RF
Our key innovation is our unique LNA architecture. We believe it is patentable and have filed
a provisional patent on it. It fixes a major flaw in most existing LNA designs that customers
were experiencing as a critical pain point. The architecture is evolutionary in that it
improves on an existing product, which also lowers the risk of the architecture.
Stage of Development Explanation
1. NIRvana Sciences
Hundreds of different bacteriochlorin structures have been developed in the lab of Dr. Jon
Lindsey at NC State, a Nirvana Sciences co-founder. Co-founders Drs. David Bocian and
Dewey Holten have developed a system of measuring the spectral performance of the dyes
so that they can be accurately tuned. Proof of principle was confirmed through a $50,000 NC
Biotech TEG grant with a leading expert at NIH. Proof of commercial concept was achieved in
new dye tests in July 2013 funded by NIRvana.
2. Guerrilla RF
The LNA architecture is designed and verified through in-depth electrical circuit simulations
using device measurements. It is CAD drawn and ready for fabrication at a semiconductor
wafer foundry. Multiple products have been designed using detailed circuit simulation and
preliminary technical datasheets have been created. We believe microchips from our first
prototyping will offer more than sufficient performance to allow customer sampling and
design-in activity.
Intellectual Property
1. Guerrilla RF
The LNA architecture is patentable and a provisional patent has been filed (application:
61/805,481). Ryan Pratt (Founder, CEO) owns the provisional patent and will be
transferring it to the company upon filing of the Utility patent. In addition, we have some
circuit design IP relating to accuracy of simulation and faster new product design, which we
consider trade secrets.
MARKET
Market Explanation
1. NIRvana Sciences
Our markets include medical diagnostic platforms including flow cytometry, immunoassays,
fluorescent in-situ hybridization (FISH), and fluorescent imaging. Our entry market will be
flow cytometry and then will expand into the other markets as they test our compounds and
identify valuable uses. Nirvana is a business-to-business company and will provide superior
NIR dyes to those who want to label their biological markers.
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2. 80Pct Solutions
We sell consumer software to a global market of “white collar” knowledge workers
(professionals, managers, creatives), as well as students that funnel to these professions. Our
secondary market, driven by our SaaS product, are parents of young children and teenagers.
We additionally plan to sell an enterprise SaaS product to SMB’s and schools. Distraction is a
cross-cultural issue; 60% of our traffic, and 30% of our purchases are already from outside
the U.S.
Market Size
1. NIRvana Sciences
Based on BCC Research Reports and discussions with industry insiders, we estimate the
global fluorescent dye market across all of the above mentioned life science markets will be
about $923 million in 2015/2016. Our planned entry and beachhead market will be flow
cytometry and then will expand into the other markets as we develop our compounds and
confirm valuable uses. The 2015 projected fluorescent dye market for flow cytometry is
$295 million (About 32% of the global life science dye market) and is a critical and enabling
technology that supports and benefits a much larger flow cytometry reagent and
instrumentation market expected to reach $4.3 billion that same year. The research and
clinical segments of this market are 45% and 55% respectively.
2. 80Pct Solutions
In the U.S. there are over 100 million “white collar” knowledge workers and post-secondary
students. Worldwide, this number is over 500 million. These consumers have pre-existing
fixed budgets for self-improvement (average consumer allocates over 300$/yr in U.S.),
which crosses income levels. Our goal is to develop a life-long distraction management
relationship with these customers that can be nurtured over the path of a career with our
products and services.
As we transition to a SaaS model, we’ve built projections based on current traffic and
conversion rates. Assuming a monthly churn of 5%, we project an average customer LTV of
170 dollars. Projected revenues for Y1 are $206,000, Y3 is $14.5M, Y5 is $53.4M. This model
assumes three stages of equity funding totaling $5.6M. Ultimately, we envision creating a
company with a valuation above 1 billion dollars at exit.
Customer
1. 80Pct Solutions
Our customers are global “white collar” knowledge workers, students, and parents; sold
direct B2C. Our SaaS product enables selling to enterprise and education B2B customers. We
acquire customers by offering a freemium tier, through organic search, content marketing
and partnerships, and PPC advertising. Upon transition to the SaaS service we anticipate
36,000 recurring revenue customers at the end of Y1, 518,717 recurring revenue customers
at the end of Y5.
BUSINESS MODEL
Revenue Model
1. CellBreaker
On the front-end, consumers pay us $10/account for the Break Analysis to detect a breach.
Once we detect a breach, consumers pay $77/line they wish the Breaker to cancel. On the
backend, carrier partners pay us referral fees for each lead we send them that they’re able to
convert, ranging from $30-80/line.
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We also have a free Break Alert that feeds into our sales funnel. Consumers sign up, email
them when their carrier changes a term. This allows consumers a chance to meet us before
they buy.
2. CrowdTunes
CrowdTunes earns revenue from patrons purchasing credits used for bidding on songs via
in-app purchase. In time, we plan to offer credits in a variety of ways like for ordering a
certain drink. Additionally, we will be projecting our song queue on screens throughout the
bar and intend to monetize a portion of the screen with advertisements. By controlling the
content displayed on tv's, the music played, and the information displayed on patrons'
smartphones, revenue streams are endless.
Selling
1. CellBreaker
Many of our leads are referred to us by our partners, and those result from active business
development. But we also market and sell to consumers directly in two ways.
1.
2.
Build brand awareness:
a. Blog
b. Grow Facebook and Twitter following
c. Use these pages to promote blog content
d. Earn PR
e. Keep in touch with reporters
Generate leads:
a. Target angry consumers who rant on social media
b. Pay-per-click campaigns
c. Site-retargeting
d. Search engine optimization of web portal
2. CrowdTunes
Initially, we will use a direct sales model to establish a pilot beachhead in the Research
Triangle. Using our local connections with bar owners, we believe our simple, value based
sales model will make it feasible to get into 15-20 bars by June. Once we have proven
business model, we will mobilize an indirect sales force through incentives and partnerships.
We also plan to test various other models including owner refer-a-bar, liquor/entertainment
distributors, or on-campus GM's.
TEAM
Team
1. 80Pct Solutions
Fred Stutzman is founder/CEO of 80Pct Solutions. His previous startup, ClaimID.com, grew
to 125,000 users and received two acquisition offers. He holds a Ph.D. from UNC-CH, with
expertise at the intersection of behavioral economics and information technology. He has
over 15 years of experience working as a technologist, manager, and educator within the
telecommunications, finance, and higher ed industries.
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In the current team structure, Stutzman manages a team of four contract developers, each a
platform technical lead, and a marketing intern. Upon hitting equity funding milestones, we
plan to grow the team to include two full-time developers and one full-time visual designer,
and a part-time marketer. As the company scales up we will add key management roles;
Stutzman will continue to lead as CEO and Freedom product lead.
Advisors
It is good to include your current advisors and how they are advising your business.
GRANT REQUEST
Use of Funds
1. AnyCloud
The grant money will be used on market testing of the production AnyCloud service.
AnyCloud is finalizing the production service with an expected launch in summer 2014. The
grant money will be used with local NC marketing talent for customer acquisition and
advertising. The goal of the grant is to further validate the finished product, get enough
critical customer mass, and establish the self-sustaining viral features and product feedback
loop.
The grant will be instrumental in achieving initial target customer milestone that are
required to attract institutional VC investments.
2. 80Pct Solutions
We request $50,000 to hire and provide resources to a contract digital marketer. Currently,
the majority of our marketing efforts focus on increasing inbound conversions on existing
traffic. The marketing strategy will drive growth by leveraging our existing products, and
creating awareness of forthcoming offerings.
Funds use:
Grow sales by identifying and targeting high-value consumer segments.
Develop customer relationships with captive distribution tools (lists, social).
Identify high-value partnership and referral opportunities.
Create a marketing strategy for our SaaS platform.
Milestones
1. AnyCloud
We've already established proof-points for customer acquisition using Facebook ads that
result in a customer acquisition cost of around $1.25.
The grant money will be used to ramp customer acquisition and gain efficiencies in
advertising.
The target milestone for a grant of $50K would be 20,000 new users. From there, we would
measure the effectiveness of our integrated viral features to establish a k-factor/viral
coefficient. The goal, of course, is to get a k-factor greater than 1 to lower CAC and increase
growth.
2. 80Pct Solutions
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This marketing plan will drive bottom-line growth and increase customer awareness, goals
squarely in line with our growth strategy. In applying the $50,000 in funds, we project a
bottom-line net annualized impact of $156,000. We define these milestones over a 12 month
period:
20% net increase in traffic to site.
4% net increase in paid conversions within high value consumer segment.
2% net increase in paid conversions across the board.
Development of five significant partnership opportunities.
Creation of a resource-ready SaaS marketing plan.