Navigating the Challenges of Running Out of Funds

we've got another question here. Let me see if I can get rid of this banner here. I have a built, fully built app already in stores. competitors, um, are Uber and Instacart only all license and registrations in place. I'm out of funds now because it's been a long run. How do I get grant so I can launch and get users on board? I can, I shared my pitch deck. Oh, I can share my check that he presented on a pitch day that collision. And he went further to, um, also say, um, either grant or seed of good faith to allow me to generate initial data with users. Now, obviously, if you've done been on for a while and you run out of funds, it's definitely a little harder to get investor interest. Where would you start, John? yeah so it all depends on on a couple things if you have i'm guessing you don't have any revenue and you might have been incorporated for a few years uh all depends on what industry the app is is is i know you said uber and instacart but um if we can get into more specifics there might be more um You're best bet at this point, there's a great grant from Mitacs. They'll come in and they'll do a full business assessment. So you'll get a master's PhD student to come in and do kind of like... I'm not explaining it right, but it's essentially like a business analysis with some suggestions. Getting with Mitacs is good because they've got a lot of great talented people. It's a hiring grant, but that would be one to start out with. The problem is I think You might be looking for just funding. If you can put up funds of your own, then you can go after some grants. IRAP might be one to look at since you already have a platform and you need to maybe develop it further. But with IRAP, you depending on the zone that you're in for IRAP, you might need to have some revenue. But yeah, we can have we can do a deeper dive. Or if you if you want to answer what kind of specific sector that you're focusing on, I might be able to come up with something else. But for right now, there's that there's there are the other ones I didn't touch on are low interest loans. So there are some potential low interest loans that that you might be able to take advantage of. I don't know, Craig, if you want to. There's a great site that you can go to and do a search on your own as the business benefits finder. Highly suggest that it gives you this. It's not exhaustive. It's about there's about sixteen hundred different types of funding options from the government that are on that list. And you can search through that and see if there's anything that aligns for you as well. Yeah, I'll find it and put it in the chat in a minute or two. Oh, thanks, John. If I can just jump in quickly, Craig, on that question. So the first thing that goes to my mind as an investor is, okay, you say you need money to go to the next step to get users. I'm not clear exactly what you want to spend the funds on, but why do you actually need that money to achieve that goal? You're saying your only two competitors are Uber and Instacart, two of the largest digital companies in the world. So if you're raising money to spend it on social media ads to try to get users, I would never invest in that, ever. You're never going to outspend them on ads. Why are you trying that? As an investor, I would want to see, you know, this equates to my rocket example. Don't come to me and say, oh, if you give me ten thousand dollars, I'll go find a bunch of users. How do you get users for free? Stand in front of the grocery store with an iPad and ask people to try your app or do something. Join a Facebook group. Talk to people about it. Ask questions. Go out in your community. Do something that costs nothing to achieve your goal. Use your creativity and your ingenuity to solve the problem without needing money. If you're able to do that and then you get to the point where you have all these users and now your app is generating funds and you achieve that all without raising capital, as an investor, I have greater confidence in you as a founder in your ability to solve problems without just turning and looking for somebody else to fund it. Because eventually your problems won't be solved by just getting somebody else to give you money. And then the business needs to succeed because of your abilities and not just because there's capital available. Yeah, I would say for, sorry, I was just gonna say like this, this to me sits very much in the world of like painkillers and vitamins, right? Of like, if you have already built the thing and it is published and you can't get anyone to use it, are you actually solving a problem anyone wants solved? And if not, you need to spend some time thinking about that because you need to pivot. Yeah. Yeah. Also, they're suggesting here they can share their business plan and two-minute video, and they're asking about resources in the U.S. We're specifically focused on investment and investors in Canada, and unfortunately, we're doing a webinar Q&A. We can't, at this moment, take time to review your video or pitch, but we appreciate you getting out there. If you are in the Toronto area, come out to Toronto Starts and pitch to the crowd. Talk to investors. It'll be a good time. Startup Investor Drinks on September And also there are a lot of other pitch opportunities, right? Yeah, that's just the one on top of my head because I totally made up. Because you run