Over the past 18 months that I have run an organization that helps startups find and apply for SBIR funds, I have been asked countless times – what does it take to win an SBIR? Most people in this ecosystem will provide the age-old useless response, ‘it depends… on a number of factors’. Based on who we have seen win or lose among the startups that we’ve helped, I have found that one factor supersedes all and really determines the rest - entrepreneurial grit.
Winning an SBIR is not very different from other wins that a startup founder might experience while working on his/her venture, for example, fundraising from investors, launching a product, first customer revenue etc. Each of these wins requires hours of diligent work, following the ‘rules of engagement’, and overcoming some major technical and/or business hurdles. All of these require the entrepreneur to have tremendous perseverance, execution capabilities, and grit – one of the most defining characteristics of a successful entrepreneur. Finding, applying, and succeeding in the SBIR world is no different.
A quick recap of what SBIRs are – this program, along with its sister program known as Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR), are Federal programs that award a total of ~$4B annually in debt-free and equity-free seed funding to startups that are utilizing scientific/technical research and development (R&D) to develop innovative products. The money is in the form of grants and contracts from government agencies such as Department of Defense (DoD), National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF), and many others. There are relevant SBIR opportunities out there for literally every bona fide startup in any given area of science and technology.
Being a government program, the SBIR process has all the same problems. They’re complicated, tedious, challenging to grasp, and for the most part, some weird, black-box, obscure thing to the outsider. For this reason, even if and when an entrepreneur musters up the courage (and $$$$ to pay expensive traditional consultants) to try for one of these, they give up after applying for one – they’re either exhausted or equate this to a loan application, where you apply for one and then wait, watch, and if you fail, try a different avenue for funding altogether – this is precisely where most entrepreneurs who are not familiar with the ‘SBIR game’ go wrong!
I am a scientist by training. I prefer to look at hard data when making any judgements or conclusions. Data published by SSTI show that during the time-period between 2009-2019, from the ~13,000 companies that won SBIR awards, roughly 60% were multiple-time winners.
Our internally conducted survey from over 400 past SBIR awardees revealed that almost 94% of them had applied for multiple SBIRs, some as high as >20 proposals. This makes sense given that the average success-rates with SBIRs is about 15%, so in order for the 60% of the winners to be multiple-time winners, they would have had to apply for 3-4x the number of opportunities.
If you ask any entrepreneur who has ever raised investments from angel or venture capital investors, they will tell you that it is a number’s game. You try and reach 100 investors, in order to get the 10 who might speak with you, from which 1 might actually invest in you. SBIRs are no different – all the data suggest that relentlessly applying for multiple opportunities is a characteristic that successful winners have. Practice makes perfect, and with repeated applications, the entrepreneur becomes better at positioning their R&D ideas appropriately for giving themselves the best chance at winning. Repeated applications also give the entrepreneur a chance to improve their proposals based on feedback from the reviewers on their previous proposals.
This is precisely why we created TurboSBIR – a software that helps entrepreneurs easily find and easily apply to multiple SBIR grants and contracts. It is an efficient proposal preparation, submission, management, and team collaboration system. Our business model is to charge a low monthly subscription that helps the repurposing of content throughout the year for several submissions without having to pay time-and-again for expensive consultants. We also offer optional success-based or flat-fee PhD grant writers to support entrepreneurs every step of the way. Schedule a demo with us today to learn more.
