GrooveHQ's no-strings-attached $1MM grant for entrepreneurs

Those of you who don't know Groove, it's a SaaS tool quite similar to Zendesk, Help Scout, Front App, etc. In short: it's a collaborative customer support tool. I haven't used it in the past, we are a Front App customer (although that might be changing).

Anyhow... the founder of the company, Alex Turnbull, has written many helpful blogposts about how he bootstrapped Groove from 0 to over $500k MMR as a non-technical founder (although I think their revenue is currently well beyond $1mio MRR). Not only is he very open & candid about his experience, but it's also an entertaining read.

As I visited the Groove blog last week Friday I was struck my the announcement in the header of the website that they have launched what they themselves call a "No-Strings-Attached $1MM Grant for Entrepreneurs". My initial reaction was '...yeah, right'. It sounded too good to be true. But as I read the full announcement document it seems that it's indeed what they are promising. In exchange for providing qualified founders a grant (the exact amount is to be determined on a case-by-case basis), you will need to be open about your progress and share your story with them (in the form of blogpost, vlog, whatever) for the world to see. In a similar fashion as their founder Alex did the last years.

When it comes to sharing financial data I tend to be quite conservative, but in the end I decided to apply for the grant. I'm not too optimistic about my chances given that we are still 1-3 months before seeing significant revenue from any of our first two SaaS apps, but who knows.

I don't know a lot of fellow bootstrappers but the few I do know had not heard of this grant. As such I thought I would dedicate my first Indie Hackers post about this initiatives. I hope other Indie Hackers are successful in their application.

Good luck!