u/pauliusyamin

Hello, there's still time to submit your questions to the live, free, online MSCA Q&A session we're doing next week.

Register to attend, submit questions, and access the recording afterwards if you can make it to the live session! Here's the link: www.fundingproposalsecrets.com/home-msca.

We'll choose the best questions to go online and answer on writing the rest.

The event will take place on Thursday July 2nd at 6 PM CEST, and the deadline to submit questions is this Friday June 26.

It will be conducted by a former MSCA recipient and a former ERC evaluator (myself).

Feel free to ask any questions in the comments and please help us spread the word!

Paulius

I think most people using AI for grant proposals are getting it backwards.

They open a tool, describe their project, and get something generic, hallucinated, and unusable. So they conclude AI isn't ready for serious proposal work.

That conclusion is wrong.

The problem isn't the tool. It's the absence of good inputs and of a method.

In my experience, three things determine whether AI produces something fundable or something forgettable:

What inputs you give it: not a vague description, but verified source material: the funder's exact criteria, your theory of change in your own words, statistics you've personally checked.

In what order you apply it: structure before content, always. One-off prompts produce mediocre results. A step-by-step approach produces something genuinely usable.

What stays with you: strategy, evidence selection, judgment, and final review. What you get from a well-run session is a strong first draft, not a finished proposal.

Get these right and AI doesn't just make proposals faster. It makes them better.

What's your experience been? Curious whether others have hit the same wall.

Most people using AI for grant proposals are getting it backwards.

They open a tool, describe their project, and get something generic, hallucinated, and unusable. So they conclude AI isn't ready for serious proposal work.

That conclusion is wrong.

The problem isn't the tool. It's the absence of good inputs and of a method.

In my experience, three things determine whether AI produces something fundable or something forgettable:

What inputs you give it: not a vague description, but verified source material: the funder's exact criteria, your theory of change in your own words, statistics you've personally checked.

In what order you apply it: structure before content, always. One-off prompts produce mediocre results. A step-by-step approach produces something genuinely usable.

What stays with you: strategy, evidence selection, judgment, and final review. What you get from a well-run session is a strong first draft, not a finished proposal.

Get these right and AI doesn't just make proposals faster. It makes them better.

What's your experience been? Curious whether others have hit the same wall.

Hi everyone, I wanted to share about my new project, which I'm sure will be interesting to some of you! I´ve been writing grants more or less successfully for the last 15 years, mainly for large foundations, governments, and international organizations (especially consulting, research, and social projects. I really like the process of designing a new project for a specific call, but the process of actually writing it for 5, 6, 10 days is really taxing.

Then in the last couple of years, I started experimenting with AI but found the outputs to be either too superficial and generic, or hallucinations or stolen pieces. With the current models that's changing, as you might have noticed, and I´ve gotten better at it as well, developing little by little a multi-step method, so now the final outputs are actually pretty decent (for a first draft at least).
With the method in place I now spend 2 or 3 hours writing the whole thing with AI, and I've made sure it includes good guardrails so that the outputs are both ethical, effective, and the evidence behind it actually EXISTS... With it, I´ve been able to secure a couple 6 and 7 figure grants with it...

Anyway, eventually my colleagues started to ask me to walk them through the method, so I developed some briefs walking people through my method for internal use so that I didn't have to explain it over and over...

Long story short, I've now turned that into a small public course, and I'm really proud of it. I know self-promotion is generally frowned upon on Reddit, but this is just me sharing a personal project I'm really passionate about and which I think could help people in this trade...
So if anyone is interested and would like to check out what I did please drop a comment below. I'd love your feedback on it and I just want as many people as possible to have access to it
Thank you!

Paulius

Hi everyone, I wanted to share about my new project, which I'm sure will be interesting to some of you! I´ve been writing grants more or less successfully for the last 15 years, mainly for large foundations, governments, and international organizations (especially consulting, research, and social projects. I really like the process of designing a new project for a specific call, but the process of actually writing it for 5, 6, 10 days is really taxing.

Then in the last couple of years, I started experimenting with AI but found the outputs to be either too superficial and generic, or hallucinations or stolen pieces. With the current models that's changing, as you might have noticed, and I´ve gotten better at it as well, developing little by little a multi-step method, so now the final outputs are actually pretty decent (for a first draft at least).
With the method in place I now spend 2 or 3 hours writing the whole thing with AI, and I've made sure it includes good guardrails so that the outputs are both ethical, effective, and the evidence behind it actually EXISTS... With it, I´ve been able to secure a couple 6 and 7 figure grants with it...

Anyway, eventually my colleagues started to ask me to walk them through the method, so I developed some briefs walking people through my method for internal use so that I didn't have to explain it over and over...

Long story short, I've now turned that into a small public course, and I'm really proud of it. I know self-promotion is generally frowned upon on Reddit, but this is just me sharing a personal project I'm really passionate about and which I think could help people in this trade...
So if anyone is interested and would like to check out what I did please drop a comment below. I'd love your feedback on it and I just want as many people as possible to have access to it
Thank you!

Paulius

Hi everyone, I wanted to share about my new project, which I'm sure will be interesting to some of you! I´ve been writing grants more or less successfully for the last 15 years, mainly for large foundations, governments, and international organizations (especially consulting, research, and social projects. I really like the process of designing a new project for a specific call, but the process of actually writing it for 5, 6, 10 days is really taxing.

Then in the last couple of years, I started experimenting with AI but found the outputs to be either too superficial and generic, or hallucinations or stolen pieces. With the current models that's changing, as you might have noticed, and I´ve gotten better at it as well, developing little by little a multi-step method, so now the final outputs are actually pretty decent (for a first draft at least).
With the method in place I now spend 2 or 3 hours writing the whole thing with AI, and I've made sure it includes good guardrails so that the outputs are both ethical, effective, and the evidence behind it actually EXISTS... With it, I´ve been able to secure a couple 6 and 7 figure grants with it...

Anyway, eventually my colleagues started to ask me to walk them through the method, so I developed some briefs walking people through my method for internal use so that I didn't have to explain it over and over... 😉

Long story short, I've now turned that into a small public course, and I'm really proud of it. I know self-promotion is generally frowned upon on Reddit, but this is just me sharing a personal project I'm really passionate about and which I think could help people in this trade...
So if anyone is interested and would like to check out what I did please drop a comment below. I'd love your feedback on it and I just want as many people as possible to have access to it
Thank you!

Paulius

Hey everyone,

I'm completing a funnel building certification and one of the assignments requires me to run a real marketing audit for 5 actual businesses. Not simulated businesses, real ones, with real websites, real offers, and real problems to find.

That means I need 5 people who are willing to let me look at their marketing setup and give them an honest diagnostic report in return.

Here's exactly what I look at:

• Your website or sales funnel and where people are dropping off
• Your offer, hook, and how you're positioning what you sell
• Your email setup: whether you have a welcome sequence, how often you send, what's missing
• Your social presence and whether it's actually feeding your funnel
• Your revenue model: offers, pricing, recurring vs one-off
• Where your biggest gaps are and what I'd prioritize fixing first

You fill in a short form (about 5 minutes), I run the diagnostic, and you get a personalized written report. No follow-up unless you want one.

The report is genuinely mine to keep as proof of work for the certification — so I have every reason to make it actually useful rather than generic.

What I need from you: A real business with a real offer. Doesn't have to be big or polished. Coaches, consultants, course creators, ecommerce, service businesses — all fine. If you have something you're trying to sell and it's not working as well as you'd like, that's exactly the situation this is designed for.

What this costs you: Nothing. Genuinely.

If you're interested, drop a comment or send me a DM and I'll send you the form link.

Paulius

Hey everyone,

I'm completing a funnel building certification and one of the assignments requires me to run a real marketing audit for 5 actual businesses. Not simulated businesses, real ones, with real websites, real offers, and real problems to find.

That means I need 5 people who are willing to let me look at their marketing setup and give them an honest diagnostic report in return.

Here's exactly what I look at:

• Your website or sales funnel and where people are dropping off
• Your offer, hook, and how you're positioning what you sell
• Your email setup: whether you have a welcome sequence, how often you send, what's missing
• Your social presence and whether it's actually feeding your funnel
• Your revenue model: offers, pricing, recurring vs one-off
• Where your biggest gaps are and what I'd prioritize fixing first

You fill in a short form (about 5 minutes), I run the diagnostic, and you get a personalized written report. No follow-up unless you want one.

The report is genuinely mine to keep as proof of work for the certification — so I have every reason to make it actually useful rather than generic.

What I need from you: A real business with a real offer. Doesn't have to be big or polished. Coaches, consultants, course creators, ecommerce, service businesses — all fine. If you have something you're trying to sell and it's not working as well as you'd like, that's exactly the situation this is designed for.

What this costs you: Nothing. Genuinely.

If you're interested, drop a comment or send me a DM and I'll send you the form link.

Paulius

Hey everyone,

I'll keep this straightforward. I'm completing a funnel building certification and one of the assignments requires me to run a real marketing audit for 5 actual businesses. Not simulated businesses, real ones, with real websites, real offers, and real problems to find.

That means I need 5 people who are willing to let me look at their marketing setup and give them an honest diagnostic report in return.

Here's exactly what I look at:

• Your website or sales funnel and where people are dropping off
• Your offer, hook, and how you're positioning what you sell
• Your email setup: whether you have a welcome sequence, how often you send, what's missing
• Your social presence and whether it's actually feeding your funnel
• Your revenue model: offers, pricing, recurring vs one-off
• Where your biggest gaps are and what I'd prioritize fixing first

You fill in a short form (about 5 minutes), I run the diagnostic, and you get a personalized written report. No follow-up unless you want one.

The report is genuinely mine to keep as proof of work for the certification — so I have every reason to make it actually useful rather than generic.

What I need from you: A real business with a real offer. Doesn't have to be big or polished. Coaches, consultants, course creators, ecommerce, service businesses — all fine. If you have something you're trying to sell and it's not working as well as you'd like, that's exactly the situation this is designed for.

What this costs you: Nothing. Genuinely.

If you're interested, drop a comment or send me a DM and I'll send you the form link.

Paulius