What we talked about
Ninh Tran joins the PreVetted Podcast to share his journey from Vietnam to the Czech Republic, and later to the United States:each move opening new doors and reshaping how he thinks about opportunity, work, and impact. He talks honestly about growing up as one of the only Asian kids in his class, facing discrimination, and eventually building deep friendships that still last today.
Show notes
Ninh Tran grew up as one of three Asian kids in a Czech gymnasium, moved to the US to study economics at Berkeley with a mission to solve poverty, then watched that goal pivot from policy to entrepreneurship, and eventually to a grant platform with a 100% win rate on its own applications, landing in the top ten out of 3,500 proposals. What makes Gravity different isn’t just the software: Ninh built it by first winning nearly $978,000 in grants himself, then quietly handing the tool to nonprofit customers to test before they even knew what they had.
What we covered
- Ninh’s family moved from Vietnam to Czech Republic when he was four, shifting from farming and street markets in Hanoi to international trade in Europe. He describes it as one of several life-changing “access to opportunity” jumps, each move opening a fundamentally different economic environment.
- After working at Google and other large tech companies, Ninh went back to startups, eventually co-founding HireEasy, where the team helped approximately 928,000 people find jobs in 2021 during COVID, a number he still refers to with precision.
- Gravity was born from a simple request: nonprofit customers kept asking Ninh to fundraise for them. Instead, he built a grant proposal tool, tested it on his own applications, achieved a 100% win rate, and then let customers try it. A few months later, one called to say they had won a $500,000 grant using the tool.
- About half of Gravity’s clients are now for-profit impact founders, not nonprofits, a development Ninh didn’t plan. AI startups working in healthcare, education, and community tech have found grant funding through the platform, including SBIR and research grants. Since AI-generated applications flooded the market, win rates on some grants dropped from 10% to 1%, making quality and matching more critical than ever.
- Ninh identifies five factors that drive grant success, with the most important being a prior relationship with the foundation. He tells clients to attend galas, connect on LinkedIn, and get on board members’ calendars, because a familiar name on a proposal carries real weight when decisions are made.
- He also shared the story of a Hawaiian nonprofit making soap for indigenous communities that turned away hotel buyers to preserve its nonprofit identity, until a $300,000 funding gap forced a rethink. Using a buy-one-give-four model, they made back the gap entirely through soap sales to local hotels. Ninh uses the story to push founders toward sustainability thinking, regardless of their tax status.
About Ninh
Ninh Tran is the CEO and founder of Grav.ID (Gravity), an AI-powered platform that helps nonprofits and impact founders find and secure grant funding. He previously co-founded HireEasy, where he led growth across product, operations, and community, scaling a hiring platform that helped close to a million job seekers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ninhtran08
- Website: https://grav.id
Episode 102 of the PreVetted Podcast.
Full transcript
Federico Ramallo (00:00) Welcome back to the pre-Vered podcast where we spotlight extraordinary people and remarkable talent reshaping our world. Today we’re joined by Nin Tran, his CEO and founder of Gravity, Grav.ID. It’s an AI-powered team helping nonprofits and impact founders find and secure grant funding in just a few clicks. Before Grav.ID or Gravity,
Nin was a co-founder of HireEasy, formerly HireTul, where he helped scale an AI recruiting platform across products, ops, marketing, sales, customer success, and community, driving major growth milestones, including launching JobSeer.ai and building large-scale enterprise go-to-market motion. Nin, welcome to the show.
Ninh Tran (00:51) Hey Federico, great to be here.
Federico Ramallo (00:53) I’m honored to have you here today. So tell us a little bit about where did you grow up and what was your childhood look like for you?
Ninh Tran (01:01) That’s a real long story because I’ve been on earth for some time now, just like you. I’m originally from Vietnam, born in Vietnam, but I didn’t grow up in Vietnam. My family soon after moved to Czech Republic in Europe. So I really grew up in Czech Republic.
in Prague for a year or two and then in Krab, Eger and Aach by borders of Germany. So that was really fun. I was there from about four to about 18 years. So really my teen and my early childhood, the formation years were over there. And my life really changed, obviously, when we moved from Vietnam to Czech Republic because the economic opportunity
Change access to opportunities change in Vietnam. I remember my family They were they were farmers. They were picking cotton at some point. They’re also hustling on open markets in in the streets of Hanoi and just make trying to make a living right and when we got to do Europe things changed drastically because The economy was so much better. We started to do international trade
buying cheap things from Asia and then reselling it at a higher margin in Europe. yeah, life has changed drastically. I remember I was one of the three only Asian kids in a classroom of all Czech people. And at first it was quite difficult. There was a lot of discrimination because I just looked different, I talked different, just not the same.
people are just afraid of you know uncertainty or just something that is very outlier right very different but over time as I got to know them and they got to know me we became best friends especially because in Czech Republic you go to like a gymnasium which is like a school that’s for smart kids
supposedly the test in. So yeah you stick with the same group of people for about eight to ten years. So we really got to know each other. Yeah and he’s like wow you’re just like me and it may have black hair and brown eyes right but you care about the same thing you’re cool. So yeah that’s where I grew up.
Federico Ramallo (03:24) Right, right. And kids can be very mean when they want to.
Ninh Tran (03:31) Yeah, I mean we all grow out of it. was, I was, you know, I just wanted to be cool when I was a kid and throughout my teenage years. And even recently when I went back to Czech Republic to visit, some of my best friends from high school, they got together with me like a mini reunion. And yeah, like we still keep in touch. So yeah,
Federico Ramallo (03:34) Yeah, but it’s a yeah, I, I understand. I’ve been through similar things on.
what’s one moment that changed how you see work or life?
Ninh Tran (04:03) Well.
Federico Ramallo (04:04) after Czech
Ninh Tran (04:04) Yeah, well, so I grew up in Czech Republic and then and then I moved to the US, right? And my life changed again, like drastically to even more access to opportunities because the economic economic environment is drastically different in here in America versus back in Europe. And so, you know, I came here for study, went to college, graduated from Berkeley and then right after Berkeley, I went into tech. And then when I got into tech,
my life changed again, right? All of sudden I went from being a broke student to actually I can afford to stay in the Bay Area, right?
where the cost of living is extremely high. And so I understood, you know, and at Berkeley I studied economics, I always wanted to solve poverty. Because I came from, you Vietnam, super poor country, not a lot of opportunities there to check with public, you know, more well off, there’s things you can do, but most of my family are entrepreneurial, so to create the opportunities for themselves and then to the US,
You know You can do anything almost anything right as long as it provides value for somebody else and they’re willing to pay for it Right, you can make a living for yourself or you can get hired. So I worked at Google You know and all these big tech companies You know quickly realized I still love being an entrepreneur and and part of that is is Like I guess a lot of moments
helped me change and see life differently. But when it comes to like work, it’s realizing that, you know, solving poverty is not about economics, right? All the policies are there. It’s really about corruption. So I was very disheartened. And then I decided, okay, let’s go back to business and let’s create impact ourselves in our own lives. And so I did that for a while with my first startup, right? I helped people who
are
like food truck owners build an app so that they can advertise where their next location going to be because they move around, they don’t have a set location for the most part, as well as they themselves hire locally from their communities and oftentimes, regardless if somebody has a record, right, or not, as long as you’re willing to show up and work hard and flip burgers or whatever they’re making, right, make tacos, you’re in.
So I really appreciate that that got a lot of friends from food truck owner business owners and then also the chefs and all the workers there. They’re really kind people and then just just being in tech and building tech that empowers people like that business owners right to do good in their community and create jobs and create employment opportunities. That’s something that that really helped me because
There’s like microeconomics, access to opportunities, but then there’s also personal and local access to opportunities. And of course, then I went on to build Hi-Easy and all of that.
Federico Ramallo (06:55) Amazing, amazing. So what problem made you want to start gravity or graph.id?
Ninh Tran (07:03) Well, you know.
After HireEasy, where we got really, really blessed and we helped about a million people get jobs in 2021, just during COVID, 928,000 and some change, right? I love, I realize about myself, like I love helping others who are helping others. And I’m always about doing the economic empowerment, right? Solving, you know, poverty at a bigger scale, but also at a personal level for people.
And so I was like, okay, who are people that really need help now and who I love to help?
creating real impact in someone’s life. And I came to the conclusion after serving all kinds of folks from, you know, I think we were building on blockchain for supply chain, like different industries, right? Even back to hiring and helping underrepresented folks from marginalized communities or just anybody across the world in developing countries get access to skills. I realized
You know people who are in the weeds and in the trenches with others are nonprofits and When I talked to them and we started to build technology like community management software Donation processing software all of that. I love all this nin I really need it, but we can’t really afford it right because we’re such on such a tight budget and At some point they’re asking me. Hey, then can you just fundraise for us? Can you fundraise for me? You know you’d
You do such a great job like I’m not sure if I want to fundraise for you for you I want to help I’m not sure if I want to fundraise for you because I’m trying to fundraise for myself and the market is really tough. That’s a couple years ago and so But I did time hey, you know, I hear you but let’s see what I can do to to help and it’s when we build gravity We won a lot of
ourselves we have 100 % win rate for our own grants we won like nine hundred seventy eight thousand dollars in grants from a private foundation unrestricted grant money 100 % win rate and not just 100 % win rate we won like you know the top ten of all
3,500 grant proposals. And so we took that knowledge, built a grant proposal generator, and let some of our nonprofit customers that we had at the time to try it. And I didn’t realize that…
A couple months later, they’re like, hey, by the way, we won a 500k grant using your tool. I’m like, holy cow, this actually works. And so I started to talk to other people, offer it to other clients, and they’re like, wow, that is crazy. Can we have it today? That’s how it started.
Federico Ramallo (09:50) Amazing, amazing. what type of nonprofits is Graph.ID built for? Do you have a specific size, a minimum size that we’re able to use it?
Ninh Tran (10:03) Yeah, I would say any nonprofit with revenue from 50 to about $25 million, those are like pretty much organizations that…
typically have suffered a lot since COVID, right? Or newer organizations. A lot of the customers that we have, they maybe had $1.2, $2, $3 million in COVID, and then it went down to maybe $500K today, or $1 million today, right? So they have been receiving a ton of grants or a ton of donations, got a lot of major sponsors, but the sponsors or donations or foundations can no longer support them.
So they need to desperately search for other avenues or they have dependent on federal state grant that has you know closed funding This year or is predicting to close next year and so they’re all trying to diversify their sources of funding and say they they come to us and we quickly help them find matching grants But you know as I go to events I meet people events have been working extremely extremely well
for us just just talking to people and networking and telling asking them what they do and learning about you know what
drives them, what motivates them. Naturally, people ask, well, hey, Nin, what do you do? And then I say, this is what I do. I help nonprofits, empire organizations, secure and compete for grant funding and non dilutive funding sources. even not just nonprofits, right? Even impact founders, startups, usually pre-series A, there’s some series B companies who are doing research grants. Like, wow,
Can you do this for me? You know and I’m like hey we can try so today about half of our clients are nonprofits and half of our clients are impact organizations impact founders Usually early stage
to about 25 to 50 million in revenue. But now we see that even bigger organizations that have done maybe 75 to 150 million in revenue who heavily dependent on federal grant funding, right, or for Medicaid or whatever, some of those programs, right, they funded some of their programs because of the reduction of budget.
to us and asking what are the funding sources that we should be pursuing and can you help us?
AI has changed a lot of the grant funding landscape, like drastically. Even for SBIR and research grants, used to be like 600 applications, a little bit over total, right, before AI, before GBT. And now after GBT, there’s 6,000 applications. So the win rate went from 10 % to 1%. And so if you spent all this time, all the effort in or
money right to hire agency to do it it’s going to be extremely extremely cost inefficient and resource inefficient and nonprofits they typically need to stay very lean and and they need you know they all are facing budget gaps so we’ve been growing really fast
Federico Ramallo (13:18) Right, right. Amazing. And very interesting that you mentioned that GrabID also helps for-profit organizations, right?
Ninh Tran (13:27) Yeah, about half of our customers are for- It just happened, actually. I tell them, you know, this is what we do. And they’re like, wow. Okay. And then they real start churning like, can you do this for me too? Can I apply for grant funding? Sure, we can try. And then we actually were able to find a bunch of grants. In fact, some of our most successful clients are AI startups, like AI for HOA or AI for therapy.
healthcare, know, health tech, ed tech, yeah, or non-AI as well. So they’ll get getting to do diligence for different grants and getting interviews. So it works.
Federico Ramallo (14:01) You mentioned a little bit that AI now makes it harder to get funded, but what are the hardest parts about getting grant funding today?
Ninh Tran (14:11) Yeah, so grant funding historically and typically has just a very small win rate, right? Typically the average is about 10 % Win rate. So it’s just been numbers game. It’s like the sales like just numbers game How many do you get into your pipeline? How many actually fit? What is the core program that you do? And then how many can you apply for based on your core program and other programs?
that may be involved. So take for example, I don’t know, a nonprofit that addresses homelessness in LA. They perhaps have won a grant previously to renovate some homes, to offer them to people who need transitional homes. And then now they expanded to providing healthcare services as well, like mental health services, sometimes addiction recovery services.
So they’ve gotten multiple different grants for all kinds of services that they provide but they also do like emotional support, coaching, gym memberships and so on that they pay out of their operating budget and they don’t have grants for those. So how can they identify additional funding opportunities that would be like essentially matching grant foundations, grant makers, funding opportunities to what they’re doing already and or
what they are planning to do in the next year and this year.
most cases a lot of this is is done like so Win rate based on the match right if there’s not a match. It’s kind of tough, right? If let’s say homeless Alleviation Nonprofits applying for space research obviously they you know, they can apply Right, but it’s not gonna be a win so matching number one that directly
affects the the win rate but also writing a decent proposal by getting it out there and explaining everything because a lot of people they use templates that they Have used for years and they may change a little bit right they they’ll let GPT they They say hey, here’s my template answer all these prompts and then they change it just a little bit based on their template Either they do it manually
or even you know
let’s face it, all nonprofits are using AI, right? But then also they use free versions, so it’s not very good. And then on the foundation side, when they review, right, if you go to Reddit slash nonprofits, like foundations are complaining about AI, like really bad AI generated applications, right? And it’s all camp that you prompt AI, right? Who are my best partners that fit for this
foundation or this grant application and it just does a couple bullet points and that’s it. Right? And so when you’re trying to do higher volume grant funding and fundraising, it’s really tough to put in a high quality proposal, especially if you’re trying to get, you know, a pipeline going in order to generate a decent outcome for yourself and hit the fundraising goals.
So for us, we alleviate the matching and we help our clients generate a high quality proposal at a fraction of the effort. Literally in a matter of a couple clicks by taking all the contacts from the nonprofits as well as the funder. And yeah, it’s been working.
Federico Ramallo (17:37) Right, right, that’s very interesting. What is one mistake nonprofits usually make when applying for grants? You mentioned a bit the low quality grant request, right?
Ninh Tran (17:49) I’d say the biggest mistake that non-profits make is they actually don’t apply for grants or they don’t apply for enough grants. So they think, like the people who get it are usually run by executive director who has a research background, a PhD perhaps, and in their PhD efforts, they already know, like, okay,
We need to apply for a bunch of grants. We need to do a due diligence have our Documentation and data room ready right to submit with the submission right I have all the financial ready or the IRS withholding certificate ready and all that so In the worst case they’ve been applying and they don’t win any grant. I have a client like I’m a PhD executive director I’ve applied for one grant every month last year and unfortunately
we didn’t win anything. That was before they came to us. But previous years they may have won maybe 30, 50k, 100k here and there. So they have won. Just last year was very tough because of the changes in the grant funding landscape because of AI.
Today, tell them 12 applications is not enough, usually. If you do it by yourself the way you do it, it’s tough. So you need more. And you also need to focus on building relationships with these foundations and not just about the application. There’s five drivers of what drives and influences usually five correlating factors of winning rents. Number one,
is previous delivery on a grant and existing relationship with the foundation. It’s number one. Okay, after the application, get in there, get in from them, get to know the board members, invite them to your gala or telling about your startup network on LinkedIn, get on their calendar, go to the event, get in their community, whatever you can do to build the relationship. Very important, because let’s say you’re at the foundation, you’re a board member, you’re part of the community,
that says yes or no on a grant. Something comes over your desk like, yeah, I know Gravity. I know Nin. He was on my podcast. He seems legit. I know he’s gonna do good with this money. You look at the proposal, checks all the boxes, high quality proposal, right? Then you’re more likely gonna advocate for this than the next thousand or hundreds of applications that you’ve never met, right? The other thing is,
you know capacity and revenue and your financials like all the all the Paper work and reporting has got to be top-notch, right? So they’re not gonna give you five million dollars if you know you have zero revenue
It’s way more reasonable to win like 50 to even 100k grants, 75k grant if you’re like pre-revenue or early stage, right? Then $5 million. Now, biotech is different. Research grants is different, right? I’m just talking in general, right?
There are grants that will give you millions of dollars, but at stages with milestones and so on. So just understanding what actually drives the success in grants is their number one mistake probably.
Federico Ramallo (20:58) Right, right. So any any issues on paperwork would raise red flags and people would say, wait a minute, right? And so having all that, you know, top notch, as you said, becomes important. Yeah.
Ninh Tran (21:12) Be ready, right? Be ready to,
like, what if they get into due diligence and interviews process right away? Right? Then what? mean, financial projections, like, as a startup, like, if I’m talking to VCs and I’m fundraising, right, data room should be ready, too. It’s not just a paycheck, right? It’s not just the application. It’s you as a founder really understanding your business. You as an executive director really
understanding the nonprofit, the ins and outs of it, and also like you know not just knowing the vision and and working with you know beneficiaries, the people that are receiving aid.
Because like everybody cares everybody has a vision everybody Everybody’s in the trenches hopefully right? So foundations are looking for people who can deliver on the promises Effectively and the people who are prepared right are Are more likely to do that than the ones who are not?
Federico Ramallo (22:11) Right. Right. So how do you know when to change direction, pivot, or just keep moving forward?
Ninh Tran (22:20) You know, we pivoted a lot of times. I’d hire EZ in here too. I would say…
Yeah, my founder journey is like, hey, I have an idea. I want to help people. Let’s go and let’s do it. And then I recruit a bunch of founders and people to my team. then we share the same vision. And then we build stuff. We just build stuff. And then we’re like, OK, well, we build AI for coding assessments. And it was pre-AI. I was like, OK, it’s a cool idea.
Nobody
uses it, nobody wants it, know, nobody pays for it. So we pivot into, and you just launch, you know, you do marketing, you do all the stuff that you still have to launch and tell people, right? And do all the social media marketing, tell people and get feedback from users. Maybe if it feels like you’re dragging people to use your software, that’s wrong. It shouldn’t be like that.
Excited to use your software or the product or whatever if you’re like Almost begging people to come on the platform and then they maybe use it for a day Or maybe a week and then you never see them ever again You know probably think about switching and pivoting and building something else now Let’s say that you reach a place where people actually are excited about using your product, right? You build something that people actually want to use
and somewhat user friendly, whatever, it can be MVP, you know. It doesn’t have to be everybody, it just has to be like your ICP, your target audience, whoever, right? If you find one person who loves the tool, right, then it’s about do they pay for it, right? Now you have users, you’re paying users. And so, yeah, we built stuff that people loved. What did we do?
At some point in HireEasy, we were a job board. And so many people got hired through the job board. They applied, I think, it was like employee referral based hiring platform. 10%.
Success rate right so like one out of ten people got hired and they got hired at Google and uber and Facebook like big tech companies So their lives must change in these are early early or senior level You know professionals. I was like amazing But when we started to like hey would companies pay for this they said no We don’t pay employee referral outside to outside external agencies right and job seekers could afford to pay for it So even though we had this
You know product that The the traction was going up and up and we were able to raise money on it It was not a viable business, right? So it would be a good free tool Right, and we’ve done that multiple times like it’s good to innovate and test and see what actually sticks But until you find somebody Well, let me take about until you find a problem
that someone is already paying for and build a solution for that problem that can be faster, higher quality, better, cheaper, essentially exponentially better as a combination or exponentially faster, exponentially cheaper, exponentially better quality than what is existing out there as a solution in the market today.
that then you’ll have people who love it and you’ll have people who also pay for it and you know if they keep coming back they’ll keep paying for it and so we essentially pivoted until we reach gravity where you know everybody has this problem of hey I need money I’m facing budget gaps the grant funding landscape is changing under my feet the foundations are changing their requirements on the fly because they’re inundated with thousands of applications every single day
How do I compete with the time and resources that I have without burning out my team and breaking the bank? Because I still need funding in order to serve my beneficiaries. I don’t want to let go of people or I have been letting go and letting off staff or not properly incentivizing the volunteer staff and so on. Or for non-profits, for startups,
Like I can find a lead investor right where pre-revenue we have a product we have some traction But we’re competing with startups who have 100k in revenue in like six months right or three months after launch right We’re not as hot, what we care about what we do and we have awesome technology Is there any funding that can bridge the gap for us to build develop get traction so that we can eventually lead or
Already have money already got series, you know seed and so on we going for series a But investors have been burned in my industry and I need some grant funding in order to keep my business going and Essentially bridge the gap until the market changes for my industry, right? So Those are some of the reasons why Yeah Why we’ve been growing so much and
and why gravity is around today, the way it is, and how we have pivoted into building this instead of building community app or donation processing. Essentially, it wasn’t exponentially better than what’s out there on the market today.
Federico Ramallo (27:28) Right, right. Very interesting. What advice would you give a founder that’s starting from zero today?
Ninh Tran (27:37) start. Read the book, The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki.
Federico Ramallo (27:40) Hahaha
Ninh Tran (27:45) If you’re thinking of starting, just start. And just do things. You don’t have to do it right. You don’t have to know everything. You just need to do something. Just start executing. Execution is more important than anything else. The chances are you’ll get to the product market fit when your first product is very small. People change, ideas change, even industries.
Federico Ramallo (28:01) Right.
Ninh Tran (28:09) like what we used to do for marketing with HireEasy, like growing HireEasy, we built communities and we got into with influencers and trainers and that was amazing. I love the Recreating Community, amazing, amazing people, right? Like I love like just going to conferences and people telling me, hey, man, I love what you build because it helped me, you know, get my kids through college, right? As an agency owner.
like you know and a single mom and so on and so on like I love having personal impact in people’s lives with building the tech right but you know
after 2021, COVID changed, like influencers, they all started charging for posts. Before it was all free, like we built relationships with people and they wanted to advance the industry without any monetary motives. And when they did, they got promoted. Like we had a senior recruiter at Amazon become the senior manager because they help us implement our tool across the organization.
Right or just introduce not implement just introduce it because it was such a blessing to everybody else to the whole organization and so Yeah, it’s It’s it’s just start and and start doing things find the people that you care about that you love and you’re like passionate to help So for me, it is non-profit stay they create impact It’s deeply personal as well like goes back to wanting to solve poverty right and also
We serve a lot of faith-based organizations who tell me like, yeah, because we’re faith-based, nobody cares about us.
Right. But in fact, a lot of the grant funding goes towards faith based organizations too. Right. So it’s just like people have these ideas of the way things work, but a lot of times it’s wrong. Right. And so unless you do things and unless you really try to get into these and figure it out, like build something.
Federico Ramallo (29:39) Right.
interesting.
Ninh Tran (29:59) see if people love it and then listen to them to see what actually they pay for and actually they need help with. Like people were telling me, hey, I just need help with fundraising. And I say, well, I can’t help you with fundraising, but there’s all kinds of fundraising. There’s donations, there’s grants, there’s VC fundraising. So we’re like, okay, we’re really good at this. Let’s build it and let’s see what happens. And then, you know,
we just got very lucky. We just got very lucky. Eventually get lucky. Unless you’re like, smart and you’ve done it many times, you exactly know, you know, what to do, then most of the time success doesn’t look like a straight line.
Federico Ramallo (30:25) Yes.
Right, right, and don’t despair, just keep moving forward.
Ninh Tran (30:38) Yeah,
every failure is on a path to success. I think of it like success, know, squeaky line, a lot of U-turns too, a lot of pivots, right? But every pivot builds up. As long as you don’t let…
the failures be the end of the journey, right? Then technically you’re still on the journey. So hang in there, keep executing and think through things, like embrace the truth, right? And…
It shouldn’t feel like you’re dragging people towards the product. It shouldn’t feel like you’re begging people to pay for your services. It should feel like you’re building a product that provides real value to people. what I mean by that is people actually need what you offer or want what you offer. And they pay for it. They will pay for it.
Today or tomorrow or they already are paying for it. You know, I don’t care what you’re selling if you I don’t know like Like one of our clients does AI for HOAs right and the homeowners they paying for it by They already paying HOA dues Right so if if there’s a problem that
Federico Ramallo (31:43) Right.
Ninh Tran (31:47) Somebody is paying for today and you can create a better solution for that You know
then do it, just execute and figure out, is this a real problem and do they actually pay for it? And then you’re just creating your business.
Federico Ramallo (32:03) Right. Right.
Ninh Tran (32:03) ⁓ For
non-pockets, it’s a little bit different, of course.
Federico Ramallo (32:07) Yes, yes. And I think we talked a little bit before recording about the for-profit with a social impact mission, right? Which are allow them to be self-sufficient by having a for-profit ⁓ organization.
Ninh Tran (32:24) Yeah, absolutely.
So we have a customer who has historically been a nonprofit building communities based on education and research around therapy, around mental health for underrepresented communities, as well as just helping kids to go through college or just succeed in life, in education. And they’ve started to build AI based on their research.
and their work right so that side the AI side is for profit right because
you know, and it is offered for free for the nonprofit and so on. But it has potential to impact, you know, a bigger population than the one that’s the nonprofit is serving. And it will also require to get a lot more funding to get off the ground and running and so on, and as well as to commercialize, go to market. So it makes sense. Right. And then as a as a lot of the
For-profits they are connected to nonprofits. They can do a B certification benefit corp, right where portion of their revenue is directly donated to the nonprofit It’s right. Yeah, exactly. So Yeah
Federico Ramallo (33:28) to the mission.
Ninh Tran (33:32) Even nonprofits, like I talked to an executive director who was searching for sustainability. They’re all searching for sustainability, either through grant funding donations or some services that they provide. And so a lot of times the nonprofits themselves, they are blocking themselves from their own sustainability because as a nonprofit, they chase nonprofit. We’re not for profit.
So we want to give our services for free, but that’s not the case. If let’s say a business comes to you and they’re like, I want to buy your services. And this is real story. I want to actually buy what your nonprofit is making. They were making soap for indigenous people in Hawaii.
in indigenous communities. Hotels came, I want to buy your soap. And they’re like, no, no, no, we cannot sell it. Because that would upset all of our partners to donate the raw materials to us for free. Because we told them it’s made for indigenous people. And for a long time, until they lost funding, like 300k, it didn’t win the grant. I’m like, oh my god, we had 300k in a hole.
Federico Ramallo (34:35) you
Ninh Tran (34:40) And then they talk to somebody who did like this, Tom Shoes founder, right? Buy a shoe, give a shoe, right? Like what if the business could buy some more our soap and we use the money to get more soap for every soap that they buy. We donate like two or three or four more soaps to these communities, right? Because it will allow us to fund the workers or fund whatever they need, right?
And so.
You know, that year they made that gap. They made 300k from soap sales to local hotels. You know, the bridge that gap. And that is still going on today, right? And that’s sustainability. So regardless of whether you’re for-profit or non-profit, just be innovative and go through the struggle. A lot of lessons, a lot of things are in the detail.
Right if somebody comes to you with with some need you don’t have to match the need right away you can modify it in a way that that’s You know They still keeps the integrity of who you are as a founder and what you guys are about as a business I said we can’t do fundraising We cannot help you with donations and we don’t do not reach out to funders even today. I tell my clients like you know
I can’t reach out to funders for you. I’ll tell them who they are, right? I’ll give you all the data You know, but you need to own the relationship, right? Yeah
Federico Ramallo (36:13) Right, right,
it’s up to them. You can show them the door, but they have to go through it.
Ninh Tran (36:17) Yeah, exactly.
And people, once they see others doing it well, they start to believe and have confidence and also use the framework that works.
Federico Ramallo (36:34) Amazing, Nin, we are running out of time, but I think we had a great conversation. I truly appreciated you being here. Any final remarks before we wrap it up?
Ninh Tran (36:45) It’s my pleasure
For me, it would be, you know, I really love what I do. I’m super blessed that we stumbled on building AI for nonprofits and impact founders to help them just compete and secure funding in a clicks. But I have a lot of interest, right? So I advise people, I mentor people, I give them free advice. You know, I’d love to hear about their challenges, their problems, especially if it comes with
Hey, we need funding, right?
Right away if we can help for gravity To help you breach the gap, right? And even just find sustainability like talk to talk about the business problems that you have Because I’ve run multiple different nonprofits Not nonprofits startups involved in different nonprofits as well. So I just love getting to know founders and
the movers and shakers to really create impact. I know every founder has a mission, right? I’d say 99 out of 100. I only meant, we only turned away one founder, okay? As you like you’re not an impact founder, right? And it was about, oh, I’m just building AI for SDR. I just wanna make money and help organizations make money.
Federico Ramallo (37:55) Ha ha.
Ninh Tran (38:08) You know, that’s in itself is not wrong. Right. It’s just I know foundations will probably not fund this. So I don’t want to waste their time. Right. It does. Yeah. The mission of making money probably will speak more to VCs and investors than grant foundations. So not a fit thematically there. But.
Federico Ramallo (38:16) Yeah, it’s not a mission-driven ⁓ goal.
Ninh Tran (38:29) Anybody who wants to like really help make the world a better place? And just has some pressing issue whether it’s funding or operations sales marketing whatever product right happy to chat. I’m on LinkedIn
My email is pretty public as well. So just hit me up. Happy to come back, Federico. I had a lot of questions. I’m a talker, man. Once I start, you need to, you need to head in. Let’s go to the next one. But yeah, I enjoyed my time here. Thanks so much for having me.
Federico Ramallo (39:05) Thank you, thank you for joining.
Ninh Tran (39:07) awesome.