About two years ago, while on a digital nomad work-vacay in Ubud, Bali, I created a chatbot called Grant Hunt using nocode tools like Chatfuel and Sheet2site. It’s a chatbot that has some conditional logic built in, and helps any grant applicant in the social impact space find a grant for their idea. I remembered working on it all day at Ubud’s lovely cafes, drinking piccolo lattes made from their home-grown beans, then taking breaks in the evenings and weekends to take walks in rice fields or go swim in the beach. It was an awesome work-vacay, and many beautiful memories formed around that project. 

But as a product, the chatbot didn’t do all that well. I loved making things but I was so so green at marketing and distributing it back then (still am now). Some people used it, but it never went viral. Other than a good handful of about 50 people dropping by the bot over the past two years, nothing much happened. After the initial excitement, I kind of forgot about it too.

Fast forward to the recent COVID-19 lockdown. A friend who works at a foundation approached me and suggested that I should try to apply for one of the grants at the foundation to revamp the bot, because some links are broken, and the content dated. There’s also a groundswell of citizen initiatives that’s popped up during the lockdown, so the bot might come in useful for that trend. I dug deeper on my own and observed that there’s an even bigger need right now to help charities and non-profits get all the financial help they can get. Because with COVID, more companies are hunkering down and starting to draw back corporate social responsibility funds. Hard times are a-coming for these corporates and therefore charities. 

Perhaps the Jaeger bot can be revived to fight this Kaiju virus…

To be continued…