How to write a funding application that wins

What the founder of ByStorm Beauty changed to secure a 30k investment the second time she applied.

By Melanie Dimmitt

Published 7 May, 2026

How to write a funding application that wins

What the founder of ByStorm Beauty changed to secure a 30k investment the second time she applied.

By Melanie Dimmitt

Published 7 May, 2026

Previous article “If I was a bloke, I would have said, ‘Yes, I nailed that’.”

Storm Menzies faced an enviable but awkward dilemma. The founder of ByStorm Beauty was at Canberra airport, fresh off winning the 2025 Enterprising Women Kickstarter Challenge and she had, in both hands, a surfboard-sized $30,000 cheque.

“I had to check it in as oversized luggage,” Storm explains from her home in Newcastle. “And the funniest thing was that I was on Pelican Airlines – a tiny, regional, maybe 20-person plane. It could not have been more inconvenient.”

But a very welcome inconvenience, nonetheless. Out of 415 innovative entries, Storm’s line of adaptive makeup tools, designed to make beauty inclusive for every body, had come out on top.

The victory was made even sweeter by the fact that it wasn’t the first time Storm had applied to take part in this national competition, which connects female founders with funding and support to get their business ideas off the ground.

She’d applied the previous year, and had come home empty handed.

“I actually think it was so good that I didn’t get it, because I’m in such a different and better place now to really see the value in what I was doing,” says Storm.

“I’m so much better equipped to use money in a really effective way – and I know what the business is. I know how to articulate myself and really connect with people.”

Back when she first applied for the program, in the early stages of ByStorm Beauty, Storm had some product prototypes and wasn’t quite sure what to do with them.

“Less than 1 percent of all female founders get investment or funding – and we don’t even have statistics on disabled women in Australia.”

“Am I going to create a business with it? Am I not? I don’t really know. And honestly, at the time, I was just applying for anything and everything to be like, could I do this?” she recalls. “I was also looking for community – people to help and support me – because you just don’t know what you don’t know.”

During this search, Storm pitched her dream and was told, time and time again, “that’s a really nice idea – what a lovely thing to do – but there’s just no money in it”.

She returned to the Enterprising Women Kickstarter Challenge with two world-first products – ByStorm Beauty’s ‘Betty’ and ‘Margie’ makeup grips – and a 27-member lived-experience advisory group, made up of disabled and chronically ill people from around the world.

Storm won over the judges with her vision for inclusive beauty and she got the dollars – every comically oversized, 30,000 of them – joining the fewer than one in ten Australian startups that ever see outside money.

“Less than 1 percent of all female founders get investment or funding – and we don’t even have statistics on disabled women in Australia,” says Storm, who falls into this cohort.

“I’m so glad I did apply the second time – and had no shame in applying the second time, as well. To know that I’m in a different place,” she says.

“Before it was really like, ‘Hey, I’ve got this idea’. And now I’m like, ‘I know that this is going to be a business. I’ve got this’.

Here, Storm shares her top five tips for winning funding:

1

Systemise your hunting with AI

“I have an AI agent that scrapes for grants and tells me when the deadlines are. Put in all your parameters of what exactly you are looking for – have qualifying criteria in terms of where you are, your location, your industries – and then tell it the places to look. Mine looks at an RSS feed of grants going on in the world and does an evaluation of whether they are compatible, worth my time, and have enough money. Then, it sends me a list and puts it into my diary. If it’s not on my calendar, I’m not going to do it.”

2

Know exactly what you need the money for

“Working through applications and questions and all of those things really helps you refine what you’re even asking for. You start out being like, I’ll take anything, everything. And then you’re like, wait, hold on a second. What are the things that I need to actually help this business move forward, and what are we trying to achieve here?”

3

Build your AI like a brutal editor, not a yes-man

“The way that I have all of my AI set up is to never agree with me. To always find weakness and arguments, never just be agreeable. I always prompt to say, ‘review this from the point of view of a judge, assessing this against the criteria’. I get it to research all the criteria first, and then look at how my business objectives actually meet them.”

4

Talk business, not charity

“I really had to change my thinking – going more like, okay, how can I make this make sense from a commercial perspective? Try to make things relate to people’s position. Disability, for example, can be thought of as this thing that will never happen to someone. But I frame it as, ‘every single person will become disabled. That is a fact. The less you invest in technology now, the more disabled you will become when you do develop a disability. Don’t miss out on that opportunity’.”

5

Look beyond the dollar amount

“You’ll never find the time to write a grant. There’s never going to be enough hours in your day. You have to evaluate – is it worth the investment in your time? But also look at not just what the grant offers, but who’s connected to that grant. The access to those judges and panellists. Think about it like, even if I don’t get this grant, I would love to speak to this person, because they’re in this industry.

“Even without getting the grant, the process of applying really helps you to think through your business and why you’re doing it.”

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