About a month ago, I ran a Facebook ad in Kenya for fourteen days. The offer: a $10,000 travel grant for young adults, 18 to 26. The ad asked one question. What adventure would you go do if someone handed you $10,000? Apply to the Finn Wardman World Explorer Fund.
At least forty qualified people wrote in asking how to apply. I told them. I told them to dream big. I told them the catch was that they had to actually put the dream on paper and send it. The "leads" or CPL were about $.81 each, a reasonable cost to make some tests for this.
Zero applications came back, despite me hand currating each response encourgaing these would be dreamers to send in their application.
Chase, my co-founder on the fund, and I have been chewing on this for weeks. I check the applicant list most mornings. Same empty page. Chase's line was, "I can't even imagine having this opportunity if I was a youth in rural Kenya, why aren't they applying?" I can't imagine it either. If someone told me at 22 that I could write any dream down and maybe get handed the ten grand to go chase it, I would have been scribbling on the back of my hand before they finished the sentence.
What we're learning is that the real demand-side problem is not attention. It is belief.
We have awarded about ten grants so far. Every one of them has had the same moment in the interview. Chase and I sit down with the candidate and four interchanging peers, including now our two super star alums Brenda and Leo. The candidate has usually never left their home country, sometimes never been on a plane, and somewhere in the first ten minutes the same question arrives with exactly the same shape. "You guys are going to give me thousands of dollars to pursue a dream, and I can do whatever I want with it? What's the catch?"
There is no catch. That is the catch. The offer is real, the money is real, the only thing you have to do is pick up a pen, write down what you would actually go do in the world if the money were not the problem, and send it. It's actually even easier, you fill out a prelim form that takes about 5 to 10 minutes to fill out and send a video. For a 20-year-old who has never flown, that is a longer walk than it sounds.
A letter landed this week from Yasmin, one of our earlier grantees, writing to Chase, Kirsten, me and the rest of the team from Sayulita, Mexico, after a year on the road. The part that stood out was this:
> I remember the day I left, I was at the airport so scared, doubting about all my decisions, cause let's be honest, solo traveling can be really scary. And then I thought about the little version of myself, and I knew this little yas would be so proud of myself, so I got in the plane and leave with all my fears.
That is the inside of the believing gap when it closes. Airport. Fear. The little version of yourself. You get on the plane anyway.
Two more candidates crossed the gap this week. A 23-year-old from South Africa who wants to fly to Maine to be a counsellor at a youth summer camp. I'm pretty sure she's never left SA nor been on a plane, I can't wait to meet her. A 24-year-old from Brazil who wants to travel to Palestine to make a documentary, interviewing people who have been affected by the war and are carrying on with their own lives anyway. I mean, what a great dream, if we can help him cross that line, why in the world would we not do it? Both vetted. Both up for their panel interviews with Chase, me, and four peers. Both worth every rand and real of the grant before we even ask the first question.
For a sense of scale on the money, a recent grantee travelled for twelve straight months on exactly $10,000. That is now our rough benchmark. Ten grand is enough to actually be in the field and live it. The falls, the stalls, the nights you do not know where you are sleeping. Exactly what we want the fund to be paying for.
So back to the Kenya forty. If belief is the actual constraint, more attention does not fix it. Another round of ads will not. What closes the gap is other young people, from places that look like the applicant's place, saying on camera, "yeah, they sent me the money, here is what happened." Which is the real reason I have three grantee podcasts sitting unpublished on my desk. I have let that slip because the grant application for the donations platform ate the last two weeks, and now I have to catch up on the foundation work I let go.
The other piece is that we are in the middle of re-applying to become a registered charity in Bermuda, where Finn and I are from. We applied once before and got turned down, reasonably, because we had nothing to show. Now we have ten grants out the door, the results are starting to come back, and the grantees really are changed. The application file is a different file.
Registered charity status in Bermuda is also a believing lever. For a 22-year-old in rural Kenya reading the ad, "some guy in Switzerland will give you $10,000" is not a sentence anyone trusts. "A registered charity will give you $10,000" is still scary, but it is a different shape. The catch, again, is that there is no catch. The structure just has to look enough like the thing people are used to for the sentence to land.
I hope some of the Kenya forty are brave enough, or stubborn enough, or trusting enough, to come back and apply. I keep writing them in DM's on insta, Hey - are you going to apply? No responses, yet. The experiment I actually want to run is this: if we can close the believing gap, we solve the demand side of this whole thing for every country in the world at once, and the donor side becomes the only hard problem left.
That is a problem I actually know how to work on.
Monthly Revenues $11,800 | Clients 2 | Prospects 0, starting to feel the gap myself.