Stupid Simple, By Design

I have one rule for everything we build at GrantOrb: it has to be absolutely stupid simple.

Not “simple for software.” Not “simple once you’ve watched the tutorial.” Stupid simple. If a busy executive director can’t figure it out in the thirty seconds between a board call and a program crisis, we failed. Full stop.

Here’s why I’m so stubborn about this.

Complexity is a tax on your mission

The people we build for don’t have a spare afternoon. They’re running food banks, tutoring programs, housing services. Every hour they spend learning software is an hour taken from the work that actually matters. Most funding tools are built like enterprise software — dashboards inside dashboards, settings pages, onboarding webinars. That’s not a feature set. That’s a tax.

So we flipped the question. Instead of asking “what can we add?”, we ask: what is the least a person should have to do to get real work out?

The answer, almost always, is one sentence.

Describe your grant in one sentence — GrantOrb builds the full application. Describe your organization once — the search runs on its own. Paste your website — your Supplier Passport fills itself in. That’s the bar for every feature we ship. One sentence in, real work out.

Talk like a smart friend

Simplicity isn’t just about fewer clicks. It’s about language.

The funding world runs on jargon, and jargon is a gate. It tells regular people: this room is not for you. I refuse to build a product that talks that way. So we went further than a style guide — we banned grant-speak inside the AI itself. Words like “utilize,” “synergy,” and their bureaucratic cousins are blocked at the source. Our internal test is blunt: if a high school student can’t understand it, rewrite it.

The same goes for how the product asks you things. No commands like “Describe your organizational structure.” Just plain questions, the way a smart friend would ask them over coffee: what are you trying to do, and why does it matter?

Ask only what a funder needs

Grant applications got long because nobody was brave enough to make them short. Every committee added a section, and no one ever removed one.

We build from first principles instead. A funder needs to know three things to make a smart decision: is the problem urgent, is the idea good, and can this team deliver? Everything we generate is built around those three pillars. When GrantOrb creates an application, it makes four sections if four is enough. It never pads to ten just to look thorough. Padding doesn’t make decisions better. It makes them slower.

And eligibility should open doors, not guard them. You don’t need a PhD or a polished credentials page to have a great idea. The criteria we generate are written to welcome people in — because the best ideas often come from the people closest to the problem, not the people best at paperwork.

Simple is the hard part

Let me be clear about something: stupid simple is not easy to build. It’s the hardest thing we do.

Behind that one sentence you type, there’s a search that verifies every result against the funder’s own page. A drafting engine that writes section by section and never overwrites your words. A matching system that explains every recommendation in plain English. We take on the complexity so you never see it. That’s the deal.

It would be far easier to hand you a toolbox and a manual. Plenty of companies do. But every setting we expose, every step we add, is a place where someone gives up — and when someone gives up on a grant application, their community loses funding. I take that personally.

Where this shows up

This philosophy isn’t a poster on a wall. It’s in every feature, and I’ve written a piece on each one:

• Grant search that runs in the background and only shows you verified, open opportunities.
• Ideas that hand you two honest options — a safer bet and a bold bet — instead of twenty maybes.
• Form automation that turns a funder’s application into a finished draft.
• Grant creation for funders — describe your grant in one sentence, launch a complete application in two minutes.
• A Supplier Passport that turns government tenders into plain-English verdicts: bid, team up, or skip.
• An AI connector that brings all of it into Claude or ChatGPT, where you already work.
• Consultant workspaces that let one person serve three times the clients without dropping quality.

Different features, one rule. If it isn’t stupid simple, it doesn’t ship.

Try it yourself at app.grantorb.com — free to start, no credit card required. Time yourself. If you’re not doing real work within a few minutes, I want to hear about it.

If you have any questions, reach out to me on LinkedIn.