The problem
The funding side of any small operation — a restaurant, a documentary, an animal rescue — is buried in the ugliest writing on the internet. Every grant guide is gated behind a borrower form, every “definitive list” is six months stale, and the actual funders are three layers down through a marketing funnel. The people who need the information have the least time to dig for it.
What we built
Fundthings.com is a long-form editorial site organized by who’s doing the funding work. The current launch covers three verticals — restaurants, documentaries, animal rescue — each with its own deep set of guides on grants, loans, and crowdfunding tactics, with the official source for every claim cited at the bottom of the page.
The editorial rules are short and strict: no borrower forms (we don’t sell your application), cited primary sources (the funder’s own page, not someone’s recap), and reader email answered personally. The whole catalog is markdown-synced into a Laravel app, so a guide ships the moment the writing is done.
How we shipped it
Built end-to-end on Laravel + Inertia + React + Postgres. The content layer is markdown-first so editorial doesn’t fight the framework. Monetization is affiliate-only — no ads, no application forms — and the publisher relationships are stacked rather than dependent on any one network. Phase 2 (an AI grant-discovery + drafting SaaS for small nonprofits) is staged but deferred until the content engine is paying for itself.
Outcome
Fundthings is live with three verticals shipping articles. The pages exist for the reader, not the affiliate fee — the trust shows up in retention and in inbound replies, not in conversion microcopy.
