Help for a non-advanced entrepreneur

I know I’m not an advanced entrepreneur, but…

I’m pitching for a grant in a couple of weeks and wanted to ask for some advise before I go in there.

The grant is a £10k proof of concept grant, and the investors will want to know exactly what I plan to spend that on.

Right now I’m stuck between pumping that into an MVP (I’ll have to put some of my own £ towards this in addition to the grant), or putting it all into market research to validate the idea a bit better.

I’ve looked into companies like Attest who conduct extensive custom market research at a price.

I’m currently doing a bit of market research myself, cold emails etc, but not getting much traction…

Thoughts?